Wednesday, July 3, 2013
meta: Apologies, everyone, for getting spammed...
Oh fret! I was trying to prevent people reading this blog before I had it properly set up, so I tried restricting readers to specific people in my contact list, not realizing that blogger would go ahead an send out "invitations" to all those people - I would have liked to do that only when good and ready. Oh well, Sorry everyone.
Saturday, June 22, 2013
PCT: chg timing & logistics - Onion Vly swap car & bicycle
Slight chg in timing and logistics. To avoid cloudiness & forecast chance of snow while climbing Whitney, and then later in week bicycling in forecasted 104+ temps in Owens vly to get back to car, I did the bike trip today leaving car at Onion vly and am about to leave bike at the hostel here in Lone Pine before trying to hitch up to Horseshoe Vly to my backpack.
Tomorrow will hike to Chicken Spring Lk just beyond Cottonwood Pass and take my time getting to Whitney by probably Weds. During next weekend's hot spell I"ll be up around Forester or Kearsarge Passes or at most at Onion Vly at my car. Will probably hang there till Owens Vly cools before fetching bike & stuff left at Horseshoe.
Tomorrow will hike to Chicken Spring Lk just beyond Cottonwood Pass and take my time getting to Whitney by probably Weds. During next weekend's hot spell I"ll be up around Forester or Kearsarge Passes or at most at Onion Vly at my car. Will probably hang there till Owens Vly cools before fetching bike & stuff left at Horseshoe.
Thursday, June 20, 2013
PCT: Olancha to Horseshoe done. Onwards to Whitney
So I'm back in Lone Pine having completed the section from Olancha Pass to Horseshoe Meadows.
The bus dropped me off at Sage Flat Rd Monday morning and I promptly got a short ride up a portion of the paved 2 miles leaving a 3 mile hike to the Olancha Pass trailhead. At the TH I rested for about an hr under a large Canyon Oak and then with many rests through midday made it to where I had stashed some water when I came down that trail abt two weeks ago. Good that I left the water because the next source was poor quality - Many of the usual sources are dry this yr.
This section was exceptionally scenic and I think I took more pictures here than in any other part of the trail so far. I still need to download them off my CF cards to make room for the next section. Here in town so far I've showered, laundried, shopped for new pocket knife I lost, food.
Still battling problems with the stupid windows app I'm forced to use to access the data from my new Holux M1000C GPS logger. This time it goes through the motions of downloading 700,000 bytes but then says no track log data on the device. Device status says 14% full, which makes sense. Aargh! I think I will continue to use but also log data with my phone and/or Garmin GPS.
So I want to camp tonight back at Horseshoe Meadows and tomorrow pack up for the next six or more days past Whitney to Kearsarge Pass where my bicycle is stored. Gotta hurry now to copy my picts (will do that back at the Laundromat where they have power plugs.)
Still need too check weather as well. Heard some mention of showers on the radio but reception was static-ey at the time...
The bus dropped me off at Sage Flat Rd Monday morning and I promptly got a short ride up a portion of the paved 2 miles leaving a 3 mile hike to the Olancha Pass trailhead. At the TH I rested for about an hr under a large Canyon Oak and then with many rests through midday made it to where I had stashed some water when I came down that trail abt two weeks ago. Good that I left the water because the next source was poor quality - Many of the usual sources are dry this yr.
This section was exceptionally scenic and I think I took more pictures here than in any other part of the trail so far. I still need to download them off my CF cards to make room for the next section. Here in town so far I've showered, laundried, shopped for new pocket knife I lost, food.
Still battling problems with the stupid windows app I'm forced to use to access the data from my new Holux M1000C GPS logger. This time it goes through the motions of downloading 700,000 bytes but then says no track log data on the device. Device status says 14% full, which makes sense. Aargh! I think I will continue to use but also log data with my phone and/or Garmin GPS.
So I want to camp tonight back at Horseshoe Meadows and tomorrow pack up for the next six or more days past Whitney to Kearsarge Pass where my bicycle is stored. Gotta hurry now to copy my picts (will do that back at the Laundromat where they have power plugs.)
