I posted my last 2 entries from my mobile phone using Flickr.com. Aside from the crappy picture quality of my camera phone, the Flickr service is actually pretty cool. To create the entire entry, I just emailed the photo to a preset Flickr email address and Flickr took care of the rest. It automatically posted the image to my Flickr account and created the corresponding entry on this blog using the email subject as my blog post title and the email body as the text along with the picture. It’s really cool for impromptu posting on your blog.

Anyway, not long after I posted that second Flickr entry, we entered the mountains and I lost cellular service, thereby ending my short-lived Flickr post weekend. But I’m happy to say I’m back from our camping and hiking adventure and I have the rest of the pictures now posted for you to enjoy.

We cut our camping trip short by a day because, as you will see from the photos, a rather nasty snow storm raged in and we opted to break camp and head down the mountain. Our original plan was to stay up there both Friday and Saturday night and come back down Sunday morning but at around 3pm on Saturday afternoon it began to snow. We assessed the risk of staying another night and getting possibly snowed in versus the benefit of sleeping there another night just to wake up and hike down in the morning and figured we shouldn’t flirt with danger.

Even with the trip being cut short by a day, it was an awesome time. We left San Diego early Friday morning and drove north about 5 hours to the town of Big Pine, CA in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. From there we parked and hiked into the John Muir Wilderness in the Inyo National Forest. Our starting elevation was about 4000 feet. I’ve grabbed a couple of screen captures from Google Earth (below) to better illustrate our journey. Our hike Friday afternoon took about 4 hours and brought us up to First Lake at an elevation of about 10,000 feet. It was a good hike and quite a workout but gave us some incredible scenery. The temperature at our car was about 78 degrees and by the time we reached First Lake it was about 45 degrees. We stayed the night at First Lake. It was crystal clear out with a full moon. Saturday we ditched our packs in the tent and headed out for a day hike to see the other lakes and to get a higher view of the area. We looped up past Second Lake and Third Lake and then opted to shoot up the glacier trail instead of continuing on to Lakes Four, Five and Six. We figured if you’ve seen one lake, you’ve seen them all and we wanted to get some elevation and take in the sights.

Around 2pm we reached our high point on the ridge above Third Lake, wedged between Temple Crag and Mount Robinson. Our elevation was just over 12,000 feet. It was at this point that the clouds dropped in over the peaks behind us and the snow flurries started. After a few commemorative photos, we headed back down the trail to our camp.

At camp it was still a mix of sun and snow flurries and for a few minutes it seemed like the brewing storm had passed on by and we were in the clear. But all of the sudden, literally within the span of 20 minutes, we were getting pelted with snow and wind and the temperature had dropped from about 45 to 28 degrees. We packed up everything in about 10 minutes flat and made a mad dash for a lower elevation. After about 2 1/2 hours, we were back at the car, cold, wet, tired and sore. We arrived back in San Diego at about 1am.

It’s always good to get out and recalibrate yourself with the simpler things in life. It was a great weekend. Here’s the illustrated version of our journey :) The drive north:


Hike in from Big Pine:


Our camp at First Lake and our day hike up to the ridge:

Illustrated view from our final high point looking back across to First Lake at approximately 12,000 feet.

View the photo gallery.

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