Today started off with some (hopefully) good karma. I found some sunglasses on the trail and held on to them. A few hours later, two girls passed by and I asked if they lost their sunglasses. She asked if they were Polaroids and I said yes, so she got her sunglasses back.
After that we began to climb. We had camped at about 9,500 feet and were going to climb up over 11,000 today. What should have been a normal climb was made much harder by the elevation. We have Whitney in two days. I hope we can acclimate.
Water has been plentiful so far with lots of streams and even some larger creeks. Above 10,000 feet there are still large snow patches, creating streams all over. With all that water comes mosquitoes, but today we were lucky enough to not have too many at our break spots.
Just before cottonwood pass, the trail became almost completely covered in snow. Not that there was snow everywhere, but it was impossible to tell where the trail was. Thankfully there’s an app that simply points you in the right direction.
We made our way down into a large snowless meadow and then walked straight up it. We saw a few people trying to follow the actual PCT and they were having a pretty hard time on some steepish snow slopes.
Our goal for the day was Chicken Spring Lake, the first alpine lake of the PCT. After 23 hard miles, we made it to the lake. What do you do when you get to an alpine lake on a hot summer day? You jump in of course!
Unfortunately for me, the lake was still mostly frozen over, so jumping in was quite a shock to the system. Very refreshing though. After my quick dip, we made camp and cooked dinner. Thankfully the mosquitoes weren’t quite as bad up at 11,000 feet where we’re camped. I’ve never slept so high. 😉
I finally have a good enough view from my tent to post one of those feet in the tent pictures.
Tomorrow we’ll be setting ourselves up for summiting Whitney. It’s just 15 miles to the junction with the Mt. Whitney trail and then we’ll go up as far as we can so we can summit early in the morning.