What a long day! This morning already feels like several days ago. We had a great night of sleep and slept through the whole night solid. We got rolling out of camp around 7:20.
It was such a warm morning today that we were all wearing only shorts and t-shirts before we left. The day started with a series of switchbacks after walking along the San Joaquin River. After the big uphill, we came upon Evolution Creek which we needed to ford. We all took off our shoes and socks and walked across. The water was really cold and came up over Sweetpeas knees. The bottom of her shorts were wet which made her even colder. Sweetpea decided to put on her rain jacket to keep warm. Soon after, it started raining. We kept walking and luckily the rain stopped. It seemed like a lot of the streams were swollen from the recent rains.
When we stopped for lunch it started raining again, so we put up one of our hammock tarps and hung out until it stopped raining. It wasn’t too long and we were back on the trail. We figured that once we hit to Evolution Lake, we would make a decision about camping there or going and extra 8 miles to where we figured there would be trees. Unfortunately, there were no real hammocking trees at Evolution Lake, so we continued on. Beardoh decided to take most of Sweetpea’s food into his pack to help her out with going the extra miles. While it was good for her, surely it was no picnic for him. The rest of the guys were willing to continue on with us and we headed off.
We climbed over Muir Pass and enjoyed our dinner outside the hut. Luckily the afternoon had cleared and we had some blue skies for our pass. It really turned out to be nice. We started heading down after 6:00 and finally found a campsite with barely passable hammocking (Beardoh’s hang is ultra long and Sweetpea’s hang is ultra short) and tenting spots around 7:45. There was only one tent site near where we hung our hammocks, so Mike is camped near us and Mace and Tom are camped further up and out of sight. We were all really beat and headed to bed. We didn’t bother to wash up and instead just headed to bed. We are super beat, but also glad we got in the extra miles today, as it puts us in a better place for doing shorter miles than previously expected to Indepenence.
Daily Miles: 21
Total Miles: 137.4
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