Back from the Sierra Nevadas
As I mentioned earlier, this summer my wife and I embarked on travels spanning the globe, from Korea to a 70-day road trip across the country, to a planned 220+ mile backpacking trip through the High Sierras. Well, we are back from our trip in the High Sierras, thus concluding our summer of travel and squarely returning us back to reality and normalcy. I plan on writing a detailed post about our backpacking trip, but for now I just want to provide a quick recap...
Unfortunately, we didn't achieve our goal of hiking the entire John Muir Trail. Instead, we only made it about half way (a total of 130 miles) before severe blistering issues prompted us to exit the trail prematurely. It was a hard decision to make, but the correct one in the end. After several days of backpacking and carrying all that extra weight on your back, your feet start to swell. My wife's boots were a perfect fit for her feet's normal size, but as her feet started swelling, she started getting blisters all over her feet, from the tips of her toes, her heels, the sides of her feet, and on her soles. She soldiered through the pain for several days before we jointly decided that enough was enough and that it was wiser to put her health and comfort ahead and completing the trail.
Despite having to exit the trail, we had a great first half and hiked over 110 miles on trails we had never explored beforehand. It was my first visit to Yosemite, my first time seeing Half Dome or El Capitan in person, our first visit to 1,000 Island Lake (see below), our first decent to Tully Hole, our first time over Donahue, Silver, and Seldon Passes, and our first time visiting Muir Trail Ranch. The weather this year was very dry, which resulted in less than ideal scenery: the mountains had far less snow on them, the meadows were brown instead of green, and there were few wildflowers along the way. However, dry seasons have their advantages as they greatly reduce the number of mosquitoes and other biting insects and make stream crossings much easier.
In any event, it's great to be back in town and to settle back down.
UPDATE [2007-11-17]: I have blogged about each of the 14 days of our JMT hike. You can start at Our 2007 John Muir Trail Attempt (Day 0 and Day 1) or go directly to the hike wrapup, which has a link to each of the day's corresponding blog entry. You can also view pictures from the trip.