Chocolate Peak, Piper Mountain Wilderness
Our original Memorial Day Weekend plans of hiking the high points of the Silver Range in western Nevada did not work out. In our effort to find warmer and drier…
Our original Memorial Day Weekend plans of hiking the high points of the Silver Range in western Nevada did not work out. In our effort to find warmer and drier…
With several weekends of beautiful summer-like weather already behind us, we headed across (the often still closed at this time of year) Tioga Pass on the Thursday night before Memorial…
I'm not going to give away many specifics about how to get up Salsberry Peak. There is some basic info in Zdon's Desert Summits, but the fun of this one…
Tuesday night we settled in to our desert vacation home in southern Death Valley, planning on staying here through Sunday. Throughout the rest of the week our friends will roll…
I've only recently finished posting my photos from our annual Thanksgiving trip to Death Valley. It's kind of fun going all the way back to November to relive this trip,…
There are plenty of options for getting to the summit of Split Mountain, from the walk-up to the technical. Split could be considered the easiest 14k peak in California when looking…
This was the day with the biggest number of unknowns. The beginning of the day started off without concern, following the trail back to the John Muir Trail (JMT) and…
Arrow Peak from Camp Words of the Day: &$%ing mosquitoes!Despite the mosquitoes this was a great day. Arrow Peak is a wonderful climb from Bench Lake and the views from…
With our longer Sierra trip coming up soon, we wanted to head out last weekend and get in some hiking and sleeping at altitude. I always feel better when I get some time above 10k before hauling a heavy pack up there. Our intended trip was to head out to Laurel Lakes (just south of Mammoth), climb Laurel and Bloody Mountains, followed by camping and fishing at Laurel Lakes. Sunday would be another ~10k peak with a short hike. It sounded perfect, at least until we looked at the weather forecast.
The thing about the Eastern Sierra is that even if your original plans fall through there is always something else equally fun to do. So we headed out despite the forecast, figuring that we’d find something to do no matter what.
As we drove out on Friday night we watched the enormous storm clouds hovering over the mountains. They were beautiful as the sun set and they glowed bright pink. By the time we made it through the mountains the clouds had cleared and we pulled into a dispersed campsite outside of June Lake where we slept under the stars in the back of the truck.
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