Rebecca M. Douglass, Author

That's right--I've finally come home and returned to editing photos, so I have another round of pictures from my September backpack trip in the John Muir Wilderness and Kings Canyon NP.   This post picks up with Day 4 of that hike. Days 1-2 are here , and Day 3 here . As we move into the heart of the Sierra, I have too many photos, so I'll just do one day at a time.   Random "on the trail" photo to start with something horizontal since otherwise Facebook will mess up the post.   Mornings are cold, even at a "mere" 9200'. It's always hard to get going, but we were pretty good at being on the trail by 8:45 or thereabouts. It always took a couple of hours to get us all through breakfast, foot care, and packing up, though part of that is time spent hoping for the sun to come and thaw us out!   Breakfast time. Once the sun was on us, it warmed up fast enough. High altitude and dry air means big temperature swings!     Morning sun.   An hour or so late...

Immediately following the trip into the Desolation Wilderness chronicled in my last 2 photo posts, I met up with friends Gretchen and Mark and we headed up the trail for 7 nights in the Sierra high country, on the North Lake to South Lake loop, an absolute classic of John Muir's Range of Light. Weather forecasts were iffy, to say the least, and our night-before spent at a campground at 9000' seemed to suggest a need to be prepared. High winds made it a restless night, and we responded by packing extra clothes, pretty much all of which did get used, though the weather didn't get as ugly as feared. Day 1  began with my daughter helping us set up our shuttle, since we'd be ending our hike a few miles from where we began it. We hit the trail for Paiute Pass about 9:40, hoping to make it over the pass. At 11,200' it was an ambitious goal for the first day, given that less than 48 hours earlier Gretchen and Mark had been at sea level. The hike started at about 9300', ...

I don't seem to be doing too well at blog posts just now--I don't have any books to review (I don't do a lot of thoughtful reading while hiking and traveling, and I've been sick and/or busy since getting home), so I guess I'm down to my weekly photo posts!  I'm making good progress through the pictures from my back-to-back trips into California's Sierra Nevada mountains, so we'll start today with the backpacking trip into the Desolation Wilderness.  I drove down to CA the last week of August, to collect my daughter and a friend for a 3-night backpack into the Desolation Wilderness (west of Lake Tahoe). This would be the friend's first backpacking trip. I'm referring to the girls as K and L, to preserve their privacy.  We started from the Twin Lakes TH at Wrights Lake a bit after noon, having waited out a rainstorm that actually ended as forecast. Inlet stream for Wrights Lake We meandered along the flats for a time, then climbed rather quickly to...