Still need too check weather as well. Heard some mention of showers on the radio but reception was static-ey at the time...
Sunday, June 16, 2013
PCT: chg logistics: bus to Olancha, car at Horseshoe
[originally emailed noon 16June2013 from my N1 phone, goofey autospellcheckwordswaps corrected]
Slight change in the logistics. I've left the car at the Cottonwood Pass trailhead (the Horseshoe Meadows area actually) and will catch the Monday morning bus south to be dropped off 5 miles south of the town of Olancha, at Sage Flats road which goes to the Olancha Pass trailhead, so I'll be able to recharge my camera batteries without having to hitch to town when I make it back to Horseshoe Meadows.
So, last night I did overnight on the trail between Mulkey and Cottonwood Passes, giving me a chance to break in my new shoes and also try out the new bear canister. The canister fits in my pack OK without it being felt by my back thanks to the design of my Osprey pack with it's curved frame and webbing intended to provide an air-space between the pack and my back. I've heard complaints from other hikers that the big can digs into their back.
The shoes may be a problem. Some spots on the insole feel like pressure points I'm worried may become blisters. I'm packing my Teva sandals along so I could switch back to them.
Having now done that stretch of PCT above Horseshoe Meadows, I can take the Mullkey Pass Trl to my car, then resume the Trl at Cottonwood Pass.
So tonight I'm at the hostel in Lone Pine, in a room with two other hikers. One of them has just aborted his hike to accept a new job with the Conservation Corpse. The other is continuing, although he's talking about spending more time to take more side trips in the sierra, at the expense of not making it to Canada this year.
Earlier today I got a ride down to town from a Game Warden who had stopped to ask us (I was talking to another hiker) whether we had seen anyone fishing - because the season didn't start til July. On the way down the hill, he griped a fee times about cars parked in random spots on the road that he thought might be fisherman.
Slight change in the logistics. I've left the car at the Cottonwood Pass trailhead (the Horseshoe Meadows area actually) and will catch the Monday morning bus south to be dropped off 5 miles south of the town of Olancha, at Sage Flats road which goes to the Olancha Pass trailhead, so I'll be able to recharge my camera batteries without having to hitch to town when I make it back to Horseshoe Meadows.
So, last night I did overnight on the trail between Mulkey and Cottonwood Passes, giving me a chance to break in my new shoes and also try out the new bear canister. The canister fits in my pack OK without it being felt by my back thanks to the design of my Osprey pack with it's curved frame and webbing intended to provide an air-space between the pack and my back. I've heard complaints from other hikers that the big can digs into their back.
The shoes may be a problem. Some spots on the insole feel like pressure points I'm worried may become blisters. I'm packing my Teva sandals along so I could switch back to them.
Having now done that stretch of PCT above Horseshoe Meadows, I can take the Mullkey Pass Trl to my car, then resume the Trl at Cottonwood Pass.
So tonight I'm at the hostel in Lone Pine, in a room with two other hikers. One of them has just aborted his hike to accept a new job with the Conservation Corpse. The other is continuing, although he's talking about spending more time to take more side trips in the sierra, at the expense of not making it to Canada this year.
Earlier today I got a ride down to town from a Game Warden who had stopped to ask us (I was talking to another hiker) whether we had seen anyone fishing - because the season didn't start til July. On the way down the hill, he griped a fee times about cars parked in random spots on the road that he thought might be fisherman.
Saturday, June 15, 2013
PCT: KM to Olancha done, GPS setback, scouting logistics past Whitney
[originally emailed 10am 15June2013 from my N1 phone, goofey autospellcheckwordswaps corrected]
So a lot of spinning wheels these last few days.
I made it through Olancha Pass back to my car by 10am of I guess the third day after leaving Kennedy Meadows, so just one full day of hiking in fine cooler weather than the hot days preceding.
Drove to Lone Pine hostel to shower, then tried downloading my tracklog from that new Holox M1000C GPS logger that gave me grief before, using my klunky old laptop with broken screen, (which I have to hook up to a small external monitor to use...) only to find out that all these days from Walker Pass on, the device has been blinking happily but not logging anything: I had changed the settings to log every two meters and stop when storage was full, which was an improvement over my initial default settings of one Hz frequency and overwrite old data when full. I guess I assumed it would somehow let me know when it was full by stopping its happy blinking or something. Anyhow, my big mistake was to not explicitly clear the log from it's memory after I had downloaded last time. This is a big setback! Now I have no location info for over a week's worth of hiking!
