To Thousand Island Lake in the Sierras
Written by Barbara Levine, January 2022
In August of 1999, Stan and I ride on horseback into the Sierras to Thousand Island Lake with friends Joe and Flora. We spend the next five days hiking and camping with black bears!
🐾 Prologue 🐴
There we were….
You’d never believe it….
We thought we were going to DIE!
That is how we feel on our first encounter in the wild with California black bears.
It is 22 years ago in the summer of 1999. Stan and I ride on horseback into the Sierras out of Mammoth Lakes, California, to Thousand Island Lake with Rolling Hills neighbors Joe and Flora.
Flora, Stan, Barbara & Joe
Six years earlier in 1993, we horsepacked with Joe and Flora to Purple Lake – also in the Sierras out of Mammoth Lakes.
Stan and I backpacked in the Sierras several times after we started dating in 1975. By 1983, my back problems had exacerbated to the point that I could no longer carry a backpack.
That is when we started riding horses into the mountains, with mules carrying our gear. We camp out for several days, hiking each day from our camp. We then either hike out or ride horses out when the pack outfit returns to pick up our gear.
On all of our pack trips, either on foot or on horseback, we have never before run into any bears. We always carry a pistol with us, but that is really for any bad two-legged critters we might run into – aka humans.
But this pack trip is to be a far different experience, where we live with black bears for five days in the wilderness – a very long way from help of any kind!
We drive our motorhome on all of our outdoor adventures, normally towing our Jeep with our kayaks on top and our bikes behind. On this trip, we plan on doing more than just horsepacking and camping.
The motorhome that we are driving on this adventure in 1999 is the first of three that we have owned. It is 27 feet long and has no slide outs. We bought it in 1992 when we both retired.
Stan is standing behind our Jeep, which is being towed by our first motorhome on a trip to Yellowstone National Park and Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in September 2000 – a year after this horsepacking trip. The Jeep is carrying our sea kayaks on this occasion.
The map above shows our major destinations on this trip.
🧿 Our home (My Location) in Rolling Hills is on the bottom right.
🧿 Ventura, where we stop off to visit our twin granddaughters on our way north, is 80 miles to the northwest of our home.
🧿 Mammoth Lakes and Thousand Island Lake are near the top of the map.
This map shows the locations in the Sierras that we visit on this trip. They include:
🧿 Mammoth Lakes (bottom, right of center, where we have a ski condo)
🧿 Mammoth Mountain Ski Area (which we drive past to get to Agnew Meadows)
🧿 Agnew Meadows (where our horse pack station is located on the road to Devils Postpile)
🧿 Garnet Lake (where we day hike)
🧿 Thousand Island Lake (our horsepacking/camping destination)
🧿 June Lake (where we visit & shop)
🧿 Mono Lake (top, where we kayak)
🧿 Panum Crater (just below Mono Lake, where we hike)
🚐 1. Visiting Our Twin Granddaughters in Ventura, Friday-Saturday (08/20-21)
We start out on Friday, August 20, and our first stop is Ventura where our twin, three-year-old granddaughters, Sammy and Maddie, live with their mother Karrie. Ventura is 80 miles to the northwest of us – a two-hour drive. We spend the afternoon and evening with the girls, and stay overnight in our motorhome on the street outside their home.
Center: Stan with Maddie & Sammy
Top left: Maddie & Sammy with Stan in our motorhome
Top right: Barbara with Sammy, Maddie & their mother Karrie, and their two cats
Bottom left: The twins’ cat on our bed in our motorhome, looking at our whitewater kayaks on top of our Jeep that we tow behind
Bottom right: Maddie & Sammy playing chess with Stan in our motorhome
The next morning, we leave for Mammoth Lakes – 340 miles and a 5 ½ hour drive from Ventura. We spend Saturday night in our ski condo in Mammoth Lakes, and head out the next morning to hike at a new place – Panum Crater – 28 miles north of Mammoth Lakes and just south of Mono Lake.
