Reunion Roaring River Road's End Report
Saturday, 17 September, I went to Pasadena for my 35-year high school reunion. Took some photos but haven't put them up on the web yet. The organizer had a photo of my kindergarten class!
Sunday, I got to go on a mountain bike ride with my nephew Ben and his mother's partner Marty, in Wildwood Park: http://tinyurl.com/7hnbk
Monday, I drove up to Kings Canyon, found my backpacking friends, and we camped overnight near Grant Grove. Then, starting on Tuesday, we did a car shuttle and then walked about 33 miles in 3 days. We drove about a half-hour from Grant Grove to the trailhead at 7400 feet or so. We started hiking into a rainstorm ... saw five little frogs at various points along the trail. We climbed over a ridge and into the sun, for a great view of the newly-snowed-upon Great Western Divide ...
After that, we descended gently along the beautiful Sugarloaf Valley, where we camped on Tuesday night. More thunderstorms happened overnight, but we all stayed dry. Pattie had brought a (lightweight, plastic, REI) flask of Cazaderos tequila -- very nice.
Wednesday, we dropped down to about 7100 feet, before climbing 400 feet to Roaring River Ranger Station. (Pattie said that the beauty of this station convinced her that "Ranger" would be her next career, and she would find a way to be assigned to Roaring River.) Then we climbed another 1500 feet, to above Moraine Ridge. That was hard, but the views of the headwalls of Deadman Canyon and Cloud Canyon were spectacular! Godfrey had the same sort of flask, but he had brought some 18-year-old Glen Morangie. Yum!
Friday (9/22), we started at 9000 feet, climbed up to Avalanche Pass (10,000 feet), and then down, down and down some more. And then some steep downhill, and then more downhill, and then down a cliff. Pix to be linked later ... [Looking down the worst section of the Sphinx Switchbacks] . [Looking up at a few of them]
http://sierra-trails.com/sphinx/sphinx10.htm
Altogether, we dropped 5000 feet that day. Yow! Here are the photos from the backpacking part of the trip, including the big frog I saw while we were driving out: http://tinyurl.com/9vv8v
Oh, yeah: from about an hour before we reached the starting trailhead around noon on Tuesday, we saw no other humans until Thursday afternoon, about an hour before reaching the end of the trail.
The last segment of the week was a car-camping weekend at Cedar Grove in the main section of Kings Canyon. (The 20th annual for some of the folks there; it was my 9th year attending it.) Here are a few photos from that get-together, including the annual walk up to Mist Falls. On my way out, I visited the lookout at Buck Rock -- 8500 feet elevation, and only about 12 miles from Grant Grove. Fantastic views! Here's the tinyURL for that segment of the week: http://tinyurl.com/76p8w .
Bonus link, in case you missed it last year: photos from my Ansel Adams trip last year, along with brief caption-style trip report. The server goes down sometimes, but seems to be up at the moment: Google: NFSJ Photos, and the first hit (today, anyway) is http://zia.pycs.net/diM-NFSJ/
I'll add URLs later, though you can probably find most of these. [Edit: I added (tiny)URLs.]
12:14:37 AM
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