6/13

20 miles (766 to 786)

Its later than we usually go to bed. I'm laying in the tent listening to singing, ukelele, and harmonica. 

We didn't make it up Whitney yesterday, with about a mile left to the summit we turned around. We awoke to clouds over the mountain but decided to head out anyway. We were hiking by 5:30. It began to rain, we got wet. As we climbed higher rain turned into snow, we got cold. As we reached around 13,500 ft, it had snowed about 2 inches on top of the feet of snow already on the trail and still snowing hard. Wearing wet clothes and running shoes that I've been wearing since Mexico, I decided I felt I'll equipped for the push to the summit in the snow and feeling like a total weenie, turned around. 

The rumor back at the base camp was that there was trail magic at mile 786, 20 miles away. Spaghetti! So we were on a mission today. We hiked pretty much non stop. The terrain was challenging, we gained at least 4,000 feet and went over the highest point on the pct, forester pass at 13,200 feet. Again, it stormed. It rains everyday! Just as we were reaching the tree line coming down from the pass it started to rain, thunder and lightening. 

We arrived to a little camp in the woods set up by 6 very giving people. They hiked on over 100 pounds of food!  The spaghetti was out but we had salami and cheese quesadillas melted over a fire, they were amazing, and we all gathered and talked. 

I have to mention the toliet where we camped to do Whitney, the crabtree ranger station. Toliets are rare and they are special. There was a toliet here sitting out in the open. Two  walls about two feet high were on two sides of the toliet, leaving two sides totally open. From the camping area one could view exactly what was happening on the toliet at any given time. The walls were on the sides facing a hill, uselessly. You might think that no one would want to use this publicly viewed totally exposed toliet. You'd be wrong. We all used it and it was great.