Leaving Mammoth I needed to burn days to keep on proper schedule for arriving at the SCA project so I decided that just going down to Reds Meadow for the day then keeping my plans of a layover at Iva Bell would allow for good rest.
Camping at Reds Meadow was nice as always and I saw a couple typical sights such as the Devil's Postpile and Rainbow Falls. Later at night I offered to share my camp with 4 hikers and they all offered me 5 dollars for the site so I stayed for free, then I found out later that two of them were friends with the two friends of mine that came for the first 10 days of the trip, small world!
Reaching
Fish Valley late due to spending a couple hours talking to a PCT hiker I hurry to scout out the hot tubs before I am wondering around in the dark trying to find them and took the hard way to the top hot tubs and realised I would not return to them on that night! For informations sake there is a trail that will take you up to the top ones if you find it!
I found 6 pools in this area,
3 top pools, here, here, and the last pool was a slight
cold pool located at the very bottom just behind the large camp that is just beyond the creek crossing.
Reaching
Purple Lake and the trail crew I was surprised how primitive working with SCA turned out to be, they had very little in the way of food for any meal of the day and one volunteer actually left due to the food because it was not enough protein for him but for me it still turned out to be allot of fun as I helped fell a tree which is something I had never done before even though it made me feel a bit bad since it turned out to be 294 years old! We then cut it up and built steps with it which took 4 of us 5 days of work.
Here, here, here and
here. After two days of beautiful travel to Vermillion Valley Resort I enjoyed two days there of good food and rest but I found myself ready to get back into the wild due to the crazy nature of the place.
Traveling Mono Creek and starting up the Grinnell Lake trail it was not long before I realised that this trail was never more then calling a cross country use trail an official trail as the thing goes straight up most of the time and is hard to follow at times. Reaching a meadow at the top of the canyon wall I lost the trail completely and this area had a strange feeling to it, a feeling of truly being remote or wild even though it was not really so. Continuing on cross country after about a mile I was able to pick up what you could hardly call a trail "clearly class 1" but it helped to navigate steeper sections before I lost it again at
more meadows. Pushing on it was easy to navigate cross country to Grinnell Lake and to my surprise there were two hikers camped here. I tried fishing and was catching them on every cast but they were mostly small.
The next morning I planned a route and began up the ridge to the East and other than some fine scree slopes it proved mostly easy, dropping down the other side I planned to go past Lower Hopkins Lake which turned into a mistake as I found myself down climbing cliffs with a full pack on, at one point I had to climb through the branches of a tree on the side of a cliff and then stretch my body all the way out while holding the very tip of the branch to reach the next ledge. I almost never feel any fear while doing anything in the mountains but in this case I did which says allot!
Reaching Pioneer Basin the last of my fuel ran out because VVR let me down since they were out of fuel and I had to dig through the hiker bin and take two almost empty cans and I only got two hot meals out of them so the next morning I tried to hydrate food with cold water and I learned for the first time that it does not work! First try was a Pasta Sides meal that was disgusting to say the least after waiting an hour and then a Hawk Vittles meal was the next failure so plan B showed itself, I would hike out to Rock Creek Resort and hope they had fuel...
I realise that most of this is probably boring as shit but at least it gives me a chance to write it down so I can direct people here if they want to know anything.
Another statistic is passes:
Hardest: Elizabeth Easiest: Cahoon Gap
Seavey
Cathedral
Red Peak
Merced
Fernandez
Post Peak
Vogelsang
Tuolumne
Silver
Mono
Morgan
Pine Creek
Muir
Mather
Pinchot
Glen
Kearsarge X2
Forester
Guyot
New Army
Guyot
Kaweah Gap
Elizabeth
Silliman
Cahoon Gap
