Calipidder

Lone Pine is a long drive for us. LONG DRIVE. Like, 7+ hours. But as John Muir once said, “The mountains are calling and I must go,” and this past weekend it was Cottonwood Basin that was calling. The trail to Cottonwood starts from the Horseshoe Meadows area out of Lone Pine.
We took off  Thursday [...]

I was holding out hope that the epic overnight trip covering a lot of miles and some cross-country travel I had planned for this weekend would work out, but this year’s late snow cover would make it more epic than I wanted. So, at the last minute I trolled my Yosemite friends for conditions and [...]

Last weekend I headed into Yosemite for an overnight backpack along Chilnualna Creek. There were eight of us and it was great fun. I’m not going to write out a full trail report since I did it approximately one year ago. However, I wanted to drop in a quick post here with a link to [...]

For the first seven years I lived in California I always flew back to Michigan to visit my family at Christmas. Each year I would inevitably face midwest snowstorms, holiday travel crowds, cancelled flights, etc. But it was always worth it to visit my family.
Last year was the first year I skipped the holiday travel [...]

We continued with the ‘easy’ portion of our trip on the morning of Day 5 by turning off the John Muir Trail and heading up Piute Canyon to Humpreys Basin. About 10 miles long and with about 3000 feet of gain, it’s not terribly difficult by Sierra standards, but it was enough to keep us [...]