While Justin perused the visitor's center, I took the opportunity to re-tape my feet, which were starting to blister a bit on the heels. To my delight, they were not (yet) as bad as they felt, so I slapped on some blister treatment pads and got ready to go again. Shortly, we took off on the trail (really the highway for a quarter mile or so) again. Aside from being sore, I wasn't feeling too bad. But then we started climbing up over the ridge that separated us from Upper Truckee River Canyon.
As we wound up and down and through boulders, my toes started to feel weird...at that point I realized I should've cut my toenails before we'd left on the trip. It felt like one of the smaller nails was digging into the neighboring toe. Uh-oh... After a while, the trail began climbing in earnest up the ridge, offering us pretty good views of Round Top to the South.
After a lot of huffing and puffing, we finally reached the top of the ridge, and I believe it was here that we caught our first view of the South end of Lake Tahoe, although you can't see it in the picture due to the haze.
As the trail began to drop, I got excited because I knew we were getting close to the headwaters of the Upper Truckee River, and that meant we were closing in on our campsite for the night. What's more we had made it all the way to Carson Pass and were still walking! That may not sound like much, but after last year's disaster, I was pretty happy with our progress. We were right on schedule!
After we'd dropped in to the canyon, I started feeling a bit woozy. I realized I needed to eat some more. I figured I'd eat when we got to the junction with the Meiss Meadow Trail, which we would take to our campsite by Round Lake. Unfortunately for me, the canyon just went on and on and on. I just kept following Justin.
Although I was feeling delirious, I still managed to snap a picture of some interesting rock formations to the SouthWest.
At long last we reached the junction with Meiss Meadow Trail. With relief, I dropped my pack and pulled out a Balance bar and admired the old cabins off the trail.
Little did I know that we were about to experience our first real problem of this trip...
| Previous | PCT Index | Next |
