Friday, June 19

I’m back on schedule.

I was going to skip Rainbow Falls and the Devils Postpile, but then I decided to stick with my schedule.

I ended up, however, leaving my phone in my car so I didn’t get to take any pictures.

There’s plenty online of the falls and the postpile, but I wanted pictures of the giant trees that had fallen across the trail and had just enough of the trunk cut and rolled away to make the trails passable.

I wanted a picture of the huge rocky face of a cliff that had clumps of green plants and pink flowers growing in the crevices.

I wanted a picture of the side of the mountain that was nothing but burned stumps and the returning undergrowth. (They had a big fire in 1992.)

Or the 15 foot tree stump that looked fine on one side, but was gutted by fire on the other.

Check out this page.

So the whole place is commercialized now. You have to take a transit bus up to the trailheads (which is fine) and it probably took about 30 mins.

My “clever” plan was to walk .4 miles to the postpile and then 2.7 miles to the falls. THEN, instead of walking 3.1 miles back, I’d walk 1.2 miles to “bus stop #10.

Well, the maps aren’t topographical and didn’t say that the trail from the falls to bus stop 10 was just about straight uphill, on a small sandy trail, right through the worst of the burned out area, so there was no shade.

But I did it.

Tomorrow, Tioga Pass.

Here’s a map of the route.

Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
Day 7
Day 8
Day 9
Day 10
Day 11
Day 12
Day 13