Temperatures were in the 60s. There was a layer of clouds at 2,000 feet. They covered the summits of all the major peaks: Mount Diablo, Mount Olympia, and North Peak. Even our goal, Eagle Peak, the lowest of the four, was in the clouds.

Personally, I’d only been here on sunny days and was eager to see the landscape from within the clouds. I secretly hoped that Eagle Peak would stay in the clouds until we were on it. There’s something magical about going into the clouds using your own two feet. And we’d have good views regardless.

We left the foothills and started climbing up the ridges and canyons toward Eagle Peak. We were in the chaparral, and we’d stay in it for most of the day. The shrubs were about shoulder high, but sometimes they were tall enough to form a tunnel around the trail. Most abundant was chamise. But there were also sticky monkeyflower, buckbrush, and interior live oak. Bigberry manzanita had little white urn-shaped flowers and the toyon had little red berries.

We scrambled to the top of Mitchell Rock, our first summit of the day. It had a great view of the deep Mitchell Canyon and the web of little canyons that fed into it. The canyon bottoms were thick with evergreen trees. The ridges were covered by a mosaic of pale-green grassland, dark-olive chaparral, and woodlands.

After some more climbing we were on Twin Peaks, our second summit. We could see Mount Olympia and North Peak, their tops in the clouds. The sky above us was cold and gray. But as the clouds moved over Mount Diablo and descended its lee side, the air that held them grew warmer and drier, forcing the clouds to dissipate over the canyons to our left. The result was a shifting pattern of sun and shade on the canyons as shafts of light broke through the clouds.

From Twin Peaks, the trail took the crest of a ridge to the summit of Eagle Peak. The path led up a triangular silhouette of chaparral and a few pines before disappearing into the clouds a few hundred feet above us.

Soon we were hiking in the clouds, just as I’d hoped. A slight breeze carried the scent of the chaparral. The wind rushed through the trees—short, twisted California junipers and scattered gray pines. We put on our jackets and gloves. Mist accumulated on our faces. The temperature dropped to 54 degrees.

We stopped for lunch on the summit of Eagle Peak. Elizabeth and Alice posed for pictures. We were entirely in the clouds. It was as if our mountaintop were an island set in a white ocean. As we talked and ate, clouds poured continuously through Murchio Gap and swirled over Back Creek canyon.

By the time we left, the cloud layer had risen a little and we could see all around. The hike to Murchio Gap from Eagle Peak, with views in every direction, is a great ridgewalk on any day, but today the clouds streaming just overhead made it even more dramatic.

At Murchio Gap, we turned around and walked down into Back Creek canyon. I last walked this trail in April on a hike to Mount Diablo’s summit. That was at the beginning of the dry season—the grass was green and tall, and I found new wildflowers with every step. Now it’s the beginning of the wet season—the grass is just starting to sprout and I found no wildflowers. Otherwise, the chaparral was quite like the trail to Eagle Peak. There were more bigberry manzanita and toyon. Next to them them were chamise, buckbrush, and yerba santa.

At the end of Back Creek canyon, the hills became easy, the brush gave way to grass, and we were in woodlands of blue oak and buckeye. Buckeye seeds, quite like chestnuts and of a rich honey color, rolled on the ground.

We took the Coulter Pine Trail back to the car. As advertised, there were plenty of Coulter pines. We stopped below them to look at their cones. The cones were about a foot long and weighed a pound or two. They were solid, woody. Coulter pine cones are, in fact, the most massive in the world. Their scales had hard, talon-like spines curving down from their tips. I looked up and scanned for loose cones. I got nervous standing under the trees.

At the car, I still felt fresh on account of all the trail-running I’d done the last few weekends. For dinner we went to Skipolini’s Pizza in Walnut Creek. It had a mural of mountains along its walls, but it was only once we’d sat down to eat that I noticed that it was a view of Mount Diablo from Mitchell Canyon Road. The mural was so accurate we could trace our entire route on it.

We left home at 7 and started hiking at 9:40 under an overcast sky. The clouds were a novelty for us, since almost all of our Sierra Nevada hikes this summer have been under a blazing sun. Cool temperatures and a healthy breeze even made me put on my fleece jacket.

