Cold, Hungry and Lost

Our adventure has gifted us a car rental and some time with regular beds!! We decided to head to death valley first and show catrina the hottest place on the planet, and it didn't disappoint, even at late afternoon it mustered a cozy 118F welcome for us, which is about 48C for those who prefer metric.. Toasty.. Surprisingly there are people who live in death valley, not to mention animals, has to be a rough existence Our next journey was to travel north to yosemite.  It was a fun drive, and a steep car trip up the mountains to get over the passes into the park.  Yosemite is basically a valley, with roads along the upper and lower parts. Our first day we stayed in the upper, and visited Merced Grove with some huge trees, not redwoods, but huge all the same.  It got late so we fled to a nearby town and slept, then returned to the park the next day, this time hitting the lower valley.  It is a beautiful park and well worth the time to visit. After Yosemite we headed ...

Miles: 8.2 + 9.9 side trail Start time: 7:02am End time: 8:15pm High / Avg / Low temp: 78.9F / 64.8F / 50.1F Relative Humidity Avg: 47.2% Injuries: none to report We woke this morning with a dusting of ash from the nearby forest fires, just a subtle reminder I suppose that nature is angry about that lightning storm from yesterday. We bumped into a ranger today and he told us that 2000acres was on fire and 0% contained, we didn't see any flames while hiking though, just smells and smoke plume. Our camp site turned out dandy and 2 other tents were snuck into the rocks nearby.  The skeeters were still mostly asleep when we packed up and fled, we skipped breakfast though to put some distance between us.. The first 6 miles was downhill and very pretty as we wandered down the canyon I guess you'd call it, with plenty of water and streams among the trees.  After 4 miles we stopped to filter water and eat, given I missed dinner last night I decided to cook a meal, and I poure...

Miles: 10.2 Start time: 7:32am End time: 8:05pm High / Avg / Low temp: 70.4F / 61.8F / 49.2F Relative Humidity Avg: 44.9% Injuries: none to report Eeks.. it was a crazy camp site last night, loaded with mozzies, and they were back with a vengeance at sun up, lil winged leeches.  We packed up our tent in record time to avoid being drained of blood and basically ran up a half mile climb to try to escape them..which was mostly futile.. I think we avoided the interest of new skeeters when we fled, but the swarm that knew about us just followed us, we had to squish them all before we had any semblance of peace. This flight to freedom also included toting our gallon dirty water container in our hands which we'd stop and filter..if and when.. We escaped.. At the half mile mark we made our last stand and got our chores done... It was a day of amazing views, after our first climb we ended up in alpine meadows, surrounded by mountains, and they were beautiful, and scary..one of ...

Miles: 9.8 Start time: 8:29am End time: 5:05pm High / Avg / Low temp: 82.5F / 71.3F / 67.4F Relative Humidity Avg: 27.0% Injuries: none to report It was an awesome campsite last night, and plenty of shade from the morning sun, priceless... Pretty sure the deer from last night came back to feed by the river, and it kept even less distance from us this time.. We also noticed a decent amount of scratch marks on a tree that looked suspiciously like bear claw marks, not from the previous night or anything scary, but in the not too distant past by the looks of the sap pouring out of the tree Today started with a brutal climb uphill, opening up to lovely views of meadows. That seemed to be the flavor of the day, brutal climbs with rewards of amazing views, especially of mountains later in the day We crossed two creeks today that required balance across rocks and stepping stones, with the occasional loose rock thrown in t test your balance, luckily neither of us ended up with wet fee...

Miles: 10.3 Start time: 7:52am End time: 5:05pm High / Avg / Low temp: 85.9F / 79.8F / 71.2F Relative Humidity Avg: 17.3% Injuries: none to report We got an ok start today, our campsite was not well sheltered from morning sun which always helps with the wakey wakey time, damnit.. After a maybe a mile we saw our first lake of the Sierra, chicken spring lake.  It was beautiful, and backed by a mountainous wall of rock, definitely a first for us We didn't see much in the way of wildlife today, except a black tailed deer at our evening camp site. It was not too much of a struggle today though, gentle ups and downs, and we had an excellent campsite away from other people, and by a sweet creek, the water was so cold... Naturally we stood in it to chill our aching feet bones.. We had a deer visitor, happily munching on soft river side grass and she wasn't overly worried about us setting up camp nearby.  Its getting darker and I'm sleepy, nighty night

Miles: 3.4 Start time: 8:32am End time: 2:05pm High / Avg / Low temp: 84.9F / 71.2F / 71.2F Relative Humidity Avg: 15.9% Injuries: none to report We spend the last few days in lone pine, a town we were sure we'd skip, but ended up really enjoying anyways. Our last campsite was about six miles to the exit and we got real lucky with our hitch into town. For the return to the trail we paid a local to drive 4 of us up the hill, and the $60 turned into $15 each which was win win for us all.  The best part was we were toting town food to eat, such spoilt hikers. Our climb us was relatively short, the first 2 miles mostly flat across the meadow we exited from last time, just too the other side of it, but it was punctuated by a herd of cows cruising past, a few hundred at least, big ones, small ones, brown ones, black ones, black ones with cute white faces, even a few with horns, steers I'm guessing seeing as they didn't posture at all upon seeing us. It took a while to fi...