End: Red's Meadow Resort
Daily: 17.1
Total: 906.7
Today was way harder than we thought it would be. We assumed, since the second half of the day would be under 9000 feet, that it would be snow free. Wrong!
We woke up and took off from Tully Hole, and immediately had to climb a giant switchbacky hill of ridiculousness. Then we skirted around Virginia Lake (the trail went right through what is normally a dry patch between two lobes of the lake, but which right now is just more lake... there was ice formed on the surface of the water) and slid down a snow hill to Purple Lake, which was not Purple and also not covered in snow. There we met the CanadiYankees (Broken Record, Lighthouse, Chewie, RockLocks, Mr. Fox) who were fishing and about to have a fish fry. They let me take a few casts and I caught a foot-long golden trout on my third cast! We threw it back, because we had just eaten and didn't want to take the time to cook it. But it was fun!
Then we climbed up and over snow piles while contouring around a hill for a while. After lunch we dropped below 10,000 feet... waited for the snow to stop... 9000 feet... still snowy... then below 9000 feet when the snow was still piled up in 4-5 foot drifts with barely a dry patch of dirt around, we started getting really tired. And then Chris realized his camera was gone. Fell out somewhere in the last 12 miles. That was a blow.
Finally, about 4 miles from the end of today, the snow got patchier and patchier until it was gone. We got to Red's Meadow around 5:30 and ended up splitting a ($20! So expensive!) campsite with some southbounding JMTers, one of which had actually gone to high school with Bubbles. Weird! They were cool, as were some of the other campers there for the fourth of July weekend - they gave us free beers and proscuitto and good conversation too.
It is really good to know that we get a break now, but it's incredibly overwhelming to be around so many people. Town's supposed to be insane too.
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