Good nights sleep but I know I have a very difficult day ahead of me and so I take out 2 days of Oreo cookies :). Here are some views from my campsite at the start of the day
Some wild flowers along the way
The habitat can change rather quickly and here I feel like I am back in rain forest
I get to a stream where I am going to refresh my water and I meet 3 other guys (Rick, Bill, Mike) doing the same thing. They are bucking the trend and they are walking from Tuolumne Meadows to South Lake Tahoe. They are really taking it slow and plan on taking 8 days to do what I am trying to do in 4 (get to Sonora Pass). Good for them!!! Rick and Bill are friends and Mike is a hiker they picked up along the way and he joined them. Mike is new to hiking and likes taking pictures and videos. He has state of the art EVERYTHING including all his hiking gear but has about 60 or so pounds that he is carrying including 70 batteries for camera equipment. We are not very far away from Wilma Lake which is suppose to have good camping. They are going to stay there and invite me to join them. I hoped to get further than that today but I am dead tired and take them up on their offer. Here are a couple pictures of the Lake.
Bill builds us a fire which is the first fire I have had on the PCT. It was rather nice to just sit around the fire and talk. Mike wants to interview me and I consent and so he sets up his equipment and works on his questions and we do an interview. I have no idea what he plans on doing with it. Questions like what I am doing on the PCT, when I started, best and worst times, why hike the PCT rather than just play golf or something else. I’ll have to search to see if I can find it on YouTube later on. Rick is 64 and about to sell his pool building company and retire and he lives in Poway (really close to Escondido). I tell him we are in the process of filling in our pool and he can’t understand why we would ever do such a thing.
The only thing about stopping at mile 986 is it leaves me 30 miles to get to Sonora Pass. I really want to get there by Saturday night which means doing 30 miles in one day. I wonder if it is possible. When I indicate I will be getting up early to leave to get as many miles as possible, Bill is not all that pleased. He likes his sleep. I decide that getting up too early and waking the other 3 up would not be the right thing to do. I wake up at my normal time the next morning but hold back until 6 to get started packing up and leaving. I end up leaving about 7 in the morning which isn’t that bad but it will make it impossible to get 30 miles in. Probably a good thing.