🥾 2. Hiking to Panum Crater & A Visit to June Lake, Sunday (08/22)
Panum Crater is a volcanic cone that is part of the Mono–Inyo Craters, a chain of recent volcanic cones south of Mono Lake and east of the Sierra Nevadas. Panum Crater is between 600 and 700 years old.
Panum Crater lies at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountain range.
Mono Lake is barely visible below the mountains.
We hike up to the rim of the crater and around the rim on a trail.
After our hike, we stop by the small town of June Lake on the way back to Mammoth Lakes.
Top left: Stan on the hike up to the rim of Panum Crater from the parking lot below.
Top right: Three images of Stan in a panoramic view at the top of Panum Crater. Mono Lake is visible in the far background on the left.
Bottom left: A stream near June Lake.
Bottom right: The owner of a shop in June Lake displays the burled wood jewelry box that Stan buys for me.
🐴 3. Horsepacking In to Thousand Island Lake, Monday (08/23) 🏕
Thousand Island Lake is one of the most spectacular alpine lakes in the Eastern Sierra Nevada. The lake is named for the numerous (if not a thousand) small rocky islands that dot its surface. It is located in the Ansel Adams Wilderness area, which is named after renowned landscape photographer.
Banner Peak, a towering 12,936-foot mountain above the lake’s west shore, is reflected in the clear blue water of Thousand Island Lake. Both the John Muir Trail and the Pacific Crest Trail pass the lake.
Stan, Flora & Joe on a day hike around Thousand Island Lake, with Banner Peak on the left. We are hiking on the trail we rode in on.
A few routes lead to Thousand Island Lake from trailheads at Agnew Meadows where our pack station is located (on the lower right on the map above). One option is High Trail, an 8.75-mile-long section of the Pacific Crest Trail that is full of sweeping panoramas – this is the trail that we ride in on (the upper trail on the map).
High Trail starts at an elevation of 8,340 feet and ascends to 9,725 feet as it crosses the northeastern side of a canyon containing the Middle Fork of the San Joaquin River. The trail bounces down to 9,415 feet before ascending to Thousand Island Lake at 9,840 feet.
Stan and I get up early this Monday morning in Mammoth Lakes after spending the previous two nights in our ski condo. We leave our motorhome parked by the condo and take our Jeep, which is loaded with our camping gear.
We drive up the road to Mammoth Mountain past the main lodge of the ski area and on to Minaret Summit (9,265 feet).
Mammoth Mountain (11,053 feet) in the summer as viewed from Minaret Summit
There, a steep, winding road named Reds Meadow Road leads down to a valley toward Devil’s Postpile. Our pack station at Agnew Meadows is a quarter-mile off the main road.
We meet Joe and Flora at the pack station at 9 a.m. and unload our gear.
Stan & Barbara in front of some of the gear the four of us are packing in.
Can all of that gear be for just five days?!? It will take five pack mules to carry it all! (Each pack mule can carry up to 20 percent of its body weight (150 to 300 pounds) for 15 to 20 miles per day in mountains.)
We are going in style! Flora and I are alternating days that we provide food for dinner – it has become an implicit competition between the two of us to see who fixes the best meals.
It is sure a different way to camp out compared to when Stan and I used to carry everything on our backs – then we never even had a tent, as it weighed too much.
We start riding around 11 a.m. It takes us four hours to ride the nearly nine miles in to our campsite on the northeastern side of Thousand Island Lake.
Our pack train is crossing over a ridge on our ride in.
At 3 p.m., we reach our campsite and help unpack the mules. The last thing that the wrangler unpacks is a large barrel.
When we ask him what it is for, he replies, "That is your bear barrel. That is where you put all of the food that you don’t want the bears to get." This is the first time we have heard the word BEAR on this trip!!! (Note: The bear barrel can be seen on top of the lead mule in the photo above.)
