hmmmm.... a lot of photos...

i kind of figured as i need to leave the library soon and i can only upload photos here i'd just get as many in as i could - cos i can add text later if i get round to it...

this is a town shot... to resupply we hitch into towns. this generally involves a supermarket stop, where we sort out our next week's food - sometimes outside the supermarket... it's often a time where we meet up with other hikers too: in this shot there's some random dude, liz, funion (obscured), miaow miaow, charlie, drop dead, annie, jamz & pellet...



this is pellet taking a nap on kearsage pass... comfy looking rock...


this is the approach to kearsage pass... (i was a bit crook this day - and ended up with a vomiting migraine - (mate, the spinach enchiladas were a mistake...), great day to be sick - we were heading into lone pine and i could rest up well...




this is the view from my bed one night.. well, one of the many good views...




and this is my bed (well - a photo somewhere down below)... note the bear can, kindly loaned to me from the bear can loan programme; not much use for such things in australia... bear cans are supposed to be waterproof, however a couple of nights ago it snowed and rained on us all night, and i had to pour about 2 cups of water out of my bear can... could have been disastrous had i not been one day out of town... the sierras are a compulsory bear can area. to be honest i usually sleep with mine next to my head, so the bear's going to have to come right over and visit to get my food... (incidentally (and mostly irrelevantly), one of the great things i have discovered here in the land of freedom, orange cheese, corn syrup and endless refills of ordinary coffee [had my first good coffee this morning - the doubters are wrong - you can get good coffee in america, you've just got to look harder] is string cheese. do we have string cheese in australia? it looks like dodgey kraft cheese sticks, but it tastes like bocconcini and you split it and 'string' it as you eat it. it's fabulous, one of the greatest things i've discovered here...) (sorry, have reverted to my old habits of multiple brackets..)

also incidentally, while sitting here (for a ridiculously long time) in the mammoth lakes library, there is some kind of blue grassy band rehearsing in an adjacent room, playing guitars and violins and banjo style things - sounds great...











some of these shots are of the sheer quantity of water. i haven't particularly managed to catch it, but there's water raging down every slope, once i saw 5 torrents meeting up, and often the track is more like a creek, or waterfall...



amongst the photos below is a mule deer. i have now seen many many mule deer, including bucks with antlers and a little baby who was surprisingly small - like a small dog, with spots - nothing like a baby foal or calf, way way smaller...

one day while eating lunch, drop dead spied a coyote far below us on a frozen lake. we watched him for quite a while, very exciting because despite seeing their scats everywhere someone told me you rarely seen them (liz has since told me she's watched two on separate occasions, fossicking for food...)



somewhere in here there's a shot of the golden staircase... you kind of have to look closely to see the track, zigzagging back and forth... at the moment the pct doubles as the john muir trail, and there's some amazing engineering which has gone into the track. it's very very impressive, although we miss most of it as it's covered in snow...




i'm not sure if this is a woodpecker or a sapsucker - when i looked it up it was called something like a red breasted sapsucker - but i'm not sure if that's a woodpecker or not... it was really close, just industrially going about its work...