We hiked through a secondary forest of lodgepole pine, western white pine, mountain hemlock, and red and white fir. It was pleasant enough, but the setting was marred by the roar of nearby Interstate 80. The Pacific Crest Trail meandered around the interstate for a frustratingly long time, but it did provide one amusement: the trail crossed the road through a pair of underground tunnels that were a great place to play with our echoes.

We left the road’s vicinity through a classic Sierra landscape of pine woodlands strewn with granite boulders. By then, the clouds had broken up and brought back some classic Sierra sunshine.

Approaching Castle Pass, we walked through a forest of red fir and white pine, almost entirely secondary. A few of the trees, perhaps because of their curved trunks, had been spared by the loggers, and we found some spectacular old specimens of white pine and red fir.

From Castle Pass, Elizabeth and I turned east toward Castle Peak. The trail was steep and the rocks and sand underfoot were slippery. But plenty of switchbacks let us climb without any problems. We passed two hikers descending from the peak and we saw plenty more during the day. This is a popular peak.

I loved the sparse, wind-swept trees and tawny grass we walked through on the way up. The groves were surprisingly diverse, including red fir, mountain hemlock, Jeffrey pine, and lodgepole pine. Among the grass were pinemat manzanita, sagebrush, and some buckwheat. Woolly mule’s ears, turned yellow by now, rustled in the wind.

The morning weather forecast predicted strong winds on the peaks and ridges around Lake Tahoe, with gusts up to 50 miles per hour. And as we approached the summit ridge, we were feeling them. We held on to our hats. Elizabeth’s hair whipped her face and my backpack straps beat my chest. Some gusts even threatened our balance, but they didn’t keep us from the summit.

Castle Peak has three turrets of volcanic rock on top. The first one you reach, the west turret, is a walk-up that seems to satisfy most visitors. But the third, the east turret, is the true high point, and that’s where we headed, bypassing the other turrets on a trail below their south side.

We scrambled up a crack to the east turret’s base, from where we could see the route to the top. The rocks around us settled the wind down to a persistent breeze. Above us was a 30-foot climb up nearly vertical rock. We’d never climbed anything like this unroped before. At least it looked solid with lots of holds.

Elizabeth tried the climb first. Mindful that she’d have to downclimb it, she went up some 6 feet, then scrambled down. She faced away from the rock to descend, but I encouraged her to try climbing face-in since it would be essential to get down the steeper parts. She didn’t want to hear about it, though, and came down just the way she wanted.

I went next. The turret certainly was steep. I could only fit my toes on the rocks. I searched for handholds. I tried to keep my weight over my feet. Once I’d gotten about as far as Elizabeth had, I slowly started making my way down. I tried to face in, but like Elizabeth, I turned around near the bottom; she’d been right after all.

She went up again—this time about 10 feet—then I went up again. The first time wasn’t too bad, so now I wanted to see how high I could go before I got scared. I climbed up, putting more and more air under my heels. I made a few moves that felt tricky, particularly in my trail runners, and started worrying about reversing them on the way down. With 10 more feet of near-vertical rock above me and Elizabeth 20 feet below me, I decided I’d had enough and climbed down, slowly unwinding the path I’d taken up.

Back on the ground, I shook off my stress and excitement. The summit would have to wait for another day—the climb was still too rich for my taste. Elizabeth went up one last time, making it about halfway. Then I went up once more, but just tried out different hand and foot holds and practiced moving up and down the rock. I still had to wrap my head around the experience of climbing in sneakers and with severe consequences.

Satisfied with our scrambling, we hiked back to the west turret and enjoyed the view one last time. We waved to a group of hikers resting on top, then started down to the trail to Basin Peak.

Right then, my left knee started hurting. I’d tweaked it with some overzealous sprinting during my morning run on Wednesday and now it was acting up. Overuse injuries are easy to get and hard to lose, I knew, and I wanted to avoid one. Maybe it was time to curtail the day’s plan. Anyway, the wind was still blasting us and we were starting to get sick of it.

As tempting as the ridge hike to Basin Peak was, we returned to Castle Pass. From there, we followed a trail west to Andesite Peak, turned left at the intersection with the Hole in the Ground trail, then hiked cross country to the peak.

I traversed south of the summit, then climbed to the top over a mess of crumbling rocks. Elizabeth chose a better route, climbing over red rocks to the saddle east of the summit. In hindsight, we probably should have just gone straight up from the trail.

