Miles today: 18.6

Trail miles sum: 864.6

Trail location: 1539.7

Elevation: 6860

Spinning on the turntable: Audio book: The other side of history: Daily life in the ancient world

Nice view to start the day huh? That’s Mt. Shasta peeking over the rim. (“Shasta, Shasta, Shasta!” say all the other mountains.)

Today promised less elevation gain, for which I’m grateful.

The snow was waiting for me not more than a mile or two from camp.

Luckily the trail swung to the left of the snow! The snow is covering up a trail to a water spring but I had planned ahead for that (Guthook) and carried extra water yesterday.

It was great to hike above the alpine lakes and imagine taking a cool dip in them. Seeing the snow on the side of the lakes was a reminder that the water is most likely very, very cold.

Ah, Shasta again. I’ve not tired of her splendid magnificence yet. Frankly, I don’t think I will grow weary of her. She reminds me of Mt. Rainer in Washington State.

I was more than a little surprised to see this tiny fellow on the high mountain trail this morning. I wonder how he got here?

More fun flowers!

As usual I have no idea about the name of this plant.

I continued climbing throughout the morning and reached the apex of about 7500 feet around noon. The snow was waiting for me!

It was actually quite minor, perhaps 150 feet in total that I needed to transverse. Easy peasy!

I managed to gently navigate my way through the snow and back onto the trail pretty quickly.

I stopped to fill up on water at a spring.

I was incredibly happy that the water was super cold! That’s so nice. Cold water is the bomb.

Noelle hiked up to meet me and we hiked back to the van together. She took a little tumble and stopped to wash the dust and grime off her knees.

Tomorrow looks like a good day for slack packing. I’ll strip my pack down to the bare essentials for a day hike and then hike 20 miles and meet up with Noelle again in the evening.