Bummed, I decided too go home. I thought I could make it to my storage unit to fetch my real laptop before it closed at 7:30 that evening. I called Mike in Santa Rosa to confirmed I could overnight there (paying him $30 for two nights.)
Except I then decided to stop at the Manzanar historical site just north of Lone Pine and spent over an hr there. So I didn't get to Santa Rosa til 9:30pm.
Next day I fetched my laptop and backed up my picts - completely filling my 4TB drive - 2.5 yrs of picts. I'll have to buy yet another drive next time I'm back.
Then I tried printing out maps (from Halfmile's PCT trail maps that most all hikers are using.) I had bought a new print cartridge and ream of paper for Mikes printer earlier for this purpose, but never got around to printing them out. Now I found it would take forever to print even a few pages (it would print one half inch strip of map every few minutes. After trying to troubleshoot the problem all day I just went to Kinko's and printed them out in a few minutes in exchange for 60cents per pg.
Managed to get myself sorted out by late afternoon two days ago now, drove till about midnight overnighting in my car in a turnout somewhere on hwy 89, enjoyed the early morning drive over Monitor Pass, got stopped by a CHP for a burnt out headlamp, but still made it to Bishop just as Galen Rowell's Mountain Light photo gallery opened. Spent an hr there, then to a sporting goods store to buy my bear canister. (Oh, about the other canister, that I had ordered back in Agua Dulce to arrive "too late" at Kennedy Meadows, that I was trying to get the company to redirect to Lone Pine? Well, we ended up cancelling that order. Simpler, less expensive.)
So, I then drove up to Onion Valley (above Independence, CA) which is where I plan to exit the trail via Kearsarge Pass after hiking the section that passes by Mt Whitney (which I do plan to climb.) I left my bicycle with the campground host there, and overnighted there.
This morning I drove to Lone Pine to do some errands (including buying a new headlamp - forgot to do that in Bishop while I was passing through there yesterday, now will need to remember next time I'm in Bishop to show the CHP there that it's fixed.)
So, now I plan to drive up to Horseshoe Meadow, the trailhead to Cottonwood Pass, which is just south of Mt Whitney. Horseshow Meadow is going to be a resupply point for me, since I will be starting my hike at Olancha Pass where I left the trail a few days ago. I plan to leave food for myself in one of the many bear boxes in the parking lots at the trailheads there.
I may also decide to take an overnight hike there, from the TrailPass trlhead along a section of PCT and back out via the Cottonwood trlhead. This way I can skip that section doing my resupply via TrailPass and going on via Cottonwood Trl.
That all assumes. I won't have to charge my camera batteries. To do that I'll have to hitch to Lone Pine & probably overnight at the hostel here.
So after setting up my resupply etc. at Cottonwood, I'll drive back to Olancha Pass where I'll leave my car and resume my hike. I'll probably start hiking late afternoon when that slope will be shaded, overnight midway up to the PCT - 3500ft climb I think. Should be at my resupply pt in 2 or 3 more days, then will allow about 5 or 6 days for the Mt Whitney segment.
Then to unwind: bicycle down to catch the bus along 395 to just past Olancha, walk the 4 miles along Sage Flats Rd back to my car at the Olancha Pass Trailhead, then retrieve stuff left at the other two trailheads.
Then process picts etc before going on.
So a lot of spinning wheels these last few days.
I made it through Olancha Pass back to my car by 10am of I guess the third day after leaving Kennedy Meadows, so just one full day of hiking in fine cooler weather than the hot days preceding.
