7/24, Tuolumne to Virginia Canyon, Mile 956

[dos...@pocketmail.com]

We awoke in Tuolumne meadows campground (the backpackers area) and once again, no bear. We are convinced that there really are no bears in Yosemite, it's just a ploy by Bearvault and Ursack to get us to buy their heavy, unnecessary products.. Today we are getting rid of our bear containers, mailing them home at the makeshift postoffice which is part of the small market.

We picked up our food boxes from the post office and sent our bearvault home. We left Tuoloumne just before the grill started making cheeseburgers, we did this on purpose to avoid spending more time than necessary there. The lure of a cheeseburger is unavoidable, even the generic ones from the Tuoloumne grill..

As soon as we started hiking we got lost, the trail is not marked at all in Yosemite. None of the trail signs have the simple, helpfull, three letters "PCT". There are a lot of trails going everywhere here, almost none were on our maps. We finally found the trail, marked "Glen Aulin HSC" (High sierra camp). The camp was on the PCT so we took the trail. Glen Aulin is one of many high sierra camps in the Yosemite backcountry which caters to hikers who wish to stay in canvas tents and eat meals from backcountry chiefs, hike during the day, camp in comfort at night. The main camp tent is connected to a stone cabin which houses the kitchen, the kitchen had baked goods for sale so we bought some, muffins and chocolate cake.

The landscape changed to granite, huge boulders and large glacier/river polished slabs. The trail passed through winding granite canyons from smaller to larger, each one introducing the next one. We finally entered Cold Canyon, a 6 mile slog through meadows and everyones favorite blood sucking parisite, misquotoes.

It was getting dark and we descended just in time to Virgina canyon, forded the river and found a place to camp. We were parinoid about bears, bears which we haven't seen yet. Our food bags were very heavy and difficult to hang, it felt as if the rope (cheap 550 cord) would break with each tug.

My feet felt as if knives were being stabbed and slowly twisted into the heels, plantar tendonitis, it is still getting worse. I had hoped that new shoes would help fix the problem, they haven't yet. Nathalie has the same problem, probably the result of not stretching our calves enough, increasing tension on our heels and thus pulling the plantar tendons along the bottoms of our feet too tight. Wildthing had to get off the trail 200 miles back because of Plantar tendonitis, he coulden't walk more than 8 miles per day and decided to bail at Cottonwood pass. If this keeps getting worse it will force us off the trail. To be honest the idea of getting off the trail is not entirely bad to us, there is some feeling of guilt and failure associated with it though. We are going to do what we allways have done, take it one day, one segment, at a time, we will go to Tahoe and then re-evaluate our trip there.

Aaron

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