6/2- Today I did nothing related to hiking a trail.  I ate a hundred hamburgers and watched the movie The Road House.  It was exactly what I needed.
6/3 Mile 702-709(7 miles)

Lets talk a little bit about leaving towns:  after eating cold, less than desirable food, sleeping on the ground, enduring relentless attacks from ants and ticks, being constantly either too hot or too cold, and dealing with all of the other realities of trail life, it is an absolute revelation to get into a town.

In town every woman you see is flawless, perfect, and the most beautiful woman in the history of women.  They all appear to be akin to Helen of Troy.  All of the men appear strong jawed, muscular, and menacing. Patton Oswald transforms into Channing Tatum. Never before has everyone else appeared so well groomed, and attractive, and never before have you felt so undesirable.
Every meal seems to be prepared by an award winning chef.  Every drink is a magical elixir. Every comfort is magnified.  Ever pleasure is heightened.   Considering all of this, leaving town requires a tremendous effort.  Luckily, I feel an almost magnetic pull North, and I get antsy if I stay in one place for too long.

After a welcome rest, I left Kennedy Meadows, a back country resort located right at the edge of the Sierra Nevada mountains, and returned to the trail.  The change in scenery was both dramatic, and startlingly subtle.     The soil was still sand, but now enormous trees sprouted everywhere instead of sage and chaparral bushes.  It looked almost like the desert was putting on a forest disguise.  The big change though, was the water.  Water. Water!  WATER! Water everywhere!  There are rivers and streams and creeklets running everywhere, a by product of snow melt. Water is flowing in all directions.  It feels hard to accept that it is real.  After over a month of scurrying from water source to water source, sweating under the weight of a gallon (or more!) of water on my back, there is now an overabundance of water.  To celebrate I pour liters of water into my mouth, swallowing only a fraction of it in a gluttonous orgy of excess.  I deliberately get my feet wet.  From now on I will most frequently carry only a liter of water at a time.

Towards evening I set up camp in a meadow(!), by a creek(!). Black bears become a concern in this next stretch of trail.  Bear hunting is obviously not allowed in the parks of the Sierra Nevada, and bears, clever as they are, have realized that people are not a threat to them here.  They know you have food, and they want it.  They want it very badly.  In most places if a bear gets into your camp you can yell at it and chase it away.  Not so here.  To combat this, hikers must, by law, carry a bear canister to store their food in( think oversized nalgene bottle).  I picked mine up in Kennedy Meadows and am reluctantly carrying it with me.  It is heavy, and cumbersome, and fits awkwardly inside of my pack.  The comfort of having my food safe in a very remote area puts me at ease, but carrying it will still take some getting used to.

6/4 mile 709-731(22 miles)
The morning started with a climb up towards an enormous meadow.  It is really feeling like we are in the mountains now and my morale is sky high.  This next stretch will be physically more difficult than the desert, but psychologically much easier, and with a far greater reward in terms of scenery. Throughout this stretch of trail I will most frequently be between 10-12,000 feet in elevation, with brief trips below 9,000 feet and brief trips above 13,000 feet.  The air is noticeably more thin.  When I eat or drink or hold my breath I feel a desperate urge to gasp for air.  I am acclimatizing well, and remain to feel strong during the climbs as long as I am conscious about my breathing.

Throughout the day the sky morphed from perfectly clear blue, to sporadic clouds, to enormous thunderheads. Thunder boomed all around me as I walked along high mountain ridges. Apparently this is a very common phenomenon this time of year in the high mountains.  Afternoon thunderstorm patterns occur frequently, and it will be something I will need to keep track of.  Somehow being up above 10,000 feet in a thunderstorm feels decidedly unsafe.   At night I camped in in a place called 'Death Canyon' after collecting water at 'Poison Spring.'  Lovely.

6/5 731-751(20 miles)

The location that I am at seems to be directly in the flight path of a local air force base.  Throughout the day, fighter jets scream past right overhead.  The noise is deafening.  I am up so high, and the jets are so close, that it is a tremendous shock to my system every time they pass, shattering the tranquility of the high mountain scene.  I am again right between 10-11,000 feet today, which is right below tree line here.  In Washington, trees become sparsely distributed anywhere above 7,000 feet.   Due to the elevation, the forests are bare, with very little undergrowth.  The trees appear to be the only living thing.  There are very few signs of life otherwise(other than ants.  Ants are everywhere. Always.)

Today is especially memorable in that I arrived at the first natural lake of the trip.  After over 750 miles, I have finally come to the first natural body of water.  About time! It felt so good to be at the lake, that I decided to set up camp.  At sunset I sat on the bank of the lake and watched the sun sink below the enormous walls of white granite towering all around me, and reflected on my trip so far. The first phase, my journey through the desert, is unquestionably over now, and a new chapter begins.  I went to my tent, closed my eyes, and fell asleep, looking forward to next step in my journey.


6/6 mile 751-774(23 miles)
Snow levels are extremely low this year.  The only snow that exists is above 11,000 feet.  On the south side of slopes, there is essentially nothing, with more accumulated on the north side.  It is so different from Washington, where anything above 5,000 feet is buried in snow right now.

At midday I approached a rickety wooden gate across the trail.  There were no barriers on either side of the gate.  Nothing was stopping someone, or something, from simply walking around it.  Next to the gate was a sign that said "Please keep this gate close to protect the wilderness."  What?!  Is this supposed to be symbolic?  I laughed for 20 minutes at pitiful barrier that this gate provided.  Who put it here?

I am definitely spending too much time alone.  I have between 8-10 hours per day of solitary thought, which is both a blessing and a nightmare.  I have already relived my entire life in my head five times over, examining every action and word spoken.  I also spend a lot of time singing.  The size of my obscure song lyric vocabulary is a little disconcerting.  I wish I could put the storage space and brain power to use elsewhere.