Itinerary A rough outline for our Mt. Whitney Dayhike, scheduled for September 8th. More details to come… Sept 6 (Saturday) Early AM Drive to Onion Valley Campground (4 hrs, 225 miles) Afternoon Acclimation hike Hike towards Kearsarge Pass POIs Little Pothole Lake Overlook 2.7 miles RT || 1000′ climbing Gilbert Lake 4.0 miles RT || 1355′ climbing Flower Lake 4.5 miles RT … Read More
The Plan Due to the late snow storm in the Sierra this year, I came up with several different plans. The different options I came up with can be seen here: Trip & Hike Planning, June 1-4 2014 (Mt. Whitney, Yosemite & Mammoth) In the end, this is the option that we ended up doing: Option 1, Mt. Whitney June … Read More
With the low snow levels this year, we were hoping to hike Mt. Whitney June 3-4 with just hiking poles and microspikes. With some late season snow storms, the snow is sticking around longer than expected, so we need to come up with some alternates to Mt. Whitney. Here are a few ideas, including the plan for Whitney itself. June 1st … Read More
The Plan Being early in the year, planning for this trip was difficult – we didn’t have current trail conditions and would not know what we were going to do until a day or two before our hike. I came up with several different plans. The different options I came up with can be seen here: Cottonwood & Horseshoe Meadows (pre) Trip … Read More
The Cottonwood Pass Trailhead offers hikers an excellent starting point to explore areas/destinations such as Horseshoe Meadows, the Golden Trout Wilderness, Mt. Langley, Cirque Peak and the Pacific Crest Trail. Here is an example of a two day trip, assuming I leave my house in SoCal on a Saturday morning and eat an late breakfast/early lunch on Day 1 in Lone … Read More
The Cottonwood Lakes Trailhead offers hikers an excellent starting point to explore areas/destinations such as the Cottonwood Lakes Basin, the Golden Trout Wilderness, Mt. Langley, Cirque Peak and the Pacific Crest Trail. Here are a few pics of the area: Cottonwood Lakes Trails Trip Report, August 17 2013. Here is an example of an early season two day trip. When … Read More
Using GPSVisualizer Draw to create a simple GPX file I have tried several websites and methods for creating tracks for hikes that I am unable to locate gpx files for. What I’ve found is that most methods add waypoint, routepoint or linepoint data to the files. My GPS unit (Garmin Dakota 20) fails to load a track file if it contains … Read More
The Plan: With my Mt. Whitney Hike coming up the first week of June, I am hoping to spend some time ‘at elevation’ to help with the acclimation process. Being so early in the year, the options are somewhat limited unless you’re interested in hikes that require some serious winter gear & experience. After doing some research, we finally settled … Read More
Here are my plans for 2014. This list will be updated as plans are solidified. As hikes are completed, they will be moved to the end of the post and trip reports will be added. I would like to do one ‘major’ hike per month and try to fit in some shorter, local hikes when possible. For those going on … Read More
Here are weather forecasts for areas that I frequently check. I usually use weather.gov, but if you know of other reliable sources or would like me to add other areas to this list, please let me know. If you’re looking for smoke information (from wildfires), start here: NASA Satellite Images