Date: September 13, 2017
Miles: 878.7 – 881.1
“Are you going to eat that?” ~ Joe Dirt
I spent the entire afternoon reading a fiction novel for no educational purpose whatsoever. I can’t remember the last time I did that. With no Internet available at VVR to distract me, I did my chores quickly in the morning so I could settle in to a sunny spot on the lawn, graze for hours on snacks gleaned from the hiker box and read a Dean Koontz mystery. As a quick aside, I have to give credit to JD for showing me how to wait by a hiker box for a JMT hiker to dump their extra food that they mailed to themselves at a time when they thought they would be hungrier and before they realized how much all that extra food weighs. Those guys leave some good stuff. The afternoon passed by wonderfully slowly, but eventually it was time to board the afternoon ferry back to the trail. The usual dark clouds were rolling in, and by the time we had hiked a mile, thunder was echoing across the horizon and pea-sized hail was stinging my legs and hands. We climbed a couple more miles in the direction of Silver Pass and found a large campsite in Pocket Meadow next to a lazily flowing section of Mono Creek. We threw our tents up quickly as rain came down more urgently and spent a solitary evening cooking in our respective tents until the sky cleared and we fell asleep under the stars.
