The Adventures of...: Days 70-71

Day 70, 16 miles, endpoint PCT mile 948

At dawn this morning the temperature was below freezing, the meadow that sprawled out below the rocks where our tent was perched was completely covered in frost, and an icy sheath was layered on top of the rainfly. The last thing I wanted to do was get out from under the quilt into the icy, barely lit day, but we had to: the Tuolumne post office closed at noon and we were ten miles away. Our bounce bucket was waiting and we were in a hurry.

It warmed up fairly quickly as we covered the ten miles. We went past Cathedral Lake, then down a long, woodsy hill until we arrived at Tioga Pass Road. We walked on the road for about a mile and were finally at the Tuolumne Meadows store and post office at 10am.

We barely had any time with our bucket, however; last call for shipping packages out was 11:30, and we had to make sure our bucket would be headed to South Lake Tahoe. We scrambled to refill toiletries, charge batteries, clip toenails, file nails, grab extra ziplocks, and do a couple other miscellaneous things before we had to say goodbye to the bucket.

With that done, we got burgers and fries from the grill, drank Sierra Nevada IPAs (of course) from the store, and chilled out at the picnic tables outside. We did our food shopping for the next five days, hung out with a few other hikers, had a second round of Sierra Nevadas. After this, decided we had better do some more hiking.

We left Tuolumne Meadows through an actual meadow, a pretty trail with wide open grass stretching towards mountains on both sides. We rejoined the PCT for the first time in nearly a week, and it felt good to be making northern progress again. We hiked six more miles along a river with large granite rocks and twisting sequoia trees. Right now are camped on a granite hill above a waterfall, still within the boundary of Yosemite National Park.

Trail views.

Food and post office... nice when they are so close together!

Trail views.

Camp views.

Day 71, 21 miles, endpoint PCT mile 969

In the first couple of miles this morning we passed many other weekend backpackers hiking in the opposite direction. After that, however, we didn't run into anyone else for most of the day. The solitude was nice.

We started uphill for about seven miles through trees that blocked any views. We then dropped down into Virginia Canyon, which followed a clear river. We had another large uphill, then a large 1,000 foot downhill before we got to the main course for the day: Benson Pass. Luckily, there is no snow on any of our passes anymore, so it was just straight uphill climbing for several miles.

The other side of the pass gave us our best scenery of the day, with rolling meadows and granite mountains. It was some Sound of Music type stuff. We made it to a lake and called it quits, camping below Volunteer Peak with a view of the lake in one direction and a large canyon in the other direction.