Muir Wilderness

Upon suggestion from another member in the webshots community, I entered this picture in their weekly competition this week. The theme is creative lighting. Now, I didn't intentionally think of the lighting when I fired off this shot, but I was thinking how pretty it was, lol.

This was Alpine Col and Muriel Peak which my dad and I had backpacked over the day before. That was a memorable trip. It was just him and me and I think it was a three-day trip. He must have taken quite a bit of time off that year because I have a lot of pictures from vacations we took in 1992. And no, I didn't have a digital camera then... I scanned these in from 4x6 prints and used photoshop to get the majority of the dust specks and fingerprints off.

Here's some other pics from that trip...

The lake we camped at the first night. I'm not positive, but I think it was Echo Lake. At least that's what our plan was to be at overnight. There was a very tiny place of flat land and that green stuff was about all there was for soft ground around the lake. We didn't sleep on that though, we slept on a large boulder... the grassy area would have been wet and therefore uncomfortable and possibly have mosquitos, although I don't really remember them. We might have been too high up for that.


This is the direction we headed off in the morning. That big hunk of rock is called Mt. Wallace... some nutburgers climb that for the fun of it just to get to the top... I soooo don't get it. I mean look at all the "little" rocks down below that came off of that sucker... I wouldn't want to be coming down with one of those things! As it was, I nearly fell down a very long way trying to climb down from Echo Col above Echo Lake. That was the way the "trail" went. See next picture... that was looking back up after I got down. Towards the top of all that scree were large boulders and it was a balancing act ala Wiley Coyote.



We had planned (or rather, he had) on going down around Black Giant (another mountain crazy climbers like) but since we didn't go as fast as planned, we cut off towards Muir Pass instead. That was a cool place. Here's a shot of my dad (unintentionally) tipping his hat to the Muir Hut the Sierra Club built there for stranded wilderness folks to survive in if a snowstorm were to come up suddenly.

It was cool, but smelled like pee... some people are so rude!

This is the Black Giant we opted to go to the north of (closer side) rather than going all the way around that one (off to the right of the photo).


This is Mount Humphreys as seen from Muriel Lake... we didn't climb that either, although I think maybe my dad or brother may have been on there. I've backpacked around this area on another trip, but I don't think I was ever actually ON it.


This shot is taken from the same place as the first picture posted... except the afternoon before.


Here, I'll put two small ones side by side to compare... that's fun!


That afternoon and evening some wicked cool clouds came up in one direction. They're called lenticular clouds (learned that a few months earlier in a weather class at college). They stuck around for a long time until after the sun went down.


In a different direction, this was the view.


It was beautiful that night... unfortunately the last night before hiking several miles back to the van and then driving back home. I'm not really sure how many miles we went, I'd guess about 25... not an extreme distance, but hey, it was above 10,000 feet most of the time!