Backpacking Kings Canyon National Park - June 2026

All right, it's Friday, June 26th, June 26th, on the Bubbs Creek Trail, just out for a little weekend adventure. This formation right there is the Sphinx, and I will ascend Sphinx Creek probably on the other side of this notch on the, that's behind it. I am working my way up Bubbs Creek, and this is just a really cool perspective looking at Woods Creek, the Woods Creek drainage, and then looking down Rhodes End. I mean it's so cool, it's, it's the, it's the junction, the confluence of two massive glaciers that came down this, these mountains here. Can you just imagine this entire thing full of ice with just the tops poking out? I was just noticing in this big gully where the creek come down, comes down, there's nothing over a certain height, and look at this tree right here just snapped. Everything else is bent over or it's broken. You can see it even above the trail right here. This tree right here is broken. It's after seven now, I'm still climbing, and I'm kind of digging deep here. I made it, this is Sphinx Creek. Look, it looks so nice to forward, but good god, the mosquitoes, oh my god. I was kind of worried if this was going to be intense that I wouldn't even have the strength for it, but it's all good. Let's find a campsite. This is where I camped last night. You can hear Sphinx Creek in the back, and it's a little before seven. I camped over there, a couple hundred feet in that direction, and I'm back at Sphinx Creek, and instead of following the trail up to Avalanche Pass, I'm actually going to go off trail and follow Sphinx Creek, or use Sphinx Creek as a handrail at least, to go up the drainage here. Oh man, I think that I went way too high. I just, like, I did not want to push through the bog, and so I climbed this boulder field. I just, and then I climbed this headwall, but it's looking, it's looking a lot nicer here, I think, going forward. The views are outrageous. This is the next climb. Looks like it's pretty slabby though, but steep, so it'll be difficult, but at least it's not a boulder mess. This part was, this part was kind of unpleasant, and the mosquitos are out, but this little breeze is keeping them away. It's nice. This block, like a lot of them out here, is totally polished by glaciers, so it's really smooth. I've got two, two thoughts I want to share. First is that I really respect the trip reports I read where people did this as a day trip. Very impressed by that and admire that a lot. And then the second one is that I, a giant hole in my pants, right on my butt, has deteriorated enough where I can put my fingers through it, but it is providing some good airflow, so I think you can, I think I can see the Sphinx right there. Cool. This is where I'm going to camp tonight, up here at the lake, and today I've just been walking around, fishing, taking pictures. Tomorrow, back to the car. Oops. It's Sunday morning, and I'm headed back to the car now. I am kind of apprehensive about how long this is going to take me, but all I have to do is get to the bottom of this canyon and then walk a couple miles. That's more glacial polish reflecting off, reflecting the sun. This groove right here is a pretty epic striation. If you can imagine when this was full of ice, thousands of tons of ice above this, you know, pressing down, and a rock gets caught in between the glacier and the bedrock here, the bedrock granite, it drags the rock across the granite so hard that it scrapes it out and creates grooves like that. And a lot of the stuff I'm sitting on is totally polished. Not the smoothest polish, it's not glass like reflecting like some of this other stuff, but polished by glacial action. This is an old axe blaze, and I think this tree got shot a long time ago. It's like 10 30 now, and I'm back on the trail. A couple more thousand feet to go down, but it should be a bit quicker. It's nice coming down though. Wasn't as bad as I was expecting.