We look around at the many coolers and containers of food that we brought in, and we say there is NO WAY all of our food will fit into that little barrel! The wrangler replies, "Perhaps if you cover your containers with a tarp, the bears won’t know they are there."
After the wrangler and mules depart, we set up our tents and tables and organize our campsite. It is in a beautiful location, with a view of the lake some distance below and Banner Peak across the lake.
Panoramic view of our campsite in the fading daylight. Our campfire is in front of the large rock in the rear left. Joe & Flora's tent is the yellow one, and our tent is the maroon one several feet up the trail on the right.
Stan and Joe collect firewood, and build us a beautiful campfire. Flora and I fix a nice dinner, which we eat at our table under the pine trees. We brought a second table along, which is our food prep area.
Flora, Joe and Barbara at our dining table, with a beautiful view of Banner Peak and Thousand Island Lake.
After dinner is finished and the dishes are done, we cover our coolers and containers with a large tarp, also hiding a couple of them under our kitchen table and its tablecloth. Flora and I can’t bear the thought of stuffing all of our nice food into that bear barrel! Besides, as I stated earlier, we have never run into any bears during our previous 25 years of packing in the Sierras. By 11 p.m., we retire to our respective tents for the night.
Click on the ▶️ below to view a short video, which captures the best of the photos that we were able to take on our first day of horsepacking.
🐾 4. The Bears Arrive, Monday-Tuesday (08/23-24) ⛺️
Stan and I are awakened around 11:15 p.m. by some loud yelling and clanging noises from our campsite. Flora and Joe are banging pots and pans together to try to scare off a bear or bears. After a few minutes, the banging stops, and in the silence we can hear other noises.
Flora has brought along several fruit juices in individual, wax-coated cartons for our breakfasts. The bear has discovered these as he tipped over the container holding them. He opens one by sticking a claw into it, making a loud popping sound, and drinks it down. Then he helps himself to some food.
For a half hour, all we can hear is POP! … SLURP, SLURP, SLURP … CHOMP, CHOMP, CHOMP – repeated over and over again.
We are sitting in our tent, Stan with his revolver and myself with my pepper spray, not knowing what to do. I try to get Stan to go out with a flashlight and his gun and attempt to scare the bear away – or we won’t have any food left to survive the next four days with!
I can’t believe that Stan actually gets up and goes down the trail to the campsite! By the time he gets there, he can’t see any bears! We all get up and look at the damage that has been done.
Stan had fastened a large, strong strap around our cooler, but the bear had ripped that off with no problem. The bear had consumed a whole chicken that I had barbecued to use for our lunches. He had also eaten an apple pie that I had baked for one of our dinners, and he had opened Flora’s cooler and started in on her lamb chops.
We pack all of the remaining food that will fit into the bear barrel, and go back to our tents around 12:30 a.m.
Soon after, the bear returns with a buddy! One of them carries our cooler up the trail, past our tent, and up the hill above us! He dumps what remains of its contents down the hill, and starts eating his way toward us!
Stan and I sit in our tent for the next hour with our gun and pepper spray and listen to him chomp away – just hoping that he won’t still be hungry by the time he reaches our tent!
I finally get bored waiting for the bear, and I step out of the tent at 1:15 a.m. to take a couple of flash photos.
The bear is HUGE, and he barely looks at me when the flash goes off – he is too busy eating away!
Finally, after another hour or so, the bears leave and we are able to sleep for the rest of the night.
When we get up in the morning to inspect the damage, we find that the bears have pretty much eaten what wouldn’t fit into the bear barrel, except for a few items that apparently didn’t appeal to them.
Lower left: How our campsite looks in the morning.
Upper left: The wax-coated fruit juice containers that the bear popped and drank. At least he didn’t break our bottle of wine or eat the bananas.
Upper right: Our cooler that one bear carried up the hill past our tent, and what is left of its contents. We still use the cooler, and his claw marks on the outside are still visible.
Lower right: The containers that the bears pulled out from under our kitchen table.