Drove to Lone Pine hostel to shower, then tried downloading my tracklog from that new Holox M1000C GPS logger that gave me grief before, using my klunky old laptop with broken screen, (which I have to hook up to a small external monitor to use...) only to find out that all these days from Walker Pass on, the device has been blinking happily but not logging anything: I had changed the settings to log every two meters and stop when storage was full, which was an improvement over my initial default settings of one Hz frequency and overwrite old data when full. I guess I assumed it would somehow let me know when it was full by stopping its happy blinking or something. Anyhow, my big mistake was to not explicitly clear the log from it's memory after I had downloaded last time. This is a big setback! Now I have no location info for over a week's worth of hiking!
Bummed, I decided too go home. I thought I could make it to my storage unit to fetch my real laptop before it closed at 7:30 that evening. I called Mike in Santa Rosa to confirmed I could overnight there (paying him $30 for two nights.)
Except I then decided to stop at the Manzanar historical site just north of Lone Pine and spent over an hr there. So I didn't get to Santa Rosa til 9:30pm.
Next day I fetched my laptop and backed up my picts - completely filling my 4TB drive - 2.5 yrs of picts. I'll have to buy yet another drive next time I'm back.
Then I tried printing out maps (from Halfmile's PCT trail maps that most all hikers are using.) I had bought a new print cartridge and ream of paper for Mikes printer earlier for this purpose, but never got around to printing them out. Now I found it would take forever to print even a few pages (it would print one half inch strip of map every few minutes. After trying to troubleshoot the problem all day I just went to Kinko's and printed them out in a few minutes in exchange for 60cents per pg.
Managed to get myself sorted out by late afternoon two days ago now, drove till about midnight overnighting in my car in a turnout somewhere on hwy 89, enjoyed the early morning drive over Monitor Pass, got stopped by a CHP for a burnt out headlamp, but still made it to Bishop just as Galen Rowell's Mountain Light photo gallery opened. Spent an hr there, then to a sporting goods store to buy my bear canister. (Oh, about the other canister, that I had ordered back in Agua Dulce to arrive "too late" at Kennedy Meadows, that I was trying to get the company to redirect to Lone Pine? Well, we ended up cancelling that order. Simpler, less expensive.)
So, I then drove up to Onion Valley (above Independence, CA) which is where I plan to exit the trail via Kearsarge Pass after hiking the section that passes by Mt Whitney (which I do plan to climb.) I left my bicycle with the campground host there, and overnighted there.
This morning I drove to Lone Pine to do some errands (including buying a new headlamp - forgot to do that in Bishop while I was passing through there yesterday, now will need to remember next time I'm in Bishop to show the CHP there that it's fixed.)
So, now I plan to drive up to Horseshoe Meadow, the trailhead to Cottonwood Pass, which is just south of Mt Whitney. Horseshow Meadow is going to be a resupply point for me, since I will be starting my hike at Olancha Pass where I left the trail a few days ago. I plan to leave food for myself in one of the many bear boxes in the parking lots at the trailheads there.
I may also decide to take an overnight hike there, from the TrailPass trlhead along a section of PCT and back out via the Cottonwood trlhead. This way I can skip that section doing my resupply via TrailPass and going on via Cottonwood Trl.
That all assumes. I won't have to charge my camera batteries. To do that I'll have to hitch to Lone Pine & probably overnight at the hostel here.
So after setting up my resupply etc. at Cottonwood, I'll drive back to Olancha Pass where I'll leave my car and resume my hike. I'll probably start hiking late afternoon when that slope will be shaded, overnight midway up to the PCT - 3500ft climb I think. Should be at my resupply pt in 2 or 3 more days, then will allow about 5 or 6 days for the Mt Whitney segment.
Then to unwind: bicycle down to catch the bus along 395 to just past Olancha, walk the 4 miles along Sage Flats Rd back to my car at the Olancha Pass Trailhead, then retrieve stuff left at the other two trailheads.
Then process picts etc before going on.
Sunday, June 9, 2013
PCT: leaving KM for Olancha
3PM 6/9/2013
OK, done hanging around here - some clothes washed, enough food for next few days, weather promises to cool off next few days. Should be able to give another update after I've made it across Olancha Pass back to my car probably three days from now.
OK, done hanging around here - some clothes washed, enough food for next few days, weather promises to cool off next few days. Should be able to give another update after I've made it across Olancha Pass back to my car probably three days from now.
