A thru-hike attempt

The next 3 days were like Groundhog Day. The same routine was repeated over and over. Get up early in the morning so that I could start hiking by 5-5:15 am and get over the pass before the sun became stronger and then, hike as quickly as possible to the bottom of the next pass. The one great difference now was that I had Guy's company and that was extremely invaluable. Having someone to hike with, especially the tough sections, is so good and he was a great hiking companion. The mental effort put in to cross the passes would have been at least 2-3x, if not for Guy's company. Many thanks to him! I am just going to post some photos with comments.    Going up to Muir Pass    Muir Hut on the top of the Pass Ice bridges that one has to be careful while crossing. If it breaks and you fall in, the best is you will get wet and the worst is you can get pulled under by the water stream Trail by the side of a frozen lake belo

The next one - Pinchot Pass - was about 13+ miles away 🙄 from where I had camped on D-39. Yes, it was far away and that would mean I could only reach it later in the morning & hence, a painful traverse across slushy snow-fields and a lot of post-holing. To minimise the pain, I decided to start real early @ 3:45 am. First night hiking experience and it was not that different, especially since the trail was rather straight forward. There was one larger water crossing, but that was not deep, but just wide. And the sun started showing up an hour later anyway. This was one rather wobbly bridge which reminded me of the Tacoma Narrows "Galloping Gertie" bridge as I was walking across 🙂.   After a very long hike and unfortunately, a few post-holing incidents later, this is almost to the top of Pinchot Pass (PP) Finally found a marmot that was not camera-shy on top of the pass. These large rodents are rather crafty l