Day 43; Fri June 8 2007

(Stud) It got into the 20's last night and my homemade sleeping bag performed well. I slept warm on our bed of pine needles--and Dwight said he'd gotten his best sleep in a while.

It was still cold when we headed down the trail around 6:30. I decided since I added several clothing items at Kennedy Meadows I might as well use them--so down the trail I went in my long sleeve sun shirt topped with both my Marmot windshirt and Marmot rain jacket, running shorts topped with rain pants, fleece hat and gloves and a bandana covering my mouth and nose. The only clothing item I wasn't wearing was an extra pair of socks and my nylon pants. I'm trying to keep these clean so I can wear them at night and not dirty up my sleeping bag.

Today was our first full day in the high Sierra's. It took a while for the day to get warm enough to start pealing the extra layers--and it stayed clear and cool most of the day. We walked through "meadows" of sage brush and other prickly plants--I noticed that Dwight added a lot of new scatches to his legs. We climbed up a pass that took us to 10,000 ft, and wound our way back down through pine forest.

We had several neat wildlife encounters: at the bridge over the south fork of the Kern River we watched the swallows dart in and out from their mud nests under the bridge feeding their young. From the meadows several cows watched us as we seemed to be hanging out in their space. At cow creek, we scared a young black bear--he spotted us first and quickly scooted up hill. Not much farther down the creek we spotted a grouce with several chicks (?) milling around her. Later in the day Dwight spotted a marmot peeking up over some rocks at us--and then it wandered off as if disinterested.

The only other hiker we saw today was No Car. He was still in his sleeping bag at the Kern River when we got there around 9am. He was letting his bag dry out from the dew of the night before and working on some emails with his Blackberry. We saw him again around 6 pm as we were eating dinner. He was headed to the next creek to get water, then eat and then try to put in some more miles before dark.

We are calling it a full day after 18 miles. There is a lot of elevation gain in the next four miles, so we'll tackle that in the morning on fresh legs.