Lake Aloha

7/31/08
Finally I headed up to Echo Pass and the trailhead to Lake Aloha, the area I had been lusting over from Mount Tellac. Echo Lakes Resort offered a $10 boat taxi across the two Echo Lakes, an extravagance I'm glad I opted for. From the drop-off it was an easy 3.5 mile hike to Lake Aloha (8,116’), the largest lake in the Desolation Wilderness. I know I'm young, but I thought Lake Aloha was the most beautiful lake I'd ever seen. What? Less than a week after raving over the beauty of Pyramid Lake? Well Pyramid Lake is beautiful mostly because of its spare setting. It's still basically a big lake: you see water and shoreline. Lake Aloha is beautiful blue lake filled with white granite islands and fingers, interspersed in infinite varieties of patterns, creating bays that give the sense of there being 30 different lakes sharing the same basin. All this white and blue creates an illusion of arctic bay, as if a polar bear could come thwomping out at any moment. Scattered pines and firs only partly undermine this illusion. It was the sort of place where I take so many pictures I stop putting my camera back in its case. Not that half of them don’t end up looking the same, but I have fun.

  There was something otherworldly about the place. Maybe it should have been obvious, but I was new to the Sierras and so didn’t know this wasn’t a perfectly normal Sierra lake. I came upon remnants of old masonry walls as well as numerous trees obviously drowned, indicating this was once some sort of reservoir. Then I come upon a new masonry wall and a working spigot revealing the lake was still in use as a reservoir. I wondered about this some, this working reservoir in a wilderness area, and figured I'd look into it later, but for now I had fun to have.The water was shallow and clear, and the bright sun provided lots of chances for me to indulge my fondness for water reflection pictures.

The day was perfect, the lake beautiful and complex, and I was soon lured into my first wandering extravaganza. I just kept going and at some point decided that I must have already made it halfway around the lake and so I might as well just circumnavigate it. Boy was I wrong. I followed rock finger after finger, thinking each time that this one would be the bridge that enclosed the lake, and each one fell short, some just dozens of feet of intervening lake short. I didn’t have an overview (and OK, I did no prior research), so I just kept going. One odd thing that kept me optimistic was that in every patch of mud I came across this same set of footprints. Someone else had come this way. At some point though I began to think that I was going to come upon a skeleton, nothing left but muddy sneakers.

While frustrating, tiring, and a little worrying, it wasn’t hard hiking and it was a lot of fun until I approached what could only be the final lake ending in a huge boulder heap at the bottom of an enormous sheer cliff. As I approached it I knew I’d have to cross it because by now returning the way I'd come was really out of the question. If this boulder heap proved insurmountable, I'd have to spend the night outside, something I really was not prepared for (I subsequently added a space blanket to my day pack). I'm good at boulder hopping, having lots of Cascade experience, and I needed it as this one was pretty serious, plus I was loopy and wobbly tired. A fall wouldn't be too bad unless I hit my head, or get my leg stuck.

Don't think I didn't have Aron Ralston on my mind. He wrote the book Between a Rock and a Hard Place, and though I never read it, I did hear him describe his experience as I was lying in the dark one night listening to the radio. He had been solo hiking in the canyons of Utah when somehow a stumble and a rock fall led to him being trapped in the rocks, and the only way out was for him to cut his own arm off. The part that really got me was when he said he realized the only way he’d be able to do that was by first breaking his own bones, a shuddering thought. They say you never know what you are capable of until you’re in the situation, but I feel pretty sure that if I were ever in that situation I would not be breaking my bones and cutting off my arm. I would be getting ready to meet my maker.

But I didn’t want to do that either, and so I kept focused on the situation, carefully and steadily, testing each step, one step at a time, and soon enough I emerged onto a terrific, open beach, sublime in late afternoon sun, invigorated by the adrenaline and the knowledge that I had finally rounded the far end of the lake. I still did not know how far I had to go. Then a dog started barking at me: I'd come upon a couple of backpackers, who informed me I was about 5.5 miles from the far side of Echo Lakes. I’d be way too late for the water taxi so I’d have to hike the last 2.5 miles to the trailhead, meaning I was 8 miles from the car. It certainly indicates what kind of day this was that I was deeply relieved to learn, exhausted and already early evening, that I only had 8 miles left to hike. It was a straight shot, mostly but not entirely downhill, and above all, I would get home, no matter how exhausted.

By the time I got back to Echo Lakes they were aglow in evening light - achingly beautiful had a double meaning that day. The homes along the lake are accessible only by boat, and have no water or electricity. I was struck by an atypical bout of envy. Oh to read on one of those patios! All told my hike lasted about 10 hours, and I have no way of calculating distance, though it was at least 16 miles, generally flat except that I was almost constantly boulder hopping. In sum, I can't really recommend it, but once it was over I was glad I had done it.

I eventually did some research and learned that this astoundingly beautiful lake is in fact Aloha Reservoir, created when Medley Dam - built in 1875, raised in 1914, licensed by FERC in 1922, and grandfathered into the Desolation Wilderness - turned a group of small lakes called Medley Lakes to form Aloha Lake. But only part of the time. When the lake is drawn down for water supply, Medley Lakes reemerge, if that is the right word. The lake had been draining all around me. The day I was there, July 31, 2008, Aloha Lake covered 2,519 acre feet. Six weeks earlier it had covered 4,957 acre feet, almost twice the size it was the day I was there. Actually, 2,519 acre feet was its size at noon, while I ate my sandwich and gawked. By 5:00 PM it was 2,515 acre feet and getting smaller as I hiked around it! If I had held on for another month it would have been 1,998 acre feet, a far easier stroll, though one that would likely have entailed a lot more mud. By April 15, 2009 (by which time I would be in a dust storm in Hanksville Utah), the lake would cover 69.6 acre feet, some 5% of its size on my visit.