Rebecca M. Douglass, Author

When last seen, we had made our way into the Kaweah Basin , though not by too far, and camped near the upper edge of the trees. Let us resume our journey. Day 5 Just like all the mornings: perfect. By this stage of the trip we were in a pretty regular routine of crashing between 9:30 and 10 (whenever we could no longer focus on our books), and getting up about 5:30, in time for sunrise. This was a morning to hurry back to our reflecting pond for more photos in the first magical morning light. There weren't tons of wildflowers, but I loved the ones we had. Once we were done with the morning light and our breakfast, we broke camp for our shortest pack-hauling day of the trip. It probably wasn't much over a mile up to the lakes below those snowfields, and a pretty, easy walk to get there.  Glaciers clearly shaped the basin at some point. The granite was smoothed and polished, making a great surface for us to do the Pilates exercises we did morning and night. We had more plans, but

Part II: Shepherd Pass to the mid-Kaweah Basin Last week, I shared the beginning of our 9-day backpacking trip into the Kaweah Basin in Sequoia NP. This week, I'll take us into the middle of the trip, and the middle of the basin. Give me a couple more weeks to get through the trip, because the scenery was amazing, and it's hard to pick just a few photos to share here. Day 2 We left off in the middle of the second day of the trip, as we entered the National Park at 12,000' Shepherd Pass. Descending from the pass. It's a broad, very gently sloping valley, in sharp contrast to the east side of the pass. Still dropping from the pass. We have to descend to the confluence of the deep valleys in the center of the photo, then climb up the valley to the right, and up to the basin below the dark peaks. We found more than one old cabin, probably reminders that before the area was a National Park, miners and sheep herders wandered everywhere. This cabin had a new door with new hing

I'm finally ready to start my trip report on our recent backpacking extravaganza, 9 days into the Kaweah Basin in Sequoia National Park. The trip really began back in 2015, when my husband, Eldest Son, and I backpacked out of Mineral King in Sequoia NP. Midway down that trip report is a picture of the Kaweah Peaks, one jagged and intriguing crest. I'm not sure how we got from "those are impressive peaks" to "I hear there's an amazing basin on the other side of those peaks," but we did, and found a couple of on-line accounts of accessing the (trail-less) basin. Thus was a plan begun, but until this summer we didn't have the two-week time block we needed to acclimatize and tackle what we would want to do as a 9-10 day trip. Fast-forward to July, 2018. My husband retired, I quit work, and we had the time to train and to do the trip right. I shared some of our acclimatization activities here . Now we had 10 days food, and a plan to enter the Sierra via

Not your typical family portrait. My guest post last week at CoachDaddy has inspired me to do some more photo posts from trips long gone by. This one is from 2009, and was the first time we took our boys on a significant piece of off-trail hiking. They were 10 and 11. The route was challenging, starting with a truly nasty climb from the trailhead to the first camp, and we splurged on a packer to haul our stuff that far (this is also a good way to allow for some heavy food the first night!).  The route was from Pine Creek (near Bishop, CA), over French Creek Pass, then off trail to Miriam Lake, and farther off trail to the Bear Lakes and Italy Pass, where we picked up the trail again back down Pine Creek Canyon. The initial climb is long, hot, and not so pretty, as you climb above the mining operations in the bottom of the canyon. I was glad to have only a daypack, enabling me to make a faster climb, though the higher we got the better the views. By lunch time we had climbed out of the