Just back this Saturday evening (hey, looks like it is now Sunday morning) from a five-day trip to the eastern Sierra. This was a trip that almost didn’t happen, and actually did not happen according to the original plan. We originally planned a week-long pack trip into the upper Kern River basin, but those plans were scrapped at the last moment due to a variety of circumstances. Instead a group of three of us dialed back our plans and came up with a shorter trip to the lakes of Sabrina Basin. However, the night before I cracked a tooth! Fortunately, I have a cooperative dentist, and he saw me first thing in the morning on the day I was to leave. I’ll spare you all the dental details, but suffice it to say that he patched things up enough that I was on the road at 2:30 p.m. to rendezvous with my hiking partners at the Four Jeffrey campground that night at 9:00 p.m.

The next morning we headed up the trail out of Sabrina Lake and over the next four days we managed to visit a whole series of alpine lakes: Blue, Topsy Turvy, Sailor, Midnight, Moonlight, and a few others. We had some slightly challenging conditions when an unusual weather system passed over the northern Sierra, bringing rather high winds and colder than usual temperatures throughout the range. On the plus side, the cold seemed to suppress the mosquitoes – and we had a rare conjunction of peak wildflowers and few mosquitoes.

There are still some earlier photos in the queue, but photographs from this trip should start to show up here in the next week or so.