It was another cool night, but I was nice and toasty in my tent. My thermometer read 1C in the tent just before I got up. There was frost on my pack cover (outside) and ice in my water bottles (also outside). I had to really work at getting the ice cubes out of my platypus (which I generally carry empty during the day). It's another beautiful cloudless day, though, so we'll be hot once we get moving out on the trail. The sun hit our little valley just as we were ready to leave so everything got packed away wet/damp yet again. We backtracked through the marsh to the main trail and managed to temporarily lose Dixie along the way - oops!
We started the day with 2000 feet of downhill, following Woods Creek. The trail was gradual in most places but occasionally steep and rocky. There were a few stream crossings and finally the "Golden Gate of the Sierra" - a suspension bridge completed in 1988 and built high enough to not suffer the wash-out fate of its predecessor. Total cost of the bridge - $80,000.
Once across the creek it was a steady uphill for about 2000 feet. Really, people, could they not just have built a zip-line and saved us the 2000' feet down and up?? We stopped for lunch just shy of half-way up and had one of my favourite lunches (or maybe it was just that they had run out of breakfast food that morning and I was hungry) - curried tuna with raisins & cashews. Our elevation at the suspension bridge was about 8500' - low enough to enjoy the company of some large trees such as Jeffrey pine, red firs and lodgepole pines. This is the lowest we'll be for a while. We won't drop below 9500' again until the other side of Mount Whitney.
This is lovely Dollar Lake, with Fin Dome in the background. We'll see more of it tomorrow.
Just a little bit further down the trail..........
To our campsite at Arrowhead Lake. Lovely spot. We were in in lots of time again today. I love not being rushed when we get into camp. Lots of time to set up, do laundry & bathe, pump water, look at the maps, write my journal, chit-chat, read, etc.
Both Alex's (not sure what the proper punctuation is on that) were out floating on air mattresses today. Apparently Alex, our guide, had not done this before and thought it to be quite a good use of Katie's air mattress. I don't think anybody asked for Katie's view of that..............
Stats for the day: about 10 miles, 4260 feet up, 4500 feet down. Those numbers seem a bit high, but maybe lots of little bumps along the way. Elevation at camp is about 10,300'.
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