Had a great night’s sleep. The sky was full of starry brightness during the inevitable pee in the middle of the night. It was quite chilly in the morning, so we started out with our rain jackets, fleece hats and gloves. It was pretty much all uphill until we got to Forrester Pass. The terrain was very exposed and quite impressive. The day was cool which helped with going up the pass.
There were several people up on the pass and we talked for a while with a guy named Keith, who is a Physics professor at Cal Tech. He was kind enough to take a group photo of us with his nice camera and gave us his email to get a copy of the photo. Interesting tidbit from Keith…that nearly all rocks on earth are nearly the same density, but the core of the earth is about twice that density.
The trail down from the pass was pretty rocky, but well switchbacked which was good. The trail building that has been done is pretty impressive considering the trail is practically built on a wall of rock. Quite a bit of the descent with a sheer drop-off next to the trail. There was a group of pack horses coming up the pass when we were going down, so we had to squeeze our bodies against the side of the mountain and just stay still and quiet as the horses passed so that they wouldn’t get spooked.
We had lunch in a nice spot beside a small lake. It took several hours until we were back down to where there were trees again. We got to camp around three and got a few sprinkles in the later afternoon. It started to get quite chilly , so we are all in bed by 6:00…not because we are tired, but because we are cold.
We haven’t seen any hikers that we were seeing before the Independence resupply. Most likely they are all ahead of us by a day or two because of our double zero.
Tomorrow night we will likely camp separately, as the guys want to get as close to Whitney as they can, and we will be limited by the trees. Chances are, we will be about two miles behind them. We’ll have to wait and see how it works out. Only two nights left on the trail.
Daily Miles: 11
Total Miles: 213.4
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