The best view from Andesite Peak was of Castle Peak. We enjoyed it for a minute, then returned to the pass. Again I was pleasantly surprised by the diversity of the scraggly trees on the ridge—western white pine, lodgepole pine, red fir, and mountain hemlock. A flock of mountain bluebirds flew through the weathered conifers and the drab grass, looking like sapphire jewels.

The hike back was uneventful. I welcomed this, since knee pain was an event I hoped to avoid. I felt fresh at the end of the hike and was surprised by the time: 6:10. We’d been out for over 8 hours. Another fine day in the mountains, although we’d have to hike the Castle–Basin loop another day.

On the drive home we ate at Ikeda’s in Auburn for dinner, just as we had after our hike to Tinker Knob a few weeks ago.

On Friday night we drove 40 hungry miles on Route 395 before we found a restaurant that was open after 8. We stopped at the first one we found: Rhino’s Bar and Grille in Bridgeport. It was more fun than anything we could have hoped for, with a local crowd at the bar wearing cowboy hats and tight blue jeans, guys in camouflage playing pool, and a cheeseburger-eating patron wearing a red “DEAR LEADER CHAIRMAN MAOBAMA” t-shirt. A  jukebox playing Metallica completed the scene. It was the first night of the holiday weekend and everyone was having a great time. The food was good, and we’d definitely come back.

After dinner we spent the night at the Sportsmen’s Inn across the street, an 1880 hotel that could have passed for a haunted house. Our room was out in front, so we could hear the traffic on 395 all night and were illuminated by the motel sign outside our window. We probably could have gotten a better night’s sleep on the ground at Deadman Summit, as I did on the trip to University Peak a few weeks ago.

At 8:30 on Saturday morning Elizabeth and I arrived at the McGee Creek trailhead under a clear blue sky.Whereas Elizabeth was excited about the coming weekend, I felt uneasy. I felt as if I’d forced myself to come. There were only a few weeks of clear weather left in the Sierra Nevada, and I felt compelled to take advantage of them—to fit in as much time in the mountains as possible, whether I liked it or not, since I would regret not going enough, not accomplishing enough, not pushing myself enough, once the season was over. And I knew these were all the wrong reasons to go, which made me feel even crappier.

But I put those thoughts away as we started up the trail, confident that John Muir would be proved right about receiving the mountains’ good tidings [1]. The valley floor was filled with a gold and copper-tarnish mix of sagebrush, bitterbrush, and blooming rabbitbrush. It was split by a line of vibrant green trees tracing the course of McGee Creek and bordered by 11,000-foot ridges. At its far end a line of peaks rose past 12,000 feet.

The only trees next to the trail were a few aspen, juniper, and birch. We’d both brought our Chrome Domes, silver lightweight backpacking umbrellas, and they were perfect for the nearly treeless landscape. Almost everyone we met on the trail asked us about them.

The chutes on both sides of the valley were filled with aspens that were starting to show their fall colors. A few of the aspens had been felled by beavers and were used to build an impressive dam across McGee Creek, creating a great pond in the valley.

We would camp at Big McGee Lake for two nights. At 10,500 feet, it was just 8 miles from the trailhead, and with plenty of time to cover the distance, Elizabeth and I walked slowly and stopped whenever we felt the urge. No use hurrying to the lake and then sitting around until it got dark. Better to spend our time taking in the fantastic scenery. I could feel my mood improving as we walked farther into the wilderness and the mountains worked their influence.

As we climbed, the sagebrush and aspen gave way to a forest of lodgepole pines, hemlocks, and western white pines. It was cool and shady and McGee Creek, now a white-water cascade, roared through a rocky ravine.

We emerged from the lodgepole pine forest into subalpine meadows framed by spectacular mountains. The meadows were losing their green and turning auburn and the only conspicuous wildflowers left were ranger’s buttons. The trees—lodgepole and whitebark pines—were widely separated.

We arrived at brilliant, cobalt Big McGee Lake at 2 in the afternoon. This gave us an average pace of less than 1.5 miles per hour from the trailhead—not as slow as we had hoped, but slow enough.

