A short post where I collate some info related to the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, various aspirational objectives and questions.
Table Mountain TraverseTable Mountain is at the north west edge of the Kern River basin.
It has numerous third and fourth class routes. I think it may be possible to find a second class route on both sides, and thus add to the pass immediately to the north. Scouting will take about a week.
Class 2 – no hands. Class 3 – hands. Class 4 – hands and fear. Class 5 – hands, fear, and death.
Ideal time – July/August/September/October. Low snow, long days.
Could come in via Independence Creek (Kearsarge pass) from the east, or via Kings Canyon/Avalanche pass to the west. Or from Rowell meadow, thus avoiding a nasty pass on day one.
Either way – easily a day’s whole walk to base camp. Summit is 14k feet so will take 3 days to acclimate and avoid altitude sickness. Bring a drone?
Optional extras – Thunder and Midway are adjacent peaks. Maybe a ridge traverse?
How many lakes are in the SierrasI got curious about how many lakes there were in the Sierras and crunched some numbers using USGS topo data.
The highest altitude lake is Tulainyo Lake.
Though there are two smaller ponds immediately to the SW that are even higher.
And a tiny pond further north near the Mt Sill/Polemonium drainage.
Let’s scatter plot all the lakes.
Use a histogram to overcome data lumpiness.
Lakes by size (marginalizing the data).
So we can estimate about 750 lakes under 100 m^2 are uncounted in the scatterplot, bringing the total in the Sierras up to about 4600 above 8000′.
Tulainyo lake depthI found an account of SCUBA diving in the lake, but AFAIK no-one has ever measured its depth or made a bathymetric map.
This could be done in winter by drilling holes in the ice and plumbing, or in summer with an inflatable boat and a plumb line or a submarine or a sonar buoy or more SCUBA gear. The lake is never warm.
I have attempted to interpolate the surrounding topography to infer the depth.
It’s probably 15-20 m max, but I don’t know. And I want to know!
Access to Kaweah basin from below at class 2 or below.Kaweah basin can be accessed via passes from adjacent basins on the western edge but AFAIK there’s no known way to access it from the Kern-Kaweah river below because it’s a hanging valley with a steep drop.
Still, I think it may be possible (at second class) and I would like to try!
Kim Stanley Robinson routeKim Stanley Robinson wrote an autobiographical book about mountains. In it, he describes his ideal Sierra traverse, which I mapped here. It would probably take about a month to do this properly.