Day 41 – Tuesday, July 4

PCT Mile 702.2 Kennedy Meadows to PCT Mile 712.7

Day Total: 10.4 Miles

Packing up takes a lot longer with all of these new additions to our packs.

It was like Tetris trying to fit six days of food into the bear canister, fitting the bear canister into Stephen's pack, and then fitting some of the things Stephen usually carries into my pack. All very frustrating.

We ended up eating breakfast at the general store and spending all day on the porch waiting for it to cool down. Turns out we're not quite in the mountains yet. Soon. 

Hanging out on the porch we met more hikers and talked about the high snow levels in the mountains, our excitement about hiking Mount Whitney, where we plan to resupply through this section, and our collective disdain for the desert. 

I found (most of) a PCT guidebook in the hiker box that I hadn't seen before. (Side note: many places in trail towns, like the general store, have boxes where hikers can leave food and gear that they don't want anymore and others can pick through.)

Stephen and I had been disappointed by the lack of a good guidebook. Each one we've seen has been lacking something. This one didn't have data like elevation profiles or mileages between things, but it did have more geological, ecological, and historical info than any we had seen. I read some of it on the porch, and decided I liked having the information so much that I ripped out the desert section and the index and added it to my pack.

Who knows if I'll still want it after carrying it 100 miles? This paragraph about the High Sierra gave me chills:

"It is 200 miles as the hiker walks from Kennedy Meadows (at the southern end of the High Sierra) to Reds Meadow. In that 200 miles, you will not see a single road. You will not pass under an electric wire, nor cross a fence, not see a telephone line, a store, or a vehicle. Not even your cell phone will work. This is Wilderness, pure and simple, capital-W Wilderness, the biggest in the 48 contiguous states, and the longest roadless section on any of the nation's long-distance hiking trails. It is impossible to describe the High Sierra without resorting to superlatives. ... It is, quite simply, one of the grandest mountain spectacles to be found anywhere in the world." (The Pacific Crest Trail: A Hiker's Companion, Berger & Smith)

We finally started hiking a little before 5 p.m. There was a lot of smoke in the air all afternoon – you can see it in the photos.

We followed the South Fork of the Kern River for a while and hiked through a beautiful forest of big, old trees. We picked out a campsite, but after reading a comment on our PCT app that someone had a bear in their camp last week, we decided to hike on.

We hiked another hour or so into the dark. We ended up seeing a tent in the distance and found a couple of hikers we had met at the general store earlier, Moe and Toe. We camped near them, just under 8,000 feet.