Daily Miles: 13
Total Miles: 251
The wind died down pretty quickly last night. It was quite warm, but we still managed to sleep good. We are getting faster about packing up in the mornings, so we were on the trail at 5:50am. We still really enjoy the morning time on the trail, when we feel like we have the place to ourselves.
The morning started out with a pretty hearty climb. Since it was cool out, the climb didn’t feel bad. Once we got to the top of the climb, we headed down to Garnet Lake. It was beautiful and so serene as we walked up to it. We walked along the shore and found our most scenic break spot of the whole trip…full view of the lake with high granite peaks all around and even some snow still on the high peaks.
The morning continued with a string of picturesque alpine lakes, continuing with Ruby Lake, Emerald Lake, and finally Thousand Island Lake. The final lake is really spectacular and has a similar feel to Aloha Lake in the Desolation Wilderness near Lake Tahoe.
There were tons of hikers and campers around the four lakes. We figured that since today is Saturday, people are probably out for a weekend trip. We even saw multiple dogs out on the trail today. Once we had hiked north of the lakes, the number of hikers seemed to drop quite a bit.
We ended up having an early lunch, since SweetPea wanted a “shoes off” break around 11:00am. We found a nice shady spot near a stream and told ourselves we were powering up for the climb of our final pass on this trip, Donahue Pass.
Luckily today felt a bit cooler than the past few days. We even had some clouds which gave us a break from the sun for short periods. The climb up to the pass had a pretty comfortable grade. Our pace was still slow, thanks to SweetPea feeling a bit yucky, but we made it up to the pass just before 3pm.
There was a group of three guys who got to the top just in front of us, but they didn’t stick around, so we had the pass to ourselves. It was a beautiful afternoon and we just enjoyed our time at the top.
After a good break, we started down the other side of the pass. The trail crews have done a lot of work to create the trail up and down the pass. There is a lot of stone work to get a nice trail with switchbacks. We dropped a lot of elevation pretty quickly and came to the Lyell River.
We stopped at the first campsite that would work for both Mace’s tent and our hammocks (basically we needed to get low enough in elevation that there would be big trees). Apparently this spot is pretty popular (and it is a weekend), so there are lots of folks camped in this area.
We got to camp around 4:30pm. Since we are close to a river, we did a more thorough cleaning in the river. Mace took a quick nap and we rested in our hammocks for a bit before dinner.
We’re all in our sleeping bags by 7:15pm. We had a really good day…it is hard to believe that today is our last full day. Tomorrow should be a relaxed shorter day into Tuolumne Meadows. We are all looking forward to being clean and wearing clean clothes again…not to mention the burger and fries we will be ordering at the Tuolumne Grill.
Ending Location: 37.768855,-119.256568
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