August 7-Hey, this IS hard work and that burger sure tastes good!

Miles Hiked: 13.6  Total: 25.59
Elevation Gain: 1436 ft

Sunrise Meadow - Cathedral Peak and Pass in the distance

“Able to live on the buds of pine, spruce, and fir, they are forever independent in the matter of food supply, which gives so many of us trouble, dragging us here and there away from our best work. How gladly I would live on pine buds, however pitchy, for the sake of this grand independence! With all his superior resources, man makes more distracting difficulty concerning food than any other of the family.” ~John Muir

OUR NATIONAL PARKS - pub 1901

[John]
All prepared for mosquitoes, we descended into Sunrise Meadows early. We made it through before the mosquitoes were fully awake, enjoying the views of the approaching Cathedral Range. We went over Cathedral Pass and descended into Cathedral Lakes where the mosquitoes were beginning to congregate. We began seeing more and more day hikers venturing out from Tuolomne Meadows trailheads.

It was Sunday and we assumed we’d not be able to pick up our food drop at Tuolomne Meadows (TM) post office until after 9 AM the next morning, so we proceeded to the backpacker’s camp at TM after availing ourselves of the convenient restroom facilities near the information center.

After setting up camp at the backpacker’s camp and cleaning up a bit at the restroom sinks, we went down to the store and grill, where we had yummy burgers, lemonade and some potato chips. It was nice to eat something other than trail food!

Unicorn Peak

After returning to our camp site, chatting with some other hikers we learned we may be able to get someone at the store to retrieve our food drop waiting for us at the post office, so Christi went back to the store and soon returned with our box we had left 4 days earlier. We then started getting rid of food, having decided we carried twice as much as needed on the initial hike up from Yosemite Valley. I was able to give a lot of it away to neighboring campers at the backpacker’s camp and took the rest down to the hiker box at the TM store. I’m sure the food we left was a treasure for some other hikers, as most of what I saw in the hiker box was trash and junk.

We got to bed early as we were both really tired, having climbed over 7,000 feet and hiked over 27 miles during our initial 2 ½ days on the trail. Before turning in for the night, we met Zoe and her dad, David, Wayne and Isaiah, the foursome from Boston, who camped next to us and shared our bear box.

Although we were back down below 8,000 feet, we used our rain fly that night and were glad we did, as the following morning was cold!