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Mount Shasta as it looked at dusk, as I and several other hikers, set out to night-hike Hat Creek Rim to avoid the soaring daytime temperatures in this largely shadeless and waterless section. Northern California is proving to be a section requiring real mental toughness. It is a long way between completing the Sierra’s…
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It’s been quite a few days since I’ve blogged and a lot has happened. If you read the last post you will know that I was super-excited about my wife, Lisa, coming back to the trail. She’d hiked from the start in Campo and had completed around eight hundred miles before the foot pain…
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The next section of northbound trail would take me through the Tahoe National Forest (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tahoe_National_Forest) and Granite Chief Wilderness (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granite_Chief_Wilderness) toward Sierra City (oddly named, for it is about as far removed from being a city as you could imagine: a handful of buildings clustered together around a church and single store way off…
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The last days have seen, subtle changes starting to occur around me. The towering peaks and craggy cliffs have given way gradually to a more gentle, if still wild, landscape of meadows, woods, lakes and hills. The Sierra’s don’t just end abruptly, but concede their heights over a hundred miles or so, to become…
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Getting back to the trailhead wasn’t easy. There was no consistent bus route to get me back to Independence, the nearest town to where we came off the trail, so I had to hitch. Almost 80 miles from Mammoth Lakes where I’d had to return the hire car. We’d made the difficult decision for…
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After summiting Whitney we’d hoped to hike the 7-8 miles to the Base of Forester Pass that afternoon so that we could cross the pass early morning whole the snow pack was still firm. In practice I was exhausted and managed little more than to make dinner and return to the tent to sleep.…
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The transformation from the desert to the high Sierra’s could not have been more dramatic. As we crossed lush meadows, the pine trees grew taller, the boulders bigger and on the horizon the peaks soared skywards, only now increasingly their summits were decorated with a glistening, frosty icing. We had been off-trail for a…
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With the start of central California and the High Sierra mountains in our minds, we set a plan to cross the remaining Mojave and reach Kennedy Meadows, gateway to the Sierra, in week. Tehachapi had been a great resupply town and we’d sent a box ahead to Kennedy Meadows too with food for a…
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Occupying just 55 thousand square miles, but remaining the driest desert in the US, the Mojave would dominate our next fortnight of hiking. Known as the ‘high desert’ it is dominated by the San Bernadino, San Gabriel and Tehachapi mountains. Inevitably water was scarce and there some big distances to cover without supply, so…
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Leaving Wrightwood was harder than expected. We were back and forth between a couple of stores and the gas station trying to get final supply items sorted out and get fed before hitting the trail. In the end we conceded to lunch and cold sodas at The Village Grind, a very cool bar/coffeehouse at…