I hadn’t looked at the elevation for the day until I woke up this morning. To my surprise, there was only 1500 feet of elevation in the first 20 miles. This looked like the easiest day of the whole trail. There was something waiting at the end of those 20 miles though…
The morning was a gorgeous walk out of Lyell Canyon into Tuolomne Meadows. This was our first road crossing in awhile and we saw lots of people getting ready to go hiking. I kinda expected more, considering it’s 4th of July weekend. I guess the snow scares everyone.
I wasn’t sure how Yosemite could be any different or more impressive than the parts of the Sierra I’ve seen so far, but it delivered. The domed granite mountains and the huge green valleys were really amazing. It was totally different than what I’ve been seeing.
We hiked along the Lyell Fork which comes together with the Dana Fork to create the Tuolumne river. It was raging today, creating one of the most impressive waterfalls I’ve ever seen.
A sign of things to come perhaps?
The first 20 miles went by fairly uneventfully. We passed by day hikers, JMT hikers, and informational signs. Eventually we reached McCabe Creek. It looked super strong at the PCT crossing, so we hiked upstream to find a better spot. We did, an hour later. After crossing that we came to Return Creek just 1/10th of a mile later. It didn’t look too bad and I crossed. My partner took a quick swim but was otherwise fine.
We had one more goal for the day, Spiller Creek, just one mile later. Just above the PCT crossing, the creek was fairly flat and about waist deep. Not great, but doable. The problem was the floor of the creek. It was solid, slippery rock. A few steps out and you’d start to slide. We hiked upstream to a bend in river with a rocky bottom. I started crossing and made it about 3/4 of the way. No turning back. At that point it got quite a bit deeper and I pretty much had to swim for it. The bend made it easy to get to the other side and we picked a spot with a good long runout so I’d have plenty of time. It wasn’t the prettiest way across, but I made it safely.
My hiking partner did not want to do that, so he’s waiting until morning when the creek is hopefully lower. I’m camped on one side, he’s camped on the other. This is only my second time camping alone on the whole trip.
I made a campfire to dry out my clothes and I sat in my underwear cooking dinner. It’s the first campfire I’ve actually started the whole trail. I even managed to dry my socks, a rare luxury these past few weeks. As I was finishing dinner I had a visitor. A deer wandered into camp and didn’t seem to care that I was there.
I peed on that tree and the deer sat there munching on it for almost an hour.