July 3, 2016–14 miles
3,000 Ft elevation loss
That’s all we did today…14 miles all down after the last 3 miles yesterday were down too! U may say to yourself, “that sounds nice and easy”, but down in the Sierras is nothing but steep switch backs w tons of rocks in the trail for u to trip on or huge granite steps so that you feel like you’re on a downhill stair master! Before I get to the day let me back up a bit to our dilemma last night. Bri was trying to open the valve on his inflatable pillow to add a little air and the seam ripped so now his pillow is sad and flat 😩. The good news is that our sleeping bags have a little spot to stuff clothes, in case u don’t want to use a pillow, but it’s definitely not as comfortable! Plus…yesterday the zipper broke on his pants 😳 good thing his shirt is long! 😜 We’ll have to do a little damage control when we get home. Now for our day…we were out of our tent by 6:30, waking up on our own because it feels like the middle of the day when there is any bit of light in the sky, our tent is yellow.
We only had coffee again so we could get on the trail by 8 in order to have hot breakfast at a beautiful lake, Evolution lake, just a few miles away.
Well, of course things don’t always work out as planned so 4+ miles and 2 hrs later we were finally at the lake. I tend to get a little grumpy when I’m hungry, and that was just too long to wait! The lake was definitely beautiful and well worth the wait in hindsight, but at the time I was starving! It also didn’t help that we stopped to talk to A LOT of JMT hikers. They are all walking the opposite way we are, so they came at us all with the same questions…”did u go over Muir pass? How was it? Was there much snow?” We wanted to give them the info and it’s fun to talk to other hikers, but we wanted to eat some food, man! We felt like broken records saying the same thing over and over. Up until 12:30 we literally saw a new group of hikers every 2 mins on average…holy cow! It was like a hiker highway and we found the novelty wearing off. We stopped at 1:30 for lunch at Mclure meadow. We found a secluded beautiful spot in the shade under a tree over looking the green meadow w the huge Evolution creek running thru it and the snowy mountains as a backdrop. The creek is super wide, but this was a mellow spot so it was so quiet. I feel like every view is breathtaking this trip!
Now we needed to find our campsite for the night. One of the hikers we talked to mentioned a good spot about where we were hoping to stop so we looked but couldn’t find it. So we r down trail probably further than we wanted to go, but now we’ll have less mileage tomorrow.
We are by a more roaring part of the creek nestled in between a bunch of trees, which sounds lovely except that there r a lot of flying insects…flies (small and large w some of them biting), mosquitos, etc… We were hoping to have a leisurely morning tomorrow but we may high tail it outta here if they don’t behave. We also saw 4 more deer today…9 total, WOW! That’s way more than our quota of “a deer a day”! Thanks for joining us on our journey, Amy
Amy and Brian's 