Saturday, June 8, 2013
PCT: Walker Pass to Kennedy Meadows done
1PM 6/8/2013
I've added a few more people to this email list (which has been quite small and will probably remain so because I end up having to retype all the names in half the time when I'm using my Android phone on which I haven't figured out how to "reply to" a bcc list or view the bcc list of a msg I've sent - works on windows, just not on my Android with the basic gmail app... (If anyone knows "the secret" ...I promise not to tell anyone else... ;-) (Guess I could workaround and send me a msg with "the list" in the msg sent just to me... later when I have the time...) Anyway, also hope to eventually catch up the newbys with my older msgs ... but not today...)
I got to Kennedy Meadows (here: http://hikethepct-km.com/ ) this morning at 9, after a six day hike from Walker Pass, after Ben dropped me off there Monday evening after I caught up with him and the other CNPSers at the conference last weekend in Big Pine, after I raced to drive there after visiting Rebecca & family at her new home in Davis after spending a few days in Santa Rosa to see Sandy off on her trip to Alaska and fetch my mail (which included my PCT permit for the upcoming leg of my hike) and fetch my big laptop to do the stuff I was having trouble doing "on the road"..., after having raced there from Inyokern where, in my last msg, I was trying to decide whether to go to Santa Rosa or check out whether my Bear Canister had arrived at Kennedy Meadows yet and/or check out some of the other east sierra trailheads to the PCT before catching up with the CNPSers at the Big Pine conference.
Whew! Did I ever mention that I like long sentences and used to like the HP calculators that used "Reverse-Polish" algebraic notation?
Anyway, to unwind some of that...
Yeah, so I was in Inyokern worried I might miss the "next" bus after having missed the 8am bus which I had made sure I was there in time to catch by bicycling from Inyokern from Walker Pass by moonlight the night before and getting up at 5am to walk 20 minutes to the - oops - wrong busstop for a different bus company! So, I did manage to catch the other company's bus at 11am, get to Mojave with an hr layover (enough time to have a Carl's Jr burger) before catching the bus towards Bakersfield that dropped me off at the Tehachapi Pass trailhead on HWy 58 around 3pm, enough time to make it to the top of the first ridge where I camped with a nice view of windmills going full bore on the ridge to the west, because it happened to be still blowing fiercely from the ongoing strong wind event (60+mph winds) which continued for the duration of my hike back to my car at Walker Pass, from where I drove back to Inyokern to fetch my bike and plan my next steps.
(If I seem to be focused on logistics here, yeah, guess so - I think details of the hike itself will have to wait till I get around to my picts...)
So, my next steps involved a timing issue, wanting to be in several places at once: SRosa to fetch mail, Big Pine to camp out with a few other CNPSers for the conference, and check out some of the potential next places I could leave my car and via bicycle and/or bus or hitch or road-walk, make it back to my starting trailhead. Or visa versa. Also, I was expecting to change my mode of travel to a more traditional PCT hiker mode, mailing myself re-supplies at the handfull of designated places. Checking my email around 6pm in Inyokern I saw that Sandy was "leaving for Alaska tomorrow" and so I just figured I would act now and decide later, and drove all night to arrive in SRosa at 4am the next morning. Unable to sleep I checked my email, got some breakfast, rechecked my email, and fetched my laptop etc at my storage, then returned to Sandy's place (actually Bud's place...) where I learned she had gone to take Mike to the Dr's and would then meet with Bud and the Parkinson's group at Sonoma Bagels. So I chased them down there, finally settling down for the rest of the day copying all 4x64gb+3x6gb+16gb of the CF cards I'd filled, and my GPS track logs from 3 different devices, and troubleshooting the tech problems that made my track logs incomplete. Also visited Tom at the EC and learned people had been asking about the books & maps & otehr stuff I'd left there, so I took some old pc's that others had "donated", to the Recycling Ctr, returned some of my "computer books" to my storage, and emailed the board explaining why I thought the CNPS books should remain there, and "donated" some money for my continued access and to leave my desktop cptr which I had available to share, there. Also returned my "new" boots to REI. (I've been hiking the Teva sandals which seem to be "good for my feet" after nearly 200miles now.)
