We had 3 folks coming from two cities with 4 total flights. You guys all weighed in on how long it would take us to get to the permit station at BOF. We also got some sage advice to have a back-up plan.
Behold the second leg out of Chicago had a series of 8am storms that delayed us 2 hours. Our 11am arrival at San Jose turned into 1pm. The rental car company got us going quickly and we departed SJC at precisely 130pm. With no traffic problems and a 20 minute stop at In/Out we dashed into the permit office at 4:55 pm. Transit was 3:05 minutes direct.
So our intial plan had us hiking to Catherdral the first night (Thursday). Given our late arrival we amended the plan and pitch camp in TM backpacker campground. Given our rookie-ness at back packing this worked well as we leisurely got kinks worked out before we hit the back country. The ranger gave a nice fireside talk on owls and we racked at dark (late for East Coasters)
Friday morning we were up early and headed out to what was going to be an interesting and long day.
Our plan was to camp just below Cloud's rest. After enjoying the trek to Cathedral and then on to Sunrise, we met some folks who informed us that CR and Sunrise were parched. Streambeds were dried up and little water was to be had past SR Lakes and in fact SR HSC was having water mule'd in.
After getting some pack weight experience and wisdom, we calculated the safe water load required given the possibility of no streams for a full day with 10+ miles of hiking and cooking, we decided to head toward Merced for Friday night. We did find water several miles into the SR to Merced trail and happily filled our bottles and camelbacks. And then it started to rain. 4 hours later we knew our rain gear worked well and we stumbled into Merced at about 6pm after a very long first day. Welcome to back packing.
