John Muir Trail: As Far as Reds Meadow

Three days southbound on the JMT before a knee injury — not my usual IT band problem — ended it at Reds Meadow.

Trailhead, day one. Still just a day hike’s worth of mileage behind us.

The plan was the whole trail, southbound, about 16 miles a day, two and a half weeks end to end. We skipped the Half Dome side trip. A year earlier my friend and I had done a 90-mile loop through Kings Canyon, good training miles, and it had gone well enough that this felt like the right next step. It snowed on us overnight that trip. This time the weather was about as good as the Sierra gets.

Day one was 20 miles and around 6,000 feet of elevation change, more than the planned average but the kind of day you front-load when the legs are fresh. I felt it by the end of that first day — not the IT band problem I already know and am in PT for, something else. The bands of tissue around the knee joint tightened up like rubber bands pulled tight against the bone. Painful in a specific way I hadn’t felt before.

Mid-afternoon, day one, checking the map above treeline.

A still pool catching the last light, day one.

I stretched it, slept on it. Neither moved the needle. The obvious read in hindsight is that 20 miles and 6,000 feet on day one of a 2.5-week trip was an aggressive way to start a trail I hadn’t broken my legs in on yet, but that’s easier to see now than it was with fresh legs and a full itinerary at 7am.

Morning, day two, still smiling.

Day two I kept going anyway. We picked up a cheap Tenkara rod along the way, about fifty dollars, and I learned to fly fish with it somewhere in there, which is the one unambiguously good thing to come out of this. By evening I was eating a dehydrated meal I’d made myself before the trip, out of a plastic cup, which is a less romantic picture of thru-hiking than the one in my head when I packed for this.

Dinner, day two. Home-dehydrated, eaten out of the container it rehydrated in.

By day three the knee had made the decision for me. We got off trail at Reds Meadow on September 2nd, three days into a trail that was supposed to take two and a half weeks.

Crossing a footbridge toward the exit, day three.

I don’t have a way to make this read as anything other than what it was. I was already in PT for the other knee issue, this was a different injury, and I pushed through a second day on it when stopping sooner was probably the right call. The trail is still there. Whether I go back for the rest of it is a question I haven’t answered yet.