Then I decided to give Rebecca a call, and ended up overnighting at her new place in Davis "on my way back to the trail", walked to the nearby park with little Kaylee the next morning, went for a Subways for lunch, then off via hwy 50 & 89 to 395 to try to catch up with the CNPS folk in Big Pine, arriving there just as dinner was served (after having "dinner" at various McDonald's to use internet to try to contact some of them - another story of technical issues: missing phone#s in my contact list, probably because some were only on my AT&T SIM card when I currently was using my TMobile SIM card - and neither of these SIM's lists transferred to my Google contact list that I mostly depend on.)
Learned at the conference in Big Pine that Ben's car had radiator problems that would be repaired Monday, and I asked him whether I could get a ride back to Walker Pass thereafter, after figuring out to-where exactly I would be hiking, which I spent all of Sunday investigating, driving all the way down to Kennedy Meadows cheecking out all the potential trailheads on the way down. In kennedy Meadows I leqarned that my bear canister had not yet arrived (my screwup - I stated I'd be there later than I would actually be...) so on the way back to Big Pine I checked about possibly renting a canister until it arrived, and decided to hike only to Olancha Pass which was before the area that a canister was required. Olancha Pass is only about 25 trail miles from Kennedy Meadows (plus the spur-trail over the pass to the road.)
So, at 3pm Monday, Ben's car was done, we caravanned to the Olancha Pass trailhead where I left my car (left my bike in the car this time...) he drove me with my pack to Walker Pass where I spent the night while I think he drove all night back to the bay area like I had done (though I lent him some maps of the area so maybe he did some "exploring" & overnighted on the way...?)
Hiking from Walker Pass was in pleasantly warm weather in pleasantly wooded terrain for the most part for the first few days, then got really hot these last two days in burned terrain. Yesterday I quit, exhaused, about 5pm at the S Fork Kern River even after taking hr-long breaks frequently during mid-day - otherwise I would have been here yesterday evening. I did get washed up in the river etc and asleep before dark.
Will probably leave KM Sunday late-afternoon or early Monday and should be back at my car in two more days. (Hope to update this once mere before I leave.
I've added a few more people to this email list (which has been quite small and will probably remain so because I end up having to retype all the names in half the time when I'm using my Android phone on which I haven't figured out how to "reply to" a bcc list or view the bcc list of a msg I've sent - works on windows, just not on my Android with the basic gmail app... (If anyone knows "the secret" ...I promise not to tell anyone else... ;-) (Guess I could workaround and send me a msg with "the list" in the msg sent just to me... later when I have the time...) Anyway, also hope to eventually catch up the newbys with my older msgs ... but not today...)
I got to Kennedy Meadows (here: http://hikethepct-km.com/ ) this morning at 9, after a six day hike from Walker Pass, after Ben dropped me off there Monday evening after I caught up with him and the other CNPSers at the conference last weekend in Big Pine, after I raced to drive there after visiting Rebecca & family at her new home in Davis after spending a few days in Santa Rosa to see Sandy off on her trip to Alaska and fetch my mail (which included my PCT permit for the upcoming leg of my hike) and fetch my big laptop to do the stuff I was having trouble doing "on the road"..., after having raced there from Inyokern where, in my last msg, I was trying to decide whether to go to Santa Rosa or check out whether my Bear Canister had arrived at Kennedy Meadows yet and/or check out some of the other east sierra trailheads to the PCT before catching up with the CNPSers at the Big Pine conference.
Whew! Did I ever mention that I like long sentences and used to like the HP calculators that used "Reverse-Polish" algebraic notation?
Anyway, to unwind some of that...
Yeah, so I was in Inyokern worried I might miss the "next" bus after having missed the 8am bus which I had made sure I was there in time to catch by bicycling from Inyokern from Walker Pass by moonlight the night before and getting up at 5am to walk 20 minutes to the - oops - wrong busstop for a different bus company! So, I did manage to catch the other company's bus at 11am, get to Mojave with an hr layover (enough time to have a Carl's Jr burger) before catching the bus towards Bakersfield that dropped me off at the Tehachapi Pass trailhead on HWy 58 around 3pm, enough time to make it to the top of the first ridge where I camped with a nice view of windmills going full bore on the ridge to the west, because it happened to be still blowing fiercely from the ongoing strong wind event (60+mph winds) which continued for the duration of my hike back to my car at Walker Pass, from where I drove back to Inyokern to fetch my bike and plan my next steps.
