Dieter.us

It was hard. Over 200 miles in sixteen days (August 6th to August 20th), at times carrying a pretty heavy backpack, traversing eight up to 13,500 feet passes and finally summiting Mt. Whitney.  It was incredible. It is difficult to put the beauty of the scenery into perspective, and the photos don't capture well the incredible size of it all. Taking wide lens shots just make the enormous mountains shrink to meager hills.  Weather clearing up at Lower Palisade Lake (10,600 ft). In the end, it only rained for ten minutes on the entire hike. The John Muir Trail in California Elevation Profile of the JMT It is very isolated. The John Muir Trail traverses the Sierra Nevada from north to south starting at Yosemite National Park and ending on Mt. Whitney in Sequoia National Park. In between the trail goes through the Inyo and Sierra National Forests as well as Kings Canyon National Park. The entire area is uninhabited, and the trail does not cross a single road. Resupply was only pos...

A lot of this last week was impacted by the rain from the hurricane and it made me realize how much I really depended on the great weather I had in all previous weeks. The week started with a two hour drive to Buffalo Trace in Frankfort, KY followed by a 15 minute wait in the downpour to enter the distillery and grab a bottle of the daily special (Blanton's) for a good friend and bourbon connoisseur. The distillery tour guided us through many of the various buildings and everyone was soaked to the bone when we finally could taste the precious golden fluid. I had planned to continue south back into Tennessee and return to NC via Smokey Mountain NP. It was clear this would not work and instead I headed east to Cumberland Gap NP where TN, KY and VA meet to see some more caves and spend the night. The next day I tried to head into NC via Bristol and Damascus, but the flood damage was too great to get through and I spend another night in TN on a lake close to Bristol. In the end I took ...