Today was a much easier day, only 500-600 feet of vertical gain right away in the morning up Cathedral Pass, then it was mostly all downhill, all the way to Tuolumne Meadows!
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| Our destination lie on the other side of that peak! |
Last night and this morning was the first time I really felt the elevation- I was out of breath just walking around camp! We camped at 9300 feet last night, which is 2000 feet higher than the previous night at Clouds Rest. We lost some elevation in Tuolumne and camped at 8500 feet tonight and I didn't feel the elevation at all.
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| The view from Cathedral Pass, 9703 ft |
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| Looking south from Cathedral Pass |
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| Is this real life??! |
Today was the first day that my feet hurt from all the downhill hiking, this would become the norm for me every day. I came to dread the downhills because it hurt my feet and my knees so much!
We passed a lot of day hikers/tourists and also met a ton of other JMTers. It was fun to chat with them and share our experiences so far. We happened to cluster up at Tuolumne, where the trail meets the shuttle stop. We all opted to take the "Burger Shuttle" to Tuolumne Grill so we could get burgers before it closed at 5:00 pm. We got rowdy and a little slap happy on the shuttle, which had about 6 or 8 non-hikers on it, and chanted "burgers, burgers, burgers" to the amusement of the shuttle driver. We were all so happy to not be walking and about to be eating some greasy burgers! We were all dirty and smelled terrible and felt slightly bad for the other non-hikers on the shuttle...sorry we stunk up the place!
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| BURGER SHUTTLE! |
We all feasted on burgers and ice cream cones and bought beer at the small store. We met who we would come to call "The Wild Boys", who were 3 childhood amigos, all around the age of 21. They were young, funny, fit and on a very fast schedule to finish the trail. We also met the brother and sister duo Ethan and Haley, who we had actually met on day 1, right at the trailhead sign! We took turns taking each other's pictures! We also met Thomas, the German, who was OF COURSE an engineer! He pretended to take offense when I said "of course you are, you're German!" when he told me he was an engineer :) Along with the above mentioned and more, about 10 of us in all, walked together to the nearby backpacker's camp and found tent sites to crash for the night.
We met some PCTers at the Grill, which at first I was thrilled!!! Wow! PCT hikers! I had been following so many PCTers and now here I was meeting some! Too bad they were loud, obnoxious and mostly drunk :) And one dude tried to hit on me which I shut down immediately. I understand that there aren't a lot of females out there in the backcountry, but I was having none of it! I was wondering what they were doing in Tuolumne as a lot of PCTers were in Northern California or Southern Oregon by now....then they said they were a couple weeks behind schedule. Now it all makes sense.
We camped near Haley and Ethan, who were hiking the JMT to raise money for Juvenile Diabetes and we also met Amelia and her crew. We would come to be good trail friends with Amelia and her crew in the coming days.
After some hanging out and use of the flush toilets (!!!) we called it a night and I fell asleep immediately! Hiking is tiring!
I think this is one of the only campsites I forgot to take a picture of...whoops. Elevation 8593.
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