(If I seem to be focused on logistics here, yeah, guess so - I think details of the hike itself will have to wait till I get around to my picts...)
So, my next steps involved a timing issue, wanting to be in several places at once: SRosa to fetch mail, Big Pine to camp out with a few other CNPSers for the conference, and check out some of the potential next places I could leave my car and via bicycle and/or bus or hitch or road-walk, make it back to my starting trailhead. Or visa versa. Also, I was expecting to change my mode of travel to a more traditional PCT hiker mode, mailing myself re-supplies at the handfull of designated places. Checking my email around 6pm in Inyokern I saw that Sandy was "leaving for Alaska tomorrow" and so I just figured I would act now and decide later, and drove all night to arrive in SRosa at 4am the next morning. Unable to sleep I checked my email, got some breakfast, rechecked my email, and fetched my laptop etc at my storage, then returned to Sandy's place (actually Bud's place...) where I learned she had gone to take Mike to the Dr's and would then meet with Bud and the Parkinson's group at Sonoma Bagels. So I chased them down there, finally settling down for the rest of the day copying all 4x64gb+3x6gb+16gb of the CF cards I'd filled, and my GPS track logs from 3 different devices, and troubleshooting the tech problems that made my track logs incomplete. Also visited Tom at the EC and learned people had been asking about the books & maps & otehr stuff I'd left there, so I took some old pc's that others had "donated", to the Recycling Ctr, returned some of my "computer books" to my storage, and emailed the board explaining why I thought the CNPS books should remain there, and "donated" some money for my continued access and to leave my desktop cptr which I had available to share, there. Also returned my "new" boots to REI. (I've been hiking the Teva sandals which seem to be "good for my feet" after nearly 200miles now.)
Then I decided to give Rebecca a call, and ended up overnighting at her new place in Davis "on my way back to the trail", walked to the nearby park with little Kaylee the next morning, went for a Subways for lunch, then off via hwy 50 & 89 to 395 to try to catch up with the CNPS folk in Big Pine, arriving there just as dinner was served (after having "dinner" at various McDonald's to use internet to try to contact some of them - another story of technical issues: missing phone#s in my contact list, probably because some were only on my AT&T SIM card when I currently was using my TMobile SIM card - and neither of these SIM's lists transferred to my Google contact list that I mostly depend on.)
Learned at the conference in Big Pine that Ben's car had radiator problems that would be repaired Monday, and I asked him whether I could get a ride back to Walker Pass thereafter, after figuring out to-where exactly I would be hiking, which I spent all of Sunday investigating, driving all the way down to Kennedy Meadows cheecking out all the potential trailheads on the way down. In kennedy Meadows I leqarned that my bear canister had not yet arrived (my screwup - I stated I'd be there later than I would actually be...) so on the way back to Big Pine I checked about possibly renting a canister until it arrived, and decided to hike only to Olancha Pass which was before the area that a canister was required. Olancha Pass is only about 25 trail miles from Kennedy Meadows (plus the spur-trail over the pass to the road.)
So, at 3pm Monday, Ben's car was done, we caravanned to the Olancha Pass trailhead where I left my car (left my bike in the car this time...) he drove me with my pack to Walker Pass where I spent the night while I think he drove all night back to the bay area like I had done (though I lent him some maps of the area so maybe he did some "exploring" & overnighted on the way...?)
Hiking from Walker Pass was in pleasantly warm weather in pleasantly wooded terrain for the most part for the first few days, then got really hot these last two days in burned terrain. Yesterday I quit, exhaused, about 5pm at the S Fork Kern River even after taking hr-long breaks frequently during mid-day - otherwise I would have been here yesterday evening. I did get washed up in the river etc and asleep before dark.
Will probably leave KM Sunday late-afternoon or early Monday and should be back at my car in two more days. (Hope to update this once mere before I leave.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)