Fern Lake trail head to Thousand Islands Lake

[srnovak]

Hey all,
Just wanted to give some info about our recent trip for anyone interested.

Day 1. Started at Fern Lake Trailhead almost at dark. Hiked up to Fern Lake for the first night. That was a good...get your blood flowing hike.
Day 2. Hiked up the Fern Creek Drainage. Was tough around Fern Lake, a lot of boulder hopping with full packs. We pushed down back toward the creek and found it flatter, but a little choked with underbrush. After that it was pretty uneventful until we got toward the top. We followed a fork of Fern Creek a bit southwest vs south toward the top. The terrain was grassy and steep, but provided nice foot placement. Right as we reached the top, there was a little Class 2-3 scrambling, but overall it was not too tough. We hiked along the EXTREMELY FLAT and DESOLATE ridge of San Joaquin mountain toward the north west corner. There we found a nice scree ski slope directly down to the Clark Lakes. We camped at Clark Lakes that night.
Day 3. We left Clark Lakes and hiked south toward the Garnet River connector trail. This trail was beautiful with some nice steep sections of flat rock and waterfalls. We continued along the northern shore of Garnet Lake all the way to the pond that sits above Garnet on it's west side. This campsite was beautiful, right under the shadow of Banner and Ritter Peaks.
Day 4. Easy day...hiked down to Garnet Lake and caught a bunch of Rainbows.
Day 5. Hiked up and over the saddle to Thousand Island Lake. We found a nice, fairly sheltered campsite midway up the eastern shore. After setting up we headed up the Sierra High Route to North Glacier Pass and over to Lake Catherine. Had thought about pushing further toward the summit of Ritter, but we were all satisfied with the views from Lake Catherine and were excited about our frisbee golf game on the trip back to camp. What a game. Such great views of Thousand Island from this direction.
Day 6. For our last day, we wanted to position ourselves with a fairly easy hike out. We planned on hiking out at the Silver Lake Campground, so Gem Lake seemed like the best bet for our last campsite. To get away from crowds we saw a nice contour that lead down to the lake from the trail along the southwest end of the lake, just west of the intersection with the Clark Lakes trails. We followed this contour down steeply to the lake and found.....NOwhere to camp, No shortcut route along the very rocky and steep eastern shore and DUHHHHH, NOway to get across the dam. Ha, we felt quite stupid at this point, ate some lunch and hiked back up to the trail. We followed the trail along the western side of Gem Lake to a small spur trail (old roadbed) that lead down to the lake at a dry section of lake bed. We decided to camp right there. It was an interesting spot, amongst all the old stumps and animal prints in the sand. The sunset and stargazing were nice and we feasted on some more tasty rainbows.
Day 7. We hiked down past Agnew Lake and down down down to Silver Lake Campground, where we drank some tasty Sierras at the general store.

Thanks for the input and responses to my earlier posts.