One thing that surprises us is how neat the bears had sometimes been. They had carefully pulled out the two containers that were under our kitchen table without toppling anything over that was on top of the table!
Somehow, the bears left us enough food to eat for four more days, and I don’t remember us suffering from hunger at any time.
🚶🏻♂️5. An Easy Hike, Tuesday (08/24)
After we clean up the campsite from our bear visit, have breakfast, and pack our lunches, we decide to take an easy hike to Ruby Lake.
Our Easy Hike route in red from our campsite on Thousand Island Lake to Ruby Lake (five miles round-trip)
We retrace part of our route in on horseback around the northern end of Thousand Island Lake, and we hike past Emerald Lake on the way.
The scenery is gorgeous on the entire hike, as you can see in the video clip of our photos below. It is such a joy to be able to have this experience in the mountains.
We cross several streams on rocks or narrow logs – at least we aren’t carrying heavy backpacks. The wild flowers are so beautiful, and we spot our first marmot.*
* A marmot is any of 14 species of giant ground squirrels found primarily in North America and Eurasia. These rodents are large and heavy, weighing 6 to 15 pounds, depending upon the species. Marmots are well suited for life in cold environments and have small fur-covered ears, short stocky legs, and strong claws for digging.
Before we retire for the evening, we leave all of our empty containers open around the campsite so the bears won’t have to wake us up if they return.
And return they do! After kicking the bear barrel around the campground for a while, they decide they are unable to open it, and they leave us in peace for the night.
The bears come to visit every night after we go to bed for the rest of the week, but we barely notice them any longer!
Here is a short video of our photos for the day.
🚶🏼♀️ 6. A Long Hike & Some Rain, Wednesday (08/25) 🌧
On our second full day at Thousand Island Lake, we do a very long hike of about 12 miles – the green route on the map above.
We head west around the lake from our campsite, then climb up over the ridge and down to Garnet Lake.
Flora, Joe & Stan above Garnet Lake
We complete the circular trail around the high ridge between Garnet and Thousand Island Lakes, and at the end, we retrace the route we hiked the day before.
More nonstop, drop-dead scenery with streams and waterfalls; flower-filled meadows; rough, rocky terrain to climb; and log bridges to cross. We see more marmots and hear their high-pitched, warning chirps.
At the end of the afternoon, it turns cold and rainy. Flora is the only prepared one with a rain tarp – the rest of us just get soaked.
Barbara, Flora & Joe hiking the rain
Try crossing a stream on a slippery log bridge in the rain. as Barbara is doing here!
It rains on us a bit during dinner, and then turns sunny and beautiful afterward.
More photos are in the video clip below.
🥾 7. Local Hiking & More Rain, Thursday (08/26) ⛈
It is raining when we get up, and it continues lightly throughout the morning. We do a little hiking in the area around our campsite. After lunch, we retreat to our tents to do some reading out of the rain.
Stan & I reading in our tent during the rain
By early afternoon, the sun comes out. We walk down to the lake and meet another camper there named Christopher.
When we tell Christopher about our experience with the bears, he demonstrates how he hangs his food from a high tree branch so the bears can’t get to it.
In the late afternoon, Stan starts a large campfire, and we lay out all of our wet clothing near the fire to try to dry them out.
Later, Stan cooks chicken shish kabobs over the coals for our dinner. By the time we have dinner, it is after 7 p.m. and it is raining fairly hard. We dine uncovered in the open in our rain gear.
Stan & Joe eating in the pouring rain
The short video below shows more photos from our day.
🐻 8. The Bear Lair & Horsepacking Out, Friday (08/27) 🐴
Yesterday, Christopher told us that the reason there are so many black bears around Thousand Island Lake is because we are camped on the overlapped Pacific Crest and John Muir Trails, which run through Yosemite National Park to the northwest of us. The bears from the Park are acclimated to humans and their food, and they migrate 22 miles along the trail to Thousand Island Lake to look for more.
