After reading the Abbot story in the About section of this site, I became quite interested in the Abbot route itself. It's amazing that a century-old route still survives (in pieces) and is near forgotten out there. It would be very interesting to identify and save the historic pieces before they are lost, but I digress.
So, after our Hambone adventures, we decided to head out to the very large Jackpot meadow. I was in for quite a surprise...the meadows have been turned into a gigantic subalpine cow pasture. The trail down thru the meadows were a dusty mess from all the cow traffic, it felt like walking on Mars. It was weird seing various bovines wandering the woods, stranger still to arrive at the magnificient meadows and find them as trampled and cow-bombed as an Iowa pasture. Not only that, but the "meadow" was complety mowed down to grass-nubs, all the flowers and high elevation grasses gone.
Very discouraging. I'm still amazed that these miraculous places are abused in such a manner. Jackpot Meadow is as beautiful as any national park. Without the piles of poop of course.