Oregon was spewing smoke, and the fumes from the forest fires were reaching down into the Trinity Alps of Northern California, making my plans for a backpacking trip seem misguided. The last time I had visited these mountains, it was a chilly adventure, for the trails were buried in snow and the lakes were still frozen, even in July. This time around, I hoped for easier access to the high country, and if the pacific winds were generous enough to clear the smoke away from the Alps, the views would be magnificent. If they weren’t, then I had a whole lot of wheezing and coughing to look forward to.
Risking the poor air quality, I ventured up the exceedingly popular Canyon Creek Trail, which led through an evergreen forest full of madrones, firs and lofty ponderosa pines. Wildlife was scarce, but my movements once startled a fledgling Steller’s Jay, who careened through the air with all the confidence of a crash-test pilot. The chick was only brave or capable enough to fly short distances, and it possessed an endearing habit of hugging the bases of trees whenever it landed. Upon investigation, I saw that its blue tail feathers were not fully grown, and the gray crest atop its head was still only half as high as the one worn by its parent, who flew up and scolded me harshly with its forceful, sandpapery rasp.
I left them to resume flight school and continued up the valley. The forest here was littered with giant boulders – mossy castoffs from the peaks, which were hidden from view by the trees on both sides. After eight miles, I finally broke out of the woods and had my first unfettered view of those rocky sentinels. I was in awe. The long valley had led me into a vast bowl of silvery-white granite, with slick walls that stretched three thousand feet up to a more delicate ridgeline of crumbling towers. One of those towers was Thompson Peak, the highest point in the Trinity Alps and my ultimate goal for this backpacking trip. The steep slopes beneath the crest of the ridge had been polished by glaciers until they shone, so I would need to choose my route carefully or risk encountering cliffs too sheer to negotiate.
At the bottom of the bowl sat the two Canyon Creek Lakes, and despite written and verbal warnings that this was the most overused site in the Alps, I found the lower lake practically deserted. I pitched my tent beneath a trio of weeping spruce trees, whose disconsolate twigs hung down from their branches in dejection. This posture of abject surrender actually helps keep snow from accumulating and weighing down the limbs of these rare trees. Otherwise, the branches might snap off, and then they’d really be unhappy.
I had a quick meal and ambitiously set off for Thompson Peak at 4pm, thinking I had a chance to bag the summit and return before nightfall. But a brief exploration of the valley floor past the upper lake failed to reveal any climber’s trails, and I knew that bushwhacking through the willow thickets would consume too much time. The window of opportunity for reaching Thompson this evening had closed.
However, my reconnaissance had allowed me to formulate a route that would avoid the chaos of the canyon floor. Instead of a frontal assault on Thompson, I would sidle up to it. My new plan for the morning was to scale a tongue of rock between the two lakes and quickly reach the rim of the alpine bowl, gaining most of the elevation I needed. Then I would walk the ledges beneath the ridgeline towers, staying near the rim of the bowl until I could safely hop over the rim onto the bowl’s backside near a prominent tower called the Wedding Cake. If the back of the Wedding Cake was gentle enough, I could continue along the ridge to Thompson Peak without difficulty. The big question was: how slippery was the icing on that cake?
The smell of smoke strengthened after dark, and I lay in my tent and worried about what the morrow would bring. The sound of boulders tumbling down the first part of my chosen route was also not a good omen. But the haze dissipated at sunrise, and so the adventure was on.
As I scrambled two thousand feet up the side of the glacial cirque, I felt pretty clever for getting most of the elevation gain out of the way in the beginning. It was a little strange that there were no other signs of hikers on this side of the bowl, though. No worn patches of grass, scuffed logs or stacked rock piles. For how popular this area was, I couldn’t believe that no one else would try to reach Thompson Peak this way. Either I was extra resourceful or extra stupid.
The long traverse over to the Wedding Cake took more time than expected, for the landscape of glittering granite that had looked smooth from afar was unexpectedly rippled, like a crumpled rug. At last I came to a break in the ridgeline crest where I could climb over and glimpse the opposite side of the ridge for the first time. This was the crux of my journey. If there were cliffs on the backside of the Wedding Cake, I was sunk.
Instead, the back of the ridge was forested. Thank goodness. I was able to slip behind the Wedding Cake with ease and continue upwards to Thompson’s summit pinnacle. Pulling myself up onto the highest protrusion was tricky; but then the pinnacle itself splintered into three smaller pinnacles. To reach the uppermost finger of rock, I had to utilize a combination of recklessness and upper body strength. At the top, there was a flat space as big as two pizza boxes, but I wasn’t tempted to sit down. It was the kind of summit where if you forget yourself and relax for a moment, you’ll probably slip and fall a thousand feet onto a glacier. I tagged the high point and had my picnic comfortably on a lower pinnacle.
My surroundings were almost mythical in stature. The undulations of white granite ridgelines did not stretch far; indeed, the Trinity Alps were but a splash of rugged Sierra Nevada high country in the midst of the much greener Klamath Mountain Range. To the east, the Mt. Shasta volcano loomed on the horizon. And fifty miles to the north, a wall of smoke hovered menacingly, waiting for the winds to shift so it could suffocate California once more. I had been lucky.
By the time I made it back to camp, over seven hours had passed, and it was already after 4pm. Climbing Thompson had taken far longer than the four hours I’d naïvely predicted, and I had gained a crippling blister on my right heel during the descent. My first aid kit consisted of a couple adhesive bandages, so I couldn’t do much to make walking less painful. If I had enough food for another night at the lake, I would have rested and healed. Unfortunately, my options were limited.
So I hiked the eight dusty miles back to the trailhead wearing foam sandals. My footwear elicited a few stares from campers along the way, but at least my heels and ankles weren’t rubbing against anything. And if the sandals hadn’t worn an arc of skin off the top of my foot, I expect I would have been in good spirits when I reached my vehicle. As it was, I had some painful scrubbing, and healing… and undoubtedly several days of limping ahead of me.

Bryan is a 1991 Norwich High School graduate and author of "Off The Map: Fifty-five Adventures in the Great American Wilderness and Beyond", now available at Amazon.com. For additional photos, visit www.facebook.com/offthemaponline.