In the high Sierra backyard

I haven't been keeping count, but this might be about the 20th trip to the back country of the high Sierras.  We started hiking portions of the Pacific Crest Trail in northern California in 1988 and have rarely missed a year since then.  We come for the grandeur of the scenery and lately to prove to ourselves that we are still not to old to do this.  But this year, the 38 miles in 5 days was rugged with lots of up hill and down.  12 miles of hiking on day 4 gave me very sore feet.  The pack is always too heavy, and the hills seem to get steeper each year, but the views are definitely worth it.  A few of my favorite scenes of mountain-, meadow-, and water scapes.

Tuolomne River with Cathedral peaks in the background

Waterfall on the Tuolomne River



Our campsite on what we thought was Miller Lake (but wasn't).

With threats of storms to come in this early fall weather, the cloud formations produced some dramatic photos.

Life is challenging at 9000 feet in the high Sierra, but plants and animals somehow manage to tough it out.  I was struck by the ability of these pines to gain a foothold in small cracks in the granite slabs and survive not only burial in the deep winter snow, flooding in the melting spring run-off, but then drought during the dry summers.



We saw more mule deer on this trip than I have ever seen before on a hike.  It could have been because they were moving down from higher altitudes, or it could have been that there were fewer hikers around scaring them off (we saw no humans for more than 48 hours!).  The meadows were drying out, but the does still had what appeared to be young fawns, probably sapping their energy with their demands for milk.  You can see the ribs on the doe, and the fawn didn't appear all that healthy, defecating twice within a few minutes but not eating anything.  It reminded me of a calf with "scours".



Every canyon lures us onward, but sometimes you're just too tired to go on.  Next time.