Heading out on the John Muir Trail

Here we are on August 19th in Yosemite Valley. Check out the last location on the sign: our destination (in case you can't read it, it says "Mount Whitney via the John Muir Trail: 213 miles). If you're wondering why it looks like someone dumped a bucket of water over my head, we'd doused ourselves at the fountain at the foot of the trail. It was 95 degrees or more in the Valley, even though it was already 4pm. (I thought back on that feeling many times as we walked from summer into fall and lowlands up to alpine cold.)

It had been a long day. We woke up at 3:55AM and walked two miles in the dark to the permit office in the hopes that we could be the first in line to get the coveted permits (the ranger had told us the day before that there were permits for three people) to start the trail there, instead of 30 miles along at Tuolumne Meadows. Most of Yosemite Valley was asleep. We saw 2 little lights up on Half Dome -- climbers' headlamps. A car or two passed us and we worried: what if those cars were also on the way to the wilderness permit office and we were not the first?

Indeed, as we approached the little wooden cabin we heard talking and saw the dark shapes of 5 hikers already in line. They had gotten up at 4, also, but they had a car so they were there before us. Despite our disappointment, we struck up a conversation and settled in for the long wait until the 11AM permit time to see if somehow we would be lucky. As the sun came up, more and more hikers arrived, crest-fallen as they saw how many of us were already in line. "JMT?" they would ask. Everyone would nod. This was a popular trail and not all of us were going to be able to start today.

We were lucky. Some permit holders had not showed up so the first eight of us (Lisa and I were numbers six and seven) were good to go, as long as we started today. We rushed to wrap up our trip preparation, including mailing our cellphones back to Lisa's mom's house, and finally got on the trail in the mid-afternoon, completely exhausted.

We were doing it! Finally, after years of dreaming, months of planning, and a final frenzied 48 hours of travel and packing, here we were, climbing up out of Yosemite Valley towards Vernal Falls among  hundreds of day hikers from all over the world. We stood out with our large overnight packs among the fanny-pack-wearing tourists. Some stopped and pointed to our backpacks: "Where are you headed?"
"Mount Whitney!" It was fun watching their faces as they tried to understand what that meant: how far away it was and how we could be out in the woods for so long.

Looking back as we climbed up out of Yosemite Valley the first afternoon.