Daily Miles: 14
Total Miles: 14
Our friendly shuttle driver, Harvey, picked us up at our hotel this morning at 7am. The skies were clear blue and we were excited to get on the trail. We had a 1.5 hour drive up to Kennedy Meadows and we spent the time catching up and reliving memorable moments from previous hikes. The drive went quickly and we made it up to Kennedy Meadows at 8:30am.
We were surprised when we got out of the car at how warm it was for that time of the morning. We had expected it to be cooler, since we had climbed up into the mountains.
We headed out right away and were happy to be putting our feet on the trail. It has been way too long since we have hiked with Mace, and we were looking forward to spending the next few weeks together.
The trail started out pretty easy and flat. Even though our packs were heavy, it didn’t feel too bad. The ULA packs do a good job of being able to carry heavier loads.
Not sure that the elevation was really much of an issue today (we got over 8,000 feet today), but the heat was pretty brutal. A lot of the trail today was pretty exposed, and we often felt like we were baking. We often stopped for breaks if we hit a shady spot, just to enjoy the respite.
Luckily, we managed to find a nice shady spot for lunch. Since we had a late start we didn’t feel like we could take a really long lunch break. As we were finishing up with lunch, we saw our first hiker for the day. His trail name is Drama Queen and he is from Germany, doing a long section hike. He had started this morning at Kennedy Meadows just like us.
Our lunch break was halfway up our big climb for the day. With the heat and the heavy packs, our pace was pretty slow. We have hiked this section before when we did the PCT, and it doesn’t stick in our minds as difficult, but with this being our first day on the trail, it felt really hard.
We leap frogged with Drama Queen four or five times today, sharing the precious shady breaks on our way up the climb. Most of the climb was dry today…we had a 7 mile water carry. Since we were going so slow and we were so hot, we probably should have carried more water than we did. Once we finally made it to the water source (a beautiful, cold spring), we took a long break and drank several bottles of cold water.
It was hard to get the motivation to keep walking, since we were already tired, but we managed to get ourselves back on the trail and we continued on.
At the water source, we had met another hiker, who talked about the scarcity of water after our next water source in 3 miles (mostly what we would be experiencing tomorrow). We figured he was talking from experience, but then realized he was going in the same direction as us, so he was only expressing his own take on the comments in the FarOut navigation app. When we looked ourselves at camp a few hours later, we weren’t really sure what he was talking about, as the acceptable water sources seem well spaced out tomorrow. It was just a good reminder to us not to blindly trust what we hear from other hikers about trail/water conditions.
We finally made it to camp around 6:45pm. We were exhausted. We are camped just up from a river, so we were able to do a good body rinse, as well as some laundry before sitting down to eat dinner.
When we were unpacking our backpacks this evening, we realized the extreme heat, as well as our extreme stuffing of our gear to get in our six days of food caused some dark chocolate explosions. Our motel room last night was not very cool and there was no fridge to store the chocolate overnight to give it a cool headstart. Luckily the damage was contained in our daily food bags (SweetPea had explosions in 3 of her daily food bags and Beardoh had 1). We were thankful that the explosion was contained in the daily food bags, since those bags had been layered in our down sleeping bags. Things could have been much worse. In any case, tomorrow we’re going to have a reckoning as we try to clean up the mess.
We all headed to bed as it got dark. We decided that after the extreme heat today, that we are going to aim for an early start. Our alarms are set for 5:00am, and we’ll pack up in the dark, with the hope of getting on the trail as it is getting light. Hopefully we can get in a good amount of miles before it warms up too much.
Even though it was a tough day, it feels great to be back out in the Sierras.
Ending Location 36.181992,-118.129173
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