Introduction

This blog is to share my thoughts and experiences during a three week Sierra backpacking trip in September, 2017.  The participants were Matt Swider and Mark Shaw.  The blog is primarily generated for family members, but anyone with an interest in backpacking may enjoy this.  During the trip I (Matt Swider) wrote a journal each day.  I will illustrate the journal with some of the pictures which Mark (the nice ones) and I took along the way.  Most day's posts include the camp location from our inreach transmissions.  Unfortunately, a few days did not make it to the recipients for some reason.

Sunrise view from camp at Garnet Lake

As a bit of background, The original idea was to hike the "official" John Muir Trail (JMT) from north to south, or from Happy Isles in Yosemite National Park to the summit of Mount Whitney.  We were unable to get a back country permit leaving from any trail head which took us over Donahue Pass, as YNP allows only 45 people a day to go southbound over this pass.  We were not disappointed, as we had both hiked this section of trail multiple times.  But of course, we must end on top of Mt. Whitney, right?   Well, we both spent the night on top of Mt. Whitney last summer, and the hike down from there is not very enjoyable.  Not just the 6000' of elevation drop, but the 6000 unprepared hikers coming up from Whitney Portal, and leaving their trash everywhere.  So we obtained a permit to leave from Dana Meadows, which is just east of Tuolumne Meadows.  And our exit point target was Horseshoe Meadows, roughly 200 miles away.  So since we did not cover the whole JMT, maybe you could call this JMT lite.

Several months of planning went into executing the trip.  The one item that consumed the most time was food.  Both Mark and I like to eat well.  We spent about 6 hours a week before the trip laying out, labeling, and packaging most of the food for shipment.

And sampling our hands down favorite food item for the trip, bacon cheese bread.

There was a small mistake made during food packaging.  After several hours of dealing with this task, my brain was getting pretty fried.  When looking at the mix for the bacon cheese bread, I thought I had failed to add the bacon already.  Well, I was mistaken, but my kind wife brought over more bacon to add to the mix.  So instead of 1/3 cup bacon in each loaf, we ended up with 2/3 cup bacon.  It was not such a bad thing .  .  . .  😁  😁

Day 1 page is here