Day 38 mile 630.8 – 656

Elevation: ascent 4,791 ft, descent 3,626 ft

Well our choice of tent sites was definitely a good one last night. Besides literally being right next to the trail it was great because we got out of the wind. We could hear it whipping through the trees about 1/4 mile away so we knew it didn’t die down and we slept so much better with just a light breeze. Crashing at 7:30 makes it easy to wake up early when the sun rises. Which was great because we were treated with a beautiful sunrise.

It was cold this morning but way more tolerable without gale force winds. We walked the 1/4 miles back to the water cache and filled up for the 14 mile dry haul. We did have some service and were able to take care of some blogging and contact with family.

The climb this morning was fairly gradual and the cold temps made it easy not to get overheated. It’s weird for me to be wearing multiple layers and a beanie to hike in since I run warm normally. Before long we found ourselves in a more wooded section and even had a great view of Mt Whitney and the snow covered mountains in the Sierra. It’s neat to see how the ecosystems change as we move from one mountain range to the next. Today it was almost a dividing line between the desert and the forest.

The weather today was ideal for hiking. It was probably low 60’s with a nice cool breeze blowing. Double Down even rolled up her sleeves by mid day. We had blue skies with occasional puffy white clouds so Double Down Down could get her artsy pics in.

The terrain slowly turned back into more of a desert landscape with low brush and few trees around. Then around mid day we ended up a dirt road for a few miles which happens occasionally out here. Most of the time the roads are rough to walk on because they aren’t smooth and they typically have softball size rocks that are easy to roll you ankle on. This one would rate a 4.5/5 as it was mostly flat and we could walk side by side a lot of the time.

We arrived at McIver’s Cabin and Spring at about 1:00. This is a very random cabin in the middle of no where that some PCT hikers use to stay in. Way too sketchy and creepy for me to ever consider that. The spring was great though. Gushing cold clear water that tasted oh so good. It was even better since we had chairs to sit in with a backrest!! I tell you it’s the little things we enjoy so much. Right as we finished lunch two families rolled in, in their Polaris off-road vehicles. We chatted for a couple of minutes and then it was off to our dinner spot 8 miles away.

We got to Walker Pass Campground around 4:45 and had planned on a dinner here to rest our feet and legs as we were hoping to get in a few more miles since it wasn’t even 5:00 yet and the campground wasn’t the most scenic. It definitely was nice to have a picnic table to sit at while cooking and eating. The simple things I tell you 😁. Double Down took over the cooking and cleaning duties so I could catch up on my blogging. We grabbed enough water to get us the next 15 miles (yup you guessed it no water until then) and headed off. Our goal was to hopefully get in another 4.8 miles and we had about two hours until the sunset. To make it worse we also had to climb 1,600 feet. I guess the diner and rest was the ticket because we busted out those miles and were in camp by 7:45 allowing us to watch the sunset while setting up camp.

What a great day! We got to see a beautiful sunrise and sunset. It’s weird lying here in our tent as I would have thought we would be feeling very achy and have throbbing legs but that isn’t the case. I guess our bodies are evolving into hiking machines, just in time for the Sierra.

One other thing. We have had people ask what kind of gear we are using so we will try to give you a quick review on a piece of equipment we use at times. So today I will tell you about our tent. We use a Tarptent Stratosphere LI. We have used a lot of different tents over the years and have just found this one. It is a very light Tarptent but is double walled (meaning it allows air to move between the tent and its rain fly) which helps to cut down on condensation. We tried single walled tents in the past but struggled with setting it up properly to prevent us from getting rained on by the condensation build up from the inside. The other thing we like about this tent is you can set the whole tent up even if it’s raining without getting the inside of the tent wet. Figure being out here for 6 months that might be a good possibility. Anyway we do love the tent, but it has its draw backs just like any other. It can be very loud in the wind and hard to set up if you can’t stake it out (it isn’t free standing as it uses our trekking poles to hold it up) but being a two person tent with two vestibules that only weighs 28 oz over weighed the cons for us.

Well I hope you enjoyed today’s post and as always thanks for following along. Link