DAY 2. SON OF A B***H
It was very windy all night long. The wind was blowing my tent around left and right. I got very little sleep. When I say all night, I mean all night. It was still very windy in the morning at sunrise. I was thinking (all night) what I would do the next day. I wanted to continue up the valley. But what about the gnats? If the gnats were not out in the morning, I decided I would continue. Surely, I thought, with the wind still blowing, they would not be out in the morning. Yet they were still out and very bothersome! Once I packed up my tent and ate breakfast, the wind had stopped. Now the gnats were excruciating! Already! Again! They would be all over me, without break, all day long, if I continued hiking up the valley. Not just today, but the next day as well, and the next after that.
There was only one option: Hike out of the valley and back home. It was the right decision, but I was bummed I only got to see the one waterfall on this trip.
The trail out of the valley is nicknamed: son of a b-*-*-*-h trail. It is most definitely that. As I said, it is THE MOST DIFFICULT trail I have ever hiked before. It took over 3 hours to hike the 2.0 miles and 3000 ft. to the top. The gnats were very bothersome the entire way up the trail, and even at the top, over 7000 ft. in elevation, they were still annoying me incredibly. I definitely learned a lesson here. If I am hiking in September in the Sierra, I need to hike at higher elevation, preferably above 7000 ft. (maybe 6000 is ok, but 7000 or above would be preferable to avoid the gnats). On the hike back, I met another group of backpackers heading down into the valley. They were prepared. They knew there would be gnats and they had head nets. A head net would have been very helpful for sure, but I still probably would have hiked out the next day anyway. Nonetheless, I am going to return to Tehipite Valley some day. There is so much more there that I want to explore. I will probably do it a lot differently, but I will definitely be back. Maybe October would be a much better time to go there.
I did not hike all the way back to the car. I stopped at Crown Valley, where I found a great camping area near the creek. It took all day to get to this location (which was still about 9 miles from the trailhead). I was absolutely exhausted after two days in a row of extreme hiking. There were no gnats at Crown Valley, and there was no wind, and I slept like a baby. I got about 11 hours of sleep, and was well rested the next day for the relatively easy 9 mile hike back to my car. I was home by dinner time.
In this photo you can see one of the upper tiers of Silver Spray Falls.