As the sun was rising, we packed up our tents and left Kennedy Meadows. This is what we’ve been waiting for the whole hike. One guy we met the day before wanted to hike with us, but he said he might not get up early enough and if he didn’t we should hike without him. After filling our water and sending some last minute text messages, he was nowhere to be found. So we hit the trail.
The terrain slowly changed from desert to forest, but there were still reminders, like cactus all over. Finally we passed a sign welcoming us to the South Sierra Wilderness. We hiked on and on, up and up, eventually coming out to a huge green meadow. This definitely wasn’t the desert.
We saw lots of people we had met in Kennedy Meadows. Some had left the day before, others in the morning like us. Eventually we came to a bridge across the river that flowed through the meadow. It had hundreds of birds nesting under it. We watched them as we filtered water and ate some food, resting for our next big climb.
We continued hiking, making our way up to over 10,000 feet. There were patches of snow and some even covered the trail, making it hard to know where to go. In the next day or two, there will only be patches of ground showing, with snow everywhere else.
We could see huge mountains in the distance. Mountains we’ll be climbing. we tried to guess which one was Whitney, but we couldn’t tell.
We hiked down from 10,000 feet, hoping for a warmer night and made camp by a small stream. The mosquitoes here are out of control. I set up my tent as fast as possible and spent most of the evening cooking and sitting inside my tent.
We planned on 7 days to our next resupply but were able to do a lot more miles today than we planned on (we weren’t sure where the snow was) so hopefully we can make it back to civilization even sooner.