Homer's Nose

May 2026

It was already late May. Work and familial obligations made it such that I had almost no hope of getting out to the Sierra at all this the summer. But then, just as my work schedule was hitting it’s maximum insanity, a shipment of prototypes on the way from Vietnam for testing was delayed. The week I had planned to spend with a client was suddenly postponed. By jove, I had a free weekend! I immediately emailed Anthony: “I think I might be able to pull off a Homer’s Nose strike mission. Could probably drive out after work on Friday and climb on Saturday so long as I can get home Saturday night.” This was maybe Tuesday or Wednesday. Anthony was not planning on a big trip that weekend, and I think he had caught a cold and was nursing some sort of leg injury (if my memory serves), but my willingness to pull off a logistically crazy strike mission inspired him to do the same.

He would drive out from the east side after work on Friday, climb the Nose with me on Saturday, and hit Moses Mountain and North Maggie the following day. Friday came around and I emailed Anthony to let him know that the plan was a go. I threw together a small backpack of gear, picked some plums from the yard and boiled some eggs from our chickens, and I was off. There was an accident along my route and so it took roughly six hours to get to the trailhead, tucked way in the southwest corner of Sequoia National Park. It was really bizarre to think that I could be in Sequoia NP given I had just been driving through the central valley not more than 30 minutes before getting there.

We had made an aborted attempt on the Nose last year, and there was a huge CCC work crew there then. We wondered if they were fixing up the campground, the trails, or something else. Turns out they must have been just playing cards and spinning yarn around the campfire because the campground was still closed and disheveled, the trails were all completely overgrown, and not a single person seemed to have been in the area since Anthony and I left last year. Has the CCC devolved from its glory days of the New Deal into a glorified summer camp for listless late-teens? The state of South Fork Campground certainly lends credence to this theory.

Anyways, Anthony showed up late—maybe around 9:30 pm. We discussed the route and our start time and then drifted off to sleep in our cars. Some time before sunrise we rose and started plodding along. Anthony had some beta from a friend that suggested eschewing the standard route in favor of sending it straight up the ridge the entire time. Homer’s Nose is notoriously bushwhacky, often deemed “extreme class 1,” and so any way to make the route more straightforward would be welcomed. A fire had ripped through the area a couple years back which also might have helped our cause in terms of making the brush more manageable. In any case, after following the main trail for about half a mile, we found ourselves at a fork in the road. We could either follow the core route up a boulder-and-poison-oak-choked creek bed, or try our luck sending it directly up the steep ridge to the creek’s west. We opted for the ridge.

The brush was dense and poison oak abounded, but the going was much easier than it was during last year’s aborted attempt up the creek bed. We got to a little false summit on the ridge and descended rolling terrain to a saddle where we met up again with the main route. The gentle terrain was covered with chest high grass which made for pretty easy walking compared to the dense shrub we were just navigating. A few times here and there we were afforded views of Homer’s Nose and the adjoining peak, Homer’s Brow. Both were giant formations of granite shooting up out of alpine forests surrounding them, stunning and somewhat disorienting to look up at from the lowland deciduous forests we found ourselves in.

We took a break under an oak tree and, looking up the ridge, pondered whether to stay on it or to hang a left onto the core route that circuitously heads west, away from the summit, to gain the west ridge before cutting back east to gain the peak. The ridge looked to be just about as easy as what we had come up, and it was considerably shorter than the labyrinthine standard route, so we just kept shooting up for the summit.

Before long, we were in the alpine, making our way past Junipers, Jeffry pines, and the likes. The chief navigational challenge became getting around the large granite cliffs that blocked our progress every twenty minutes or so. With a few minor exceptions, we made steady progress with very little backtracking. Before long we surprised ourselves by seeing the terrain plateau in front of us, we made it to the summit!

We were afforded views into the Mineral King area to our east and the smog-choked central valley to our west. We lingered on the summit for some time, eating snacks, signing the summit register, and taking in the views. Eventually we started meandering back down the ridge. We got way off route somehow and probably lost about an hour zig-zagging down the mountain, getting cliffed out, reversing our tracks, and getting stuck in brushy mazes. We were having some really engaging conversations that likely caused our navigational focus to lapse. Sooner or later, we were properly back on the ridge. An uneventful hour or two saw us back to the trail.

My shoes and socks were so thoroughly run through with foxtails that I had to take them off and walk barefoot for the remainder of the hike. We also made a mandatory stop at the river to rinse off all the poison oak we had been exposed to. The river felt glorious in the afternoon heat of the lowlands. Slowly we made our way back to the cars. I had missed it on the way up on account of it being dark when we started, but I noticed a really nice, new retaining wall along the side of the fire road just above the camp ground. “Maybe this is what the CCC crew built!” I exclaimed to Anthony, excited by the prospect of them having done some useful work. Anthony chuckled the dark, jaded chuckle of a man who had worked in civil engineering for the public sector for long enough to know how silly my statement was.

“Haha, no, the park almost certainly contracted this out to some firm that charged ten million for this retaining wall.”

I hung my head in despair and lamented over the fact that we can’t just do things any more. We have to operate in the sclerotic yet some how totalizing and mind-numbing and soul-crushing and inescapable force of bureaucratized, sanitized, peer-reviewed, officially-approved, smog-checked, serialized, corporate-controlled, advanced degree-requiring, state-sanctioned, technique-driven, permit-soaked modernity. At least one can still get away from it all and thrash around off-trail on extreme class-1 routes like Homer’s Nose, assuming you secured your permit for entering the park, that is.