The longest day in the Sierras. In the morning we got up a bit early again, and were on the trail at 6:30. Idan doesn’t like it, but we need it if we want to do more miles.

Yair told me we had one more mile today, because yesterday we thought we were camped one mile ahead of where we actually were. It was a good thing we stopped anyway, because otherwise we would have been hiking in the rain. So we remained dry, but one mile short. More for today.

The hike along the San Joaquin river was nice in the morning, until we got to the bridge over the Piute Creek, which also marks the boundary of the Kings Canyon State Park. We were now entering the John Muir Wilderness. We managed to miss John Muir Cabin, a bit after the bridge. Oh well.

We started climbing upwards toward Selden Pass, and stopped for lunch at Senger Creek. It was a very nice spot. Idan discovered that on our plan to reach VVR we made a mistake that now resulted in us needing to hike 2 miles LESS. We were very happy to hear that.

From the creek it was 4 miles to get up to Selden. Most of it wasn’t too bad, but it just never seemed to end. There were also a ton of mosquitoes, so we put on the head nets every time we stopped for more than 2 second.

The pass itself wasn’t exciting. No snow, and almost no views back. The views to the next valley were nice enough.

From there we had about 3.5 miles down to Bear Creek, which might be a dangerous ford. We already heard from southbounders that it’s really not too deep or dangerous. So we didn’t worry. We reached it and crossed it easily, and had another 4.5 miles to go until our campsite.

We needed to get as close as we can to vvr, so that tomorrow we will get to the lake early enough to catch the ferry. Do those last mile were hard and long, with many creek crossings on thinner and thinner logs. But eventually we got here.

After eating dinner, I was happy to see I have plenty of extra snacks for the short day tomorrow. That’s a nice surprise.