June 23rd - Cottonwood Pass to Crabtree Meadow Ranger Station

Woke up to another beautiful morning. Chicken Spring Lake, where many of our friends were staying, wasn't too far away (less than a mile). We filled up on water at the lake outlet and took a quick peek at the lake. Although nice, it wasn't as great as I thought. I have yet to be impressed with California lakes compared to Washington lakes. Nothing beats Washington's high alpine lakes!

The scenery continued to get better as the day went on. We continued to climb into the Sierras. Hiked past many a green meadow and saw lots of snow-capped mountains. Lunched aboved Rock Creek. Both Tom and I were starting to feel even more sluggish with our lack of food for lunch. I really was beginning to worry about how we were going to make it 10 days with the food that we had packed.

As fate would have it, after lunch we happened to walk by the Rock Creek Ranger Station sign - and there was a handwritten sign advertising "Free Food and a Cute Baby to Make You Smile". ha! Without missing a step - we made a bee-line to the backcountry ranger station. It was a cool log cabin set about 1/4 mile off the trail. There were 4 ranger milling around. Turns out the rangers had arrived in the last couple of days for the summer and they were working on cleaning out all the old food from the previous summer's ranger (hence, the free food). We were free to take any food that we wanted. Although all outdated and stale, we were hungry and jumped at the chance for the much-needed extra food. We scored a bag of granola, some kids graham cracker snacks, a dark chocolate bar, and a Cliff bar. Oh, we saw the cute baby too!

With our food bag even fuller, we were back off on the trail. Another couple big uphill and downhills and before we knew it we arrived at Crabtree Meadows Ranger Station. Since we decided not to carry bear cannisters, we have to camp at camps with bear boxes and this was the closest bear box to Mt. Whitney which we hope to climb tomorrow.

We were both impressed with the Crabtree Meadows camp. Although a popular camp spot - it was a beautiful, open woody area next to a meadow with a lovely creek. There were already probably 15 people set up in camp, but somehow we still found a place that was quiet and nice to set up our tent. Had a lovely dinner by the creek and washed up some clothes. Visited with the other people in camp - turned out they were all thru-hikers who climbed Mt. Whitney that day.