John Muir Trail Daily Log: Day 6-10
Hey Friends! Thank you so much for all of the great feedback about our JMT videos and posts! It’s been a blast reliving the experience as we prepped all of these for you all! This is the second installment of the daily log which is a blog post containing photos paired with day 8 from my written journal, as well as the video daily logs that we recorded while we were on trail. Enjoy day 6-10!
JOURNAL ENTRY: DAY Eight
Slept in until exactly 6:23 am. Owen was very specific with his alarm this morning. We were on trail by 7 am.
The reason we decided to sleep in was because our first stop of the day was at Muir Trail Ranch (MTR) and just 1.6 miles from our camp spot for the night. MTR is the last of our resupplies for the duration of the trail, which means we were picking up eight days worth of food. Sadly, the MTR staff wasn’t at all friendly or accommodating. After greeting many staff members, happy to be around other humans, we were completely ignored. Even the dogs had no interest in us! Do we really smell that bad?! Their sole focus was the people that were there to ride their horses. However, the guests were nice! No bathrooms, no food for sale, no nothing. NOTE TO SELF: Resupply at VVR next time, we hear great things. We retrieved our two resupply buckets that were waiting for us and started unloading all the food onto the table for sorting. We sourced from Zero Day Resupply Co because we were too late to send in our own resupplies.
Looking at all the food laid out across the table, I’ve never looked at the food with such fear. How the hell are we going to carry all of this stuff?! Now that we’re down a person (Sissy) and cut back on our calorie intake we had so much extra food! Right as we started sorting out the unneeded food to take to the donation buckets, a couple from the UK hiking the PCT came in to go through the donation buckets because they realized that they were seriously calorie deficient. We struck up a conversation with them and ended up giving them the first pick of any of the food we no longer needed to ensure that they made it to their next resupply properly fed. We also had a bunch of fancy backpacker meals leftovers, so we decided to send them back to my parents for a later hike. Now that we’re taking daily siestas we realized that we’re quickly going to run out of coffee as well as our sunscreen due to the volume we’re wearing on a daily basis for snow crossings. We took the opportunity to check the donation buckets for them. We scored some Vietnamese and Korean coffee/latte packets (I LOVE Vietnamese coffee) as well as a mostly used bottle of sunscreen that should cover us in the event we do actually run out. While I was mailing the package home I also bought a patch despite the lack of hospitality because this place is all apart of the journey! I also bought a tiny thing of lotion because our legs are so damn dry from all the nearly freezing river fording we’re doing. The resupply took a little bit of time because we had to redivide out our back into our bags into our bags from the previous seven days. We like having the snacks portioned out so we know how much to eat without accidentally eating into another day’s supply. After everything was sorted, donated, mailed and divided between the two of us we strapped on our heavy packs and started climbing out of Muir Trail Ranch. The extra weight seemed more apparent with every passing mile and every foot we climbed.
Most of the day was spent following the clearest river that I’ve ever seen in the US. I thought they only made rivers like this in Canada! We stopped for our siesta near a footbridge to have coffee and an extra Mountain House breakfast skillet we decided to bring along as our “breakfast” since we never really had breakfast because we were too focused on our resupply. This is the first time we’ve ever had this one, and MAN it’s good! Owen said he picked it because it was one of the most calorically dense meals for the weight on the zero-day resupply website. After our siesta we climbed some hot switchbacks before getting to a fork in the trail that required a decision. Either we ford Evolution Creek which is a really fast-moving and deep “creek” or we take an off-shoot through Evolution Meadow. Evolution Meadow is usually recommended as the crossing of choice during the early season, but with all the snowmelt we’ve been hearing for days that people have exclusively been taking the meadow route. We decided to stick to the canon and switched into Bedrocks before heading into the Meadow. The mud was so deep in sections that it was nearly knee deep. The meadow was flooded like many have been and frequently had spots of water equally as deep as the mud. I was glad we weren’t in our trail runners because I’m convinced we would’ve lost our shoes in a few places. We were nearing our desired place to camp for the night which was near a ranger station but the mossies were so bad that we decided to press on another two miles to a higher elevation. Turns out they were horrific there too. So bad that they might be the worst we’ve seen yet. For a while, after reaching camp we went a little way downhill to a water slide in the creek and sat with our feet in the water as we enjoyed our remaining snack of the day and worked on building enough courage to brave the mossies to make dinner. Naturally, dinner prep left us tormented by the damn mosquitos. I made Annie’s Mac & Cheese which we took turns inhaling so we could return to the safety of our bug nets and then each had an Almond Snickers bars in the tent for desert… away from the constant onslaught of mossies.
Date: 07-17-19
End Elevation: 10,020 ft
Total Distance: 15.1 Miles
Time on Trail: 9 hrs 10 mins (my watch accidentally stopped for a little while at the resupply)
High: 10,026 ft
Low: 7671 ft
Ascent: 2365 ft
Descent: 1447 ft
VIDEO LOG: DAY 6-10
Thanks so much guys! As always, more to come!
- MAK
