A day without a pass and without any snow. What a treat - The distance between Mather Pass and Muir Pass is 21 miles, so most normal hikers don’t try to do them day after day, especially when it’s not a good idea to do Muir after the snow melts, since the north side is about 5 miles of gradual ascent in the snow.

We got up a bit earlier today, and hit the trail at 6:30. That doesn’t happen a lot. The climb up to Pinchot Pass wasn’t very hard. There was a section where the trail went behind a hill, and on its north side, before reaching the pass, there was plenty of snow. But apart from that the accent was rather easy, and the switchbacks up to the pass itself weren’t too hard either.

In the morning, while we were packing up our stuff, at least 3 hikers passed by our campsite, on their way up to Glen Pass. The climb up to the pass wasn’t too hard. It took us a while, with several more hikers passing us. And when we got to the pass everyone else were already half way down the other side. The other side, as we’ve heard before, was a steep snow covered slope. We could see the trail marks made by other hikers on the snow, and we picked the one that seemed most traveled by. A southbounder came onto the pass just as we were leaving it, and he gave us some tips on the way ahead. He said that if we are “moving it” we can get over Pinchot Pass as well today. We never “move it”…

We started the day with arranging our gear in the hostel room, and munching on some banana and yogurt for breakfast. We got out of there at around 8:00, and headed over to the bus station by the McDonald’s. The bus to Independence came exactly at 8:30, and we took it and got to the junction heading towards Onion Valley Campground. Next came the hard bit of hitching up the road to the campground, on a road with almost no traffic.

Today wasn’t as relaxing as I was hoping.