High Sierra Topix

Whew! Posting this report has given me a new appreciation of the effort it takes. Thanks to all of you who post reports on this forum, they are very much appreciated and my family has benefited from them many times. Thank you!!!

I love family trips! Thanks


Mike

awesome trip man!

haha i told you watch out for bears. Ive been through there 2 times and always see signs of bears. one time went through long valley up to summit lake, then to blossom lakes. saw bear track at long valley and in the snow between summit and blossom. on the return fresh bear scat all over the trail in long valley.

is that the campsite that is set above the tule river that has swimming pools and falls? that's such a beautiful spot, although i have not camped there Ive spent lots of time there enjoying it, swimming in the pools and even caught some fish there.

A very nice report. Thanks for sharing.

On the picture thing. The reason some of us use the integrated upload attachment capability is that it caches the pics. The 3 times I've touched your thread, it reloads each pic. As an example, your IMG_20141111_161856 is 4.37Mb. 350k would be good enough for forum sharing.

I use MS office picture mgr to reduce my pics for general web consumption. I copy the pics to the desktop and then compress each one to around 300k ish.. right hand side bar in the edit pic function. Then upload.

EDIT: Just moved to a new Win8 pc, and good luck finding the ol' easy compress capability. I'm thinking now it's probably paint to set the pixel size. I was on Win 7. For Ipad's, you're on your own.

Regardless of the approach, if your pics are too large, some might not wait to see what you posted and it's not like they need to print them at a quality level.

Again, a great report. Happy girlz; happy family!

Russ

Fun report, thanks for posting it. The answer to your question, who would taste the
best to the bears, the answer: easy, the one carrying the Cheetos.

Yeah a beautiful little used area of our Sierra.

Loading the thread is so annoying slow that it takes several minutes to even load the first image because your multi-megabye images have not been downsized and it appears they are loading off a slow Google server. Thus may be useful to edit your post after creating downsized versions.. What the HST board software does after receiving large images, is downsize them to no more than 550 pixel widths or 1000 pixel heights, images of just a few hundred kilobytes max.

Could be because the total size of all your images is a heavy load of megabytes that are trying to load small incremental amounts of all images in parallel versus each image sequentially. When a jpg image is saved there is an embedded option for doing one or the other though that may be a Google setting users cannot change.

tallkan wrote: A dreamy place, where fairies hide in the woods and kids rule the world.

A Great way to sum up a report on an excellent trip! Keep up the good work and post more reports!



Thank you for an excellent report,

-Russ

Set a date. Get gear ready. Cancel. Set another date. Cancel again. Set third date. Gear scattered again, get it packed and ready. Cancel again…

Friday evening, we pull into Shake Camp MHSDF, finally ready to hike. It’s getting dark now, but everybody is too anxious to wait until morning, so we snap our headlamps on and bumble down the trail in the dark. Even if we just go a couple miles and camp. My wife and I, our three girls, excited and giddy and giggling about who would taste better to a bear. Bear tracks in the snow right from the start.
Couple hours later, we are back at the trailhead again. The trail didnt drop down into the canyon as we expected. It kept climbing, and stayed too far against the west side of the canyon. This isn’t right. The trailhead sign is very clear though, how could this be the wrong trail? Whatever. We’ll sleep at the trailhead and figure it out in daylight tomorrow. Burrito Party!!!
The next morning, we discovered what we had all missed the night before. The sign has an arrow on the very edge that is easy to miss. This isn’t the trail! There’s another trail over there!! The girls scurry down into the canyon ahead of us, laughing at daddy’s navigational prowess, while my wife and I fall back and take it in slowly. Majestic Sequoias, ferns and moss-covered boulders dazzle us right from the start.
Break time near Moses Gulch. Tenkara and Cheetos.

Picnic near Hidden Falls. Creek conditions are low, clear and very still. So, fooling the 12-14 inch trout that I saw near here would require stealth and luck. Maybe another day.

Only one of our pyramid shelters saw any use, most of us slept out. Long nights meant lots of time to meditate on the stars, the moon, and the shifting moon shadows on the forest floor. I was also treated to the sound of a landslide not far from our camp. An incredibly loud hissing-grinding sound startled me, until it ended in a huge boom, which is when I knew what it was. Left my heart pounding pretty good for a while. On our first night out, there were new bear prints around our camp in the morning, and muddy prints all over our food can. So many good laughs around the fire and sweet moments enjoying the moon down by the creek.

Salami and Gouda on Naan, with artichoke antipasto. Snickers and Cheetos were coveted more than water and oxygen.

Dogwoods and Black Oak were in full Autumn color. We saw no poison oak that I can recall, picked and ate blackberries, scrambled and explored huge boulders and hidden waterfalls along the creek, and we found comfortable campsites every hour along the canyon. A dreamy place, where fairies hide in the woods and kids rule the world.