Mile 906.5 to mile 911.5 : Reds Meadow to The Devil's Postpile
Mileage : 5
Today was a frustrating day. I got a very late start as i spent most of the morning trying to find my sunglasses, which i thought i'd lost. More than 2 hours were spent turning the apartment upside down and revisiting the places i could have left them the day before. Luckily they turned up safe and sound before long, but by then my final morning chores had been delayed by amost 3 hours. By the middle of the afternoon though i was back up at Reds Meadow ready to go, and even with a replacement hiking pole, and looking to catch up with the rest of PRT, who had a 3 hour head start on me. Before getting back on the trail i had to make a quick stop at the Devil's Postpile. The Devil's Postpile is a world famous rock formation formed several hundreds of millions of years ago when a fissure opened in the granite rock which typifies the Sierra Nevada mountains range and brought a huge volume of magma up to the surface. The volume was so great it formed a lake which cooled very gradually and homogeneously resulting to incredibly regular hexagonal columns being formed. During the last ice age, a glacier tore half of this formation away, revealing the remainder when the ice age came to an end. The only place i have seen anything remotely similar is at the Giants Causeway in Northern Ireland, and it's difficult to know which is the more spectacular. The formation was very nearly dynamited at the beginning of the last century when local industry managed to get it removed from the newly created Yosemite National Park with the intent of daming the nearby river. Luckily for the American public, and the world at large, the site became part of a new series of National Monuments thus preserving the site for future generations. After alternating for several minutes between taking pictures and swatting mosquitoes minutes i pushed on up the trail to the JMT - PCT junction. The PCT and the JMT follow the same trail through most of the Sierra, but they split briefly north of Reds Meadow and i decided to follow the JMT up to Thousand Island Lake as it is supposed to be most scenic. Not far past the junction i bumped into Chick-Chack, Starfox, Lighthouse, and another couple whose names i forget, and decided to call it a day as by now the light was fading. It would have been nice to close the gap to PRT a bit more, but equally i hadn't seen this bunch in a while so i decided to camp with them and attempt to catch my group up the next day.
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| The Devil's Postpile |
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