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May 23-25, 2003

Our annual Memorial Day weekend backpacking trip. This year, we headed off to the Emigrant Wilderness, located northwest of Yosemite, for a three-day hike.

The thing about backpacking this early in the season is that you encounter quite a bit of snow at higher elevations, which really slows down the progress of the hike, but the beauty of it is that not many hikers are out, so most sites accessible only through hiking are readily available.

Day 1, Friday:

We head off early in the morning from my place in SF and arrive at the Summit Ranger station at around 10am, and despite the warnings about snow, we decide that we would attempt the five-mile hike to the Crabtree trailhead, which is usually accessible by car. Because of the snow, however, we had to park five miles down the road and hike there.

(Somebody's been working out...

...Allen you are shameless.)

After trudging through a relatively steep incline through patches of snow for two miles and getting our boots and socks wet in the process, we reached the sign and realized that it was simply too much work to make it to Crabtree, and we had to turn around and find another trail.

By this point, we had hiked four miles and had gone nowhere, which was pretty disheartening. Our boots were too wet to hike in, so we continued on from Kennedy Meadows trailhead in our trusty Birkenstocks!

After hiking through another two and a half miles or so to get to Relief Reservoir, the weather started to turn nasty, and with thunder looming behind us, we quickly set up camp, and just as the tent was set up, it began to hail with thunder and lightning, leaving us cowering in the tent.

Yeah we were a little scared at the moment. Psh.

After the weather lifted, we cooked up dinner and eventually drifted off to sleep.

(I dunno...it wasn't MY idea.)

From there, we headed about six miles towards Kennedy Lake, where we set up camp, caught some brown trout for dinner (I caught THREE and Ed caught ONE, despite what he says, that freak), and basically chilled for the evening.

Day 3, Sunday:

We hiked about eight miles back to the Kennedy Trailhead, (same trail, same images) and went straight to Koryo BBQ in Oakland for some kahlbee and ahl jjigae. Hell yeah.