Marc's Public Blog - Hiking / Backpacking

The great thing for pilots is that the very nice owners will pick you up at the airport and lend you their jeep so that you can get around and get to see a little bit more than just Pine Mountain Lake itself (which is actually a nice place, but there is more to see in the Sierras than just that).

After arriving at the Cub Inn, the owners lent us a couple of bikes so that we could go to the lake, where we chilled out a little bit:

Jennifer's knee wasn't doing well with biking uphill, so we didn't get to bike much farther and just went back to the Cub Inn. Joe nicely lent us his jeep, and we were able to go around Pine Mountain Lake and hike around some trails north of Pine Mountain. It wasn't a great trail, but it was a good warming up for the upcoming hiking.

The next morning, we drove to Hetch Hetchy for some hiking:

reservoir was overflowing to say the least...

the overflow relief was spewing big time

As far as the rangers let us go, just short of the first waterfall.

That's a slightly faster way back than the trail :)

Due to the backpackers who had died a few days prior when trying to corss the 2nd waterall while it was pouring too much over the bridge (they got swept away), the rangers were blocking all traffic in both directions and gave boat rides to those who were stranded on the other side. So, we had lunch there, and turned back.

Then, since we had a bit of time left over, we did a quick hike to a local vista point before heading home:

The next day, we got up early and went to Yosemite valley and parked at the bottom of the 4 mile trail. We waited until July 5th to go to Yosemite, as we had heard that it was packed to capacity the days prior due to the July 4th crowd.
Thankfully, on the 5th, there weren't many people, so we almost had the trail to ourselves.

Merced River

Nice little 'flow' :)

Hike up Yosemite Falls

Slowly getting higher

Half Dome

And we finally got to Glacier Point

Did I mention water flow? :)

Still some snow left

It was out to get our lunch

After a good break at Glacier Point, we headed for the real peak: Sentinel Dome. A big thanks to Arturo for giving us the tip to go on up to there.

Getting to Glacier Point was only half the journey (about 6 miles and 4000ft up), then we had to go back down, but it turned out to be a bit faster :) We were lucky and got to see 3 different bears on the way down.

On our way out, we went to the visitor center for a little while

nice vantage point of the trail we took

And that was it, our 3rd day was over and it was time to get back home.