Spa Day - some Sunshine?? Day 6. 13 miles. 30,142 steps.

Bear Creek.

Left Squaw Lake at 7:30am to get up Silver Pass. Sunrise was beautiful. Shook frost off our tents and did the best we could to pack everything up with really cold fingers.

Silver Pass was not so bad and had views of all the Indian Lakes. The lakes all had the early morning reflections and shadows on them and it was quite beautiful. Kathleen was the first to find all kinds of obsedian shards and remnants from a time past.  It was pretty cool sitting up there trying to imagine the Native Americans sitting carving their arrow heads and what nots up at this pass.

 Joan and I are walking well together, seem to have similar strides, at least this morning. Talked a lot about the kids growing up and what lovely young adults they have all become.

After Silver pass the trail went along a beautiful rock slide area along the North Fork. To hard to resist, so at 11:30 on our first sunny afternoon, we just said STOP and had ourselves a wonderful Sierra spa day on the hot rocks.

We bathed, did laundry and pulled everything out of our packs (especially tents) and just dried out. We had our own private waterfall to wash our hair. We did not see one hiker in the entire hour and more during our bathing party. We now know all the JMT hikers in our little time frame. Wonderful people. It's so surprising to me that you can literally walk alone for hours and not see anyone. Sometimes with this crazy weather, I wish I would run into someone.

Back on the trail feeling clean and dried out, we now dripped further into the Mono drainage. Finally came to the much dreaded climb from the VVR junction. OMG!

 What a hell of a climb. 2000 ft in 2 miles. Is swear it would never end. You could see the tops of the trees and think almost, but no. Just more trees and more sky to climb.

We are camping with the Australian, who is really Tasmanian, so we named him the Tasmanian Devil and his Columbian buddy, who is really Mexican and works for Cisco in Orange County, named him the Cisco Kid.  They are a great couple of young men and we have come to enjoy their company whenever we see them. They were both SOLO hikers and met at the Happy Isles hiker campsites. They are great. We had our first campfire that night as we were just shy of 10,000 ft and actually NO rain, for a change. Unfortunately, exhausted we were only able to enjoy the fire for about 30 min! Then off to bed.

Hank is great. He listens to podcasts at night in his tent. This American Life and Ted talks then over morning coffee and tea, we get to hear all kinds of great stories. What a wonderful story teller he is. He has been so respectful of us ladies during our bathing times. He is just a pleasure to have along.

Miss Kevin and the kids so much. And Bodie and Shadow.