Big McGee was set in a granite cirque topped by Red and White Mountain. A stiff wind was blowing down the cirque, so we picked a campsite sheltered by a grove of whitebark pines. Elizabeth took a nap in the tent while I walked around to admire the scenery.

At dinner Elizabeth and I introduced ourselves to Sam, another backpacker staying at the lake. He’d come up from San Diego on Friday and was planning on dayhiking to McGee Pass Sunday. This happened to be the same route we were taking to Red Slate Mountain, and we considered hiking to the pass together. We all cooked and ate dinner as the sun set, then went to our tents to sleep.

The wind blew all night long, roaring down the cirque, over the lake, through the pines, and across our tent, flapping its sides and blowing dust on our faces. But the wind quieted down often enough that we slept much better than we had at the frightening Sportmen’s Inn the night before. We were also blessed by a full moon that made walking outside the tent a phenomenal experience. We did not need our headlamps: everything—the stark peaks, the lake, the pines, and the boulders near our tent—glowed in its cold white light.

The next morning, Elizabeth and I saw Sam again as we packed our bags to hike up to Red Slate Mountain. We’d hike to McGee Pass together, then Sam would decide whether to continue to the summit or go back to camp.

We left camp at 8:30. After spending so much time staring at the lake on Friday, I was excited to see it from a new perspective. We hiked away and soon enough we were a few hundred feet above our campsite, with excellent views of the lake, the cirque, and the mountains around it.

We walked past timberline through a fantastic landscape of meadows, streams, and waterfalls. The only trees here were whitebark pines, and even they became isolated and gnarled as we gained elevation, eventually disappearing completely in the alpine tundra.

We stopped at a seep, green and dripping with water, that was a jackpot for wildflowers. From it grew bog orchids with their lovely white flowers, elephant’s heads with their tiny pink flowers, and grass of Parnassus, whose white, five-petaled flowers Elizabeth said looked like a miracle. Next to the ranger’s buttons, rose-colored mountain onion, scarlet paintbrush, and some kind of yellow monkeyflower added color to the scene.

In the canyon east of McGee Pass, we were flanked by steep ridges of layered red and white rock and walked amid their colorful rubble. At its end stood an imposing peak with two snow-filled cuoloirs. I’d read about the route up Red Slate Mountain and by all accounts it sounded like a walk-up. But the mountain in front of us looked more difficult than that, I thought, so it couldn’t be Red Slate.

On top of McGee Pass we got our first view of the landscape to the west: meadows split by lazy rivers and bordered by pine forests and granite mountains. Backpackers heading in the opposite direction congratulated us on making it to the pass, but we didn’t mention that we were going to the top of Red Slate Mountain and that getting to the pass was the easy part. Sam found the hike to McGee Pass quicker than he expected and decided to come with us to the summit.

By now I had confirmed that the imposing peak was in fact Red Slate Mountain. Its slope looked less steep from the pass, but it still looked more difficult than I’d imagined. In particular, a steep band of gray rock below the summit looked as if it might give us some difficulty, and I was eager to see what it would be like once we were on it.

The wind hadn’t let up since the night before and it whipped us as we climbed. We found an intermittent use trail but didn’t bother to stay on it at first since the slope was so mild. The mountain’s rocks were indeed like plates of red slate, and they sounded like wind chimes as we walked on them.

We took a break halfway up, then continued over slightly steeper terrain with bigger rocks. Getting off trail now meant scrambling with hands, so we tried harder to stay on it.

When we got to the band of gray rock I’d been concerned about, the terrain got steeper and more slippery, but we were able to get through it in a few minutes, using our hands for balance and scrambling most of the way.

Above the gray rock, the slope got mellow and we cruised to the summit, arriving at 12:30. On top, we were over a half mile higher than our campsite; the ridges around it and even Red and White Mountain were well below us.

Sam was quite happy to have made the climb, and he surprised me when he said that this was his first Sierra peak and that he’d never hiked this high before. The view from pass, he said, just didn’t compare with the view from the summit. Indeed! Being on a peak spoils one to the more modest joys of valleys, lakes, and passes. We snacked and rested on the summit, then took photos and signed the register.

Elizabeth and Sam were a little worried about the descent, but we were able to follow the use trail through the steep sections without any trouble. I thought we’d be home-free once we got to milder slopes lower on the mountain, but Elizabeth didn’t like how the rocks shifted under her feet and her progress was slow. The wind was incessant, and when we got down to the pass we took a break behind some rocks that gave us shelter.

