Hot Shower $5.00. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
An inviting sign on a door at a trailhead packstation in the Eastern Sierra Nevada.
I have been a Sierra backpacker for a long time. How long, you ask? A significant number of decades. My first backpacking trip, something I had dreamed about for a few years, was the summer I turned 16. Two buddies and I headed off into the Desolation Wilderness for something like five days. Unsupervised. (I still cannot believe that my parents allowed this.) Both friends had at least some backcountry experience, one with his family and one in the Boy Scouts. But this was all entirely new to me.
Often we think of the peak moments in the backcountry, the astonishing sunrises, climbing to the summit of a peak, and encounter with wildlife, visiting a place to which few others have been. Or perhaps we tell “hero stories” — the time I took a five day pack trip with a broken toe, my first solo (two weeks long), bad weather, getting lost. But the truth is that a lot of the experience is based on some pretty simple pleasures: sitting on a comfortable rock as the day ends, eating that freeze-dried food out of the pot, traveling for days with friends… and that shower at the trailhead when you return from a week or more in the backcountry.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.
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