Soho and I planned a big day today.   But first we needed to eat a couple excellent breakfast burritos that the manager offered to cook for us in the morning.   He is a trained chef who, for various reasons, is helping his Mom run the place for a time.   The burritos are worth the wait.   

Filled up at 8, we walked over to the road leading up the Onion Valley trailhead.    This is the one we popped out of a couple days ago.   Unfortunately it is a ~15 mile ride up there.   It is a dead end road, so we figured it was going to be a long wait.   We setup under a tree and waited.   Turns out a local saw us walking down the street, so he finished up his coffee, jumped in his SUV and drove over to offer us a ride.   

He was a really great guy.   He’s a construction consultant doing some gig in Independence.   Wouldn’t accept money for gas.  He just wanted to know our story.   Took an hour out of his day to do this.  Total kindness.  

So it was back to work around 9ish.    First we had to do 8 miles to get back to the trail up over Kearsarge pass again (around 11k), then up and over Glen pass (~12k), then back down to a decent camping spot.   It is going to be a big day 20 miles and 5k+ of ascending.  

On the way up I met an Australian couple who was doing a day hike with their toddler.   The guy was hauling the kid in kiddie backpack contraption.   They were all gungho to get to the top.   They passed me after the lake heading toward the heavens.  

When I reached the top, Soho was up there having a snack with some other hikers.  The Aussies made it.   Their toddler was wondering around trying to fall off the rocks.   He had a cookie in his hand that he kept dropping in the dirt.   Soon it was poopie diaper time.

 After that entertainment, I hit the trail for the next couple miles to intersect the PCT.    Easy stuff.   Ran into a couple of pack trains coming out of a resupply stops.    Talked to one of the leaders for a bit.   He’s been doing this for years.   Apparently many of the JMT’ers don’t want to do the work of hiking out Kearsarge, so they buy a service that packs their food resupply in to meet them on the trail.  Costs $400 per person, but gets cheaper with larger groups.   I don’t think PCT’ers bother with this stuff.   

Back on the trail again, it was time to mount the assault on Glenn.   

The approach to Glen turned out to be meh.   Not very interesting.  Fortunately it was only a 1300 foot climb from the intersection. 

Here you can see a couple of hikers on the pass.   There was a small snow field to climb, but it wasn’t too bad. 

Got over this thing around 4:30.   Soho was up there milling around.   Fortunately, the other side was the much more scenic Rae lakes.  

Ran into a few folks fishing the lake.   They all said they fish were hitting.    At 10k though, they were the size of a big sardine.   Not much fight in a sardine.    

Each lake had outlets that fed the other below it.   The trail followed these outlets all the way down.   

Eventually the trail jumped into another canyon which was populated by a bunch of small stream crossings.   It was getting late but still had another 4 miles to get to the camp site.  I put on the headlamp and stumbled through the darkness until 10:30.   Tent up, choked down some food, and crashed.  

It was a hard day.   We figured around 20 miles total with the Kearsarge bit + the trail miles, only 12 were PCT miles.    Maybe next time I’ll hire the donkeys.