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Sunday, August 15, 2010

South Lake To North Lake Trip Report Day 1

We planned a 60.5 mile backpacking trip to the Sierras to travel along the John Muir Trail, go over 3 mountain passes and descend into two major canyons in the Sierras. Here is my favorite picture from day 1 of the beautiful scenery we experienced!

Cameron and I slept in our car at the trailhead on Saturday night. You are not allowed to do this but it didn't stop us. We wanted to sleep up at elevation and we did not have a permit to hike in and we were too late anyways. The sleep inside the escape was not good. I couldn't wait for morning to come. When we saw the first light we were ready.


We ate excellent blue berry muffins from Vons and poured our bottled water from our car into our water bottles and we were ready to go. We were the first ones on the trail that morning!
This is South Lake where the trail starts.
Here is the first meadow we came to that morning.

I highly recommend the South Lake Trailhead from Bishop as an excellent day hike to some beautiful lakes. In all the times I have been there I never hiked in but I will be taking the kids back to fully explore the trails. The trail is not too steep and the scenery is amazing!
There are the lakes looking down on them!

I was pretty impressed because we managed to stay in front of the crowd except for two trail runners who did not have backpacks. We both were feeling good and enjoyed the hike. It was nice to have packed lightly as our backpacks felt pretty good.

When we started up the actual pass area we came to an area that warned of falling rocks. We were told to hurry through this area so we did.
The top of the pass is all just rock. There is nothing else anywhere around. It is like this for all passes.
We had to hike on a few snow field patches. Ali does not believe this is really snow.
Are you convinced?
We got to the top in a good time as the first backpackers up there from South Lake! I felt pretty good! Here is a picture going in to Dusy Basin.
We finally came across a nice meadow with good water to filter. The meadow was filled with wildflowers! It was a beautiful site! I liked looking at the Palisades and Cameron was in complete awe of it all!

We continued hiking down to the bottom of Dusy Basin. The hike was pretty easy going for down hill. We were enjoying the views and soon came to the lake furthest down in Dusy Basin. We did not like the camping options so we hiked all the way to the drop off. We crossed the creek and found a nice shady place for our tent.

We took a nice nap and enjoyed the cool mountain air. Cameron woke up with a high altitude headache and quickly took an excederin. He quickly learned that we should not take medicine on an empty stomach and ended up being sick for a couple hours. Later when he was feeling better he went fishing for awhile and I read.
It was a nice relaxing way to end a backpacking day!

This is a picture looking down at Le Conte Canyon where we were headed the next day

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