Monday June 9, 27.7mi/44.6km
Marysville Canyon Trail Jct (813.0/8890ft) to Kingston Canyon Trailhead (840.7/7440ft) (NV)
Another beautiful day on the Toiyabe Crest Trail! I left camp at 6:30 and had a few miles through steeply rolling hills on old 4wd roads.
It’s funny that this old road would be steeper than a trail, usually roads switchback up hillsides too. Not this one… Straight up. Paula Abdul style.
I was at a slightly lower elevation now just below 9,000 ft, and I started seeing all these huge leafy plants. I know they will eventually sprout yellow flowers, but none of these had them.
The Toiyabe Crest Trail is generally a well-maintained and well signed trail, for pretty much all 50 miles of its length. In this case it was oversigned, as there was no creek here, and the San Juan basin is one ridgeline over!
A beautiful morning of hiking.
I hiked by a bunch of these signs yesterday but they were all faded, so I was finally able to get a nice photo of a nice new sign for this National Recreation Trail.
The trail would weave around the mountainsides and occasionally dip into small gullies, some of which had creeks and therefore lots of lush vegetation. I loved hiking through the little Aspen forests.
One of the little creeks was still covered in a lingering snowfield, which was easy to walk across, but it meant I had wet feet now.
My final task of the day was to climb up this valley, to the 10,000 ft pass in the distance.
More aspen forests! Actually it’s more like an Aspen grove.
Kingston canyon is the northern end of the Toiyabe Crest Trail.
I stopped by the creek to refill my water, have a snack and wait out the remaining thunder. After a mile of easy switchbacked hiking I was at the top of the pass, the view looking back down what I had just climbed:
The trail stayed up high on a ridgeline and wrapped around a small summit. I should have expected the Eastern sides to still have cornices.
No way I was going to try to traverse on that snow, and it was easy to go up and then around.
I was hiking in the sunshine, but the storms in the distance provided a very interesting lighting contrast.
I love a good ridgeline walk, it was just so good. If yesterday was my favorite day, today was my second favorite. These two rock pillars seemed like sentinels guarding the final part of the trail! Like the ones from the movie, Neverending Story.
Epic views.
Way up here at 10,500 ft, I saw a lonely little flower clinging to life next to a rock.
It was nearing the end of the day, so I was happy to be approaching my planned camping spot at a lower saddle at 9100 ft. Again though, even though there had been trees and bushes all day, there weren’t any here in the saddle. And it was quite windy, making it a pretty unusable camp spot. So I continued three more miles, all the way down to the valley, at Kingston canyon Trailhead.
I did get a special treat watching the full moon rise over Groves Lake.
A few minutes later I was at the trailhead, and camped literally directly at the trailhead, since I promised my feet I would go no further (picture taken the next morning).
There was a nice picnic table here, so I enjoyed dinner sitting at a table and it felt so luxurious.
By now it was 9pm and getting quite cold in this deep damp valley, so I quickly setup my tent and crawled into my sleeping bag with a bunch of warm clothes.