At 3:30, back at camp, Sam packed his bag and left for a spot closer to the trailhead so that he could make an early departure the next morning. We then exchanged e-mail addresses and wished each other well.

Elizabeth and I were both weary from being out in the sun and wind all day, so we lay down on our sleeping pads under the pines. I had a headache and spent half an hour just staring at the branches of a whitebark pine swaying in the wind against the blue sky. Elizabeth was a little exhausted and joked that she didn’t like backpacking, or even like hiking, anymore.

With Sam gone, we had the campsite to ourselves—no one else in sight. We rinsed our hands and faces in the cold lake, then stuck our feet in until they got numb. We ate dinner at sunset, then watched the sky grow dark and the stars come out. Cleaned, rested, and with full stomachs, our moods improved considerably. Elizabeth no longer hated hiking and I’d finally gotten rid of my misgivings from the start of the trip. The wind had settled down. We went to bed at 8:30 and slept soundly all night.

This morning, we got up at 6 and packed up our gear. We left at sunrise, saying our goodbyes to Big McGee Lake and to the trees and critters that call it home. As we walked away, the top of Red and White Mountain blazed in the sunrise light while the moon, almost too bright to look at, hung over it in a deep blue sky.

We made good time on the way to the trailhead, getting back to our car in less than 4 hours. I particularly enjoyed traveling through the many life zones of the eastern Sierra Nevada, from subalpine meadows and woodlands to lodgepole forests to aspen groves to sagebrush flats, in so short an amount of time. We had both enjoyed ourselves tremendously on the backpacking trip and we were sad to leave. But a stop at the Whoa Nellie Deli for lunch lifted our spirits and prepared us for the return to civilization.

[1] ‘Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.’ – John Muir, Our National Parks

We stopped at the Sunrise visitor center, 6,400 feet. Rain was forecast for tonight, but we found high clouds and pleasant temperatures. Mount Rainier filled the horizon to the southwest. I’d never seen it before and it struck me as huge but not spectacular, lacking any dramatic ridges or wild jagged peaks. Instead it was a giant snow cone, a rounded mass of rock covered in ice. It was snow-free this late in the season, and its glaciers’ crevasses, bergschrunds, and moraines were fully exposed, looking like awful terrain. The gray and silver of the glaciers mimicked the clouds in the sky. To our south, Mount Adams, a stratovolcano like Rainier, was just visible through the haze.

The park rangers recommended the hike to Dege Peak (pronounced ‘deggy’), and we got on our way. The subalpine meadows were fading from green to gold and were punctuated by dark blue-green groves of narrow conifers. The meadows were filled with pasque flowers, foot-tall stalks, each with a ball of long, platinum fur on top that glowed in the sunlight.

At 7,000 feet on Sourdough Ridge we took in the cool breezes and expansive views. The ridge rolled off gently to the right, but to the left it alternated between dropping down steep scree slopes and rising to rocky peaklets. The short, wind-sculpted trees on the ridge gave it a wild appearance.

Walking on the ridge let me see the forest more closely. The trees in the groves were subalpine fir and Englemann spruce. Between them were a few yellow cedars, their scaly sprays yellow-green and weeping. There were also a few whitebark and lodgepole pines, familiar to me from high elevation forests in the Sierra Nevada. The trees grew no taller than 10 or 20 feet, and on parts of the ridge where they were exposed to the elements they grew even shorter, like bushes.

We got to the spur trail to Dege Peak and took a few switchbacks to the top. The summit gave us 360-degree views that included Sunrise, Mount Rainier, and several smaller peaks around us. We all agreed that the hike offered an excellent reward for little effort and that the rangers had given us a great recommendation.

But what I enjoyed most—what I will remember the longest and what will bring me back—was the smell of the subalpine meadows. The air and every breeze carried the balsam, citrusy smell of subalpine fir. I confess that I exploited some of the firs as I walked by them, breaking off a few of their needles and crushing them between my fingers for their fragrance.

By the time we got back to the car, the clouds had gotten darker and had completely filled the sky. Some cumulus had formed below the summit of Mount Rainier, and the western sky threatened rain before nightfall.