Day 72- June 30th

This morning I had cereal and milk!!! Not exciting? Try eating a protein bar for breakfast every morning for a few months and then have cereal and milk! I had bought the family size bag of frosted mini wheats at the store in Lone Pine and Claire and I finally decided to get some dehydrated milk. So good!

Yummy!!

We left our nice little camping spot by 8am, and headed up towards Glen Pass. We had only camped 2 miles away last night. I read in Yogi's book that Glen Pass is the iciest and scariest pass of them all! Also, my paper map has it printed next to its elevation that it particularly holds snow on its North facing side for a long time which can be dangerous.

The way up was beautiful! We came across a few lakes, some of them still half frozen! They were so blue it was unreal! Neither of us had seen a lake so blue.

We went straight up over many switchbacks, the two miles taking a grueling 2 1/2 hours. When we finally got near the top and turned around, the view was great.

As we popped over the actual pass that we saw in front of us wasn't too bad either!

See that line in the snow in the right of the picture? The one that looks horizontal? That was our trail down and it was DEFINITELY not flat!

There were a few sketchy spots that we had to just make our own path safely down. There were a few glissade paths downs very steep slope up top, but we decided to try our first glissade a little lower on the trail. Glissading is when you slide on your but down the snow instead of "postholing" down (stepping in others' deep footprints).

And glissade we did!!

The first run through we went down in our shirts and got ice burn on our bottoms. The second time we opted for our rain pants and they made much better sliding devices than our bare skin!

We descended down through Rae Lakes. The lakes are absolutely stunning with high snowy peaks looming behind them. There were 3 main lakes with many other smaller ones speckled about. We met a hiker named Pathfinder who was in the middle of catching some dinner. 

He let this one go because it was so small, but I'm sure he ended up eating some good fish tonight. I told him his name should be "Fishfinder" instead of Pathfinder.

There was just scene after gorgeous scene (including the one at the top of this post) as we descended way down along the lakes and eventually over a really cool suspension bridge.

We were at the bottom of the descent, but it was only 5:45pm, so we decided to keep on a bit longer and chip off a little bit of tomorrow's climb is to Pinchot Pass. Soon after we crossed the bridge we hit a great milestone!

Man, these last 100 miles have taken sooooo long! It was really rough. Both of us getting the stomach flu at separate times, having to take 3 zeros on trail and a zero in Lone Pine after the emergency Whitney Portal descent... Whew!  The next 100 miles will fly by I'm sure! Even though everyone's pace slows in the Sierra, we feel way stronger than before!

We climbed up a ridge alongside a river which continually have us new waterfalls to look at. The west side of the trail had all sorts of seasonal streams coming down from the snowmelt, and the creeks and streams were very swollen and rapid!

Nothing like getting your feet wet in freezing cold water in the last two hours of daylight. Wet shoes in the morning!

Tomorrow we'll climb over 3,000 feet up to Pinchot Pass in just 5.66 miles!! Our packs are still very heavy since we took 9 days of food out of Lone Pine. Today we did 12.5 miles today. Straight up Glen Pass and then down down down over 9 miles. It's been a loooong day! 

-Thanks for reading!