Backpacking to Maude Lake, Desolation Wilderness

A highlight of the summer so far has been getting to hang out with three young Mudders (a student or alum from Harvey Mudd College). One Mudder is living with us for the summer while she interns at a little-known internet search engine company. The other two Mudders have graduated and are waiting to start grad school and a new job respectively. (Our daughter Kate attends HMC, but is away for the summer so we are using her friends as substitute children).

If you haven’t gone backpacking for, say, 20+ years, I highly recommend going with adventurous young adults in their early twenties. For one thing, they are strong and will carry a lot of the heavy stuff. They will volunteer to carry and cook the food and bring nice extras like hammocks or an extra blanket to use when napping outdoors.

We drove out of the East Bay at 5:00pm on Friday. With a dinner stop and traffic, we didn’t roll into our car camping spot at Wright’s Lake until 10:00. I immediately pitched a tent but others chose a more direct sleep option.

Our plan was to sleep in until 8:00, but the bright morning light and the presence of many mosquitos “encouraged” us to hit the trail early. It was a varied, lovely, occasionally uphill 5-mile walk to Maude Lake.  

We found a nice campsite and two Mudders offered to prepare lunch while the third Mudder entertained us by reading from CS Lewis’ Perelandra. Lunch was “fajitas” made with canned chili con carne. I don’t know if it was actually good, or only everything-tastes-good-after-a-long-hike good, but it was delicious.

Wes and Mudders 1 and 2 decided to explore a nearby peak but Mudder 3 and I decided to nap and read and nap some more.  After a bit, we decided to go for a swim in Maude Lake, which turned out to be more of a quick dip because water was so cold it literally knocked the breath out of us.

The weather was perfect and the day so pleasant, but once dusk arrived, those darn mosquitos came back with a vengeance. We had to eat our yummy pasta dinner as fast as we could before being driven to cower and play cards in one of the tents. We were all a bit stiff from all that hiking and sitting in the cramped tent space wasn’t ideal, so we took a break from card playing to stretch.

The next morning, we decided that we had time for a mini hike and so set off. That view! I managed to jerry-rig a tripod and used the timer on my phone to snap that ever-elusive all-group photo.

We then packed up our campsite and hiked back out, somehow managing to end up on the opposite side of Wright’s Lake than where we had parked.

We waited by the cool water while Wes and Mudder 1 went to get the car. We drove back through the Sacramento heat (103 F) in our 1996 van that doesn’t have AC. So much bonding.

Thank you, Mudders! The trip was really fun and I’m already itching (mosquitos, ha ha, get it?) for more.