Kuna Peak Climb - Summit Day
by Michael A. Wong
(Note: I took some small video clips from our adventure, and posted them here.
Click here to see the photos that I took on our climb ).
Perfect weather...we filled our small hiking packs with crampons, food, water, and my two cameras, then set off up a wide canyon behind our cozy camp. The terrain changed from steep, broken granite rock to steep snow fields.
The altitude just kicks ones' ass, no matter how good of shape you're in. We kept climbing upwards. Here's the weird thing about Kuna Peak - you never see it, not once while on the Parker Pass trail. You can't see it from Hwy 120, it's so hidden and remote, so that almost nobody has ever heard of it. The only photos that I had ever seen were shot from other mountain peaks. Kuna Peak is the "Illusive Mountain", third highest in Yosemite at officially 13,002'. Up to this point, I kept telling the guys that I lied, that there is no Kuna Peak. We passed a beautiful alpine lake where we stopped to take photos, then proceeded up another snow field with granite walls on both sides.
Finally, we see the famous "notch" on the summit ridge. We were negotiating the deep sun-cupped snowfield, and finally we arrived on a ridge that overlooks the whole grandier of Kuna Glacier and the rock walls that lead us to Kuna Peak.
We then strapped on our crampons to negotiate this wonderful glacier. Crampons are like magic, your feet just sticks to the ice like glue, and one can travel on ice like it's a normal thing. We stayed high up on the glacier to traverse to its east side, where we worked our way high up the ice. We then removed the crampons, and scambled up the horribly loose talas rock. We're now on the saddle between Koip Peak and Kuna Peak. You can see north and south as far as the eye can see. We also found remnants of a crashed airplane from decades ago.
The mountain views are out of this world, but we still have to make the summit...we encounter huge boulders that we scrambled upwards over. Every time I thought we were at the top, there was more climbing to go. Finally, finally, I approach the true summit. It has tall, sharp rocks pointing towards the sky. Gary, Bob and I had done it. We are now standing on top of the world!
Gary's GPS says 13,018' elevation. Most mountains have a sign-in canister, the last guys that signed it summited earlier in the year, but nobody took the North Face route that we accomplished. I can tell you that I was so incredibly filled with joy. Here's a 54-year-old guy fighting for every inch for a total of three days, and I'm standing on top of the world for a short while.
Out of three cell phones, none had any service. We sat on the sheer drop- off ledge, and had our traditional lunch, which starts with a can of smoked clams. This tradition goes back to the '80s as one year that we climbed, it's all that we had left, and it tasted so good. The views were absolutely incredible. You could see all of the highest mountains in CA., and many that I had stood upon in years past.
Every party must come to an end, and we packed it up, and headed down to The Koip / Kuna Saddle. It's strange, we also have to climb Koip Peak, which stands in our way to the switchback trails on Parker mountain. It was a lot of work negotiating over the sharp and loose rock up Koip Peak. The views were just a grand because Koip is just a few feet lower than Kuna.
38 switchbacks descending 1500' on Parker Peak was amazing, especially thinking about the poor people that had to build it. At the top, Bob says "This could really intimidate some hikers" as it seemed like the trails were clinging to a very steep and giant mountain.
We could see where our camp was, next to our little alpine lake. We only saw one person the whole day. We were the only ones on both mountains, and that's the way we planned it. A good dinner and another cold 12 hours in bed, then 6 hard, tough miles hauling packs and we can say we pulled off one incredible climb.
