June 23rd
The meadow we camped in collected cold air and condensation last night, making for a difficult time in crawling out of the warm, dry sleeping bag.
With the prospect of cheeseburgers as our incentive we had a brisk hike to Reds Meadows, where a small store and cafe outpost served up all we wanted for lunch.
On the way we walked through an old burn area where nearly all of the standing trees, mostly old growth pines, had lost their tops, leaving charred trunks from 8 to 40 feet high. A forest of short, thick black poles in a sea of green flowering shrubs. Very eerie
The store at Reds Meadows had very meager supplies making it difficult to buy food for the next section. And we followed “the unit” in by only a couple hours, making the scant supplies dwindle even further. Their breakfast selection was especially paltry. Fortunately we only have to secure provisions for the day and a half before Tuolumne Meadows and the store did sell beer. And with the beer we were able to barter with Crazy John for some oatmeal.
Leaving Reds Meadows we walked through the nearby “Devil’s Post Pile” with its crumbling columns of basalt and its deluge of day hikers.
We hurried our walk along the San Joaquin River dodging rainstorms and hatching mosquitoes. We followed the PCT up a ridge on the east side of the valley with great views of the Minaret range and Mammoth Mountain. A few miles up we found a knoll slightly off the trail with great views and the chance for a breeze to hold the bugs down. While bush whacking around to find the site I discovered an intact arrowhead about an inch and a half long chipped from Obsidian. Obviously we weren’t the first ones to find this site. With thunderclouds gone we made camp with Crazy John and the remaining mossies. The breeze never came and after the mossies found us they stayed well past dark forcing us to put up a tent to have any peace from them.