This is our last morning at Thousand Island Lake. We are expecting the pack train to arrive around 1 p.m. to transport us out. By 11 a.m., we are all packed and ready for them, and we decide to hike up above our camp to explore an area we hadn’t been to previously.
We enter a lovely meadow about 300 yards above our campsite, and LO AND BEHOLD! – we find the BEAR LAIR! There are large impressions all through the meadow where the bears have slept, as well as bear tracks and their skat (aka animal dung).
The bear lair in the meadow 300 yards above our campsite
Our campsite is the first stop on their nightly roaming for human food! The bears must have rejoiced when they saw us coming with five heavily-ladened pack mules!
Our pack train arrives as scheduled, and we have a lovely ride out to the pack station at Agnew Meadows.
We see our pack train arriving down by the lake
We take the lower trail back for some new scenery (see the maroon route on the map above in Section 3).
The video clip below shows the scenery during our hike to the bear lair and our pack trip back to Agnew Meadows.
🛶 9. Kayaking on Mono Lake, Saturday (08/28)
On our last day in the Sierras, we return to Mono Lake where we hiked to the top of nearby Panum Crater six days ago. This day, Stan and I wish to kayak for the first time on the lake among the tufa towers.
Below is a short video of us kayaking on Mono Lake. We are using our whitewater kayaks, which are the ones we brought along on this trip on top of our Jeep.
🐴 Epilogue 🐾
This was one of our best pack trips into the Sierras – with good friends, a lot of excitement and gorgeous scenery.
It was great to horsepack with Joe and Flora again. We met them 12 years prior to this trip, shortly after we moved to Rolling Hills in 1987, and soon became close friends. We participated regularly in Rolling Hills events together, including the Tennis Club and the Women’s Club.
Flora passed away in August 2014 from cancer. We still see Joe regularly.
🐾 Postscript - Other Bear Events in Our Lives
Stan had a close encounter with a grizzly in Yellowstone National Park in September 2000. We were on a motorhome trip with our two dogs and camped there for a few days.
One day as we were driving in the Park, we noticed several cars pulled over to the side of the road. Many people were out of their cars and excitedly looking into the woods. We pulled off the road also, and Stan walked up with his camera to investigate.
There he took the photo on the left below of a large grizzly coming out of the woods directly toward him. I took the photo on the right as the grizzly emerged from the woods, with everyone but Stan diving for their cars – he just stood there filming it as it crossed the road right in front of him! That is one of the reasons I call him My Hero!
My father’s greatest passion was hunting, especially for larger wild animals. He hunted for more than just the sport of it, but also to feed his ever-growing family of 11 children (I am the eldest). A good portion of the protein in our diet came from wild game that he shot. Our mother knew how to create delicious meals from all of it.
There were lots of white-tailed deer to hunt for where we grew up in the upper part of the lower peninsula of Michigan. Dad also traveled out west to Montana with several men each fall to hunt for elk, antelope and mule deer. He came back with more than one bear, including a grizzly. We ate bear meat a lot on those occasions – in case you are wondering, it tastes OK (at least, when my mother prepared it), although it is VERY GREASY.
The photos below depict some of the other bear events in my life.
Middle: 1962: My father Frank on the left with sisters Elaine (right) & Liz, all holding elk and antelope antlers. Dad was in the process of butchering the black bear on the floor beneath them.
Top left: 1964: A photo of my father Frank with his grizzly from a newspaper article.
Upper right: 1972: I am with a Disney bear in my office at The Aerospace Corporation in El Segundo. The bear was a promo for our company’s night at Disneyland that I was the chairperson of.
Lower left: 2004: I am with a stuffed grizzly at the Canyons ski resort in Park City, Utah.
Lower right: 1999: I am in front of a statue of a grizzly at Canyon Lodge at the Mammoth Mountain ski area.
🐴 🥾 🏕 The End of My Bear Stories 🐾 🔥 🛶
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