After a lovely warmer, drier night (my bid to sleep at a lower elevation paid off), I walked down the last few thousand feet, the last handful of miles, to the trailhead at Road’s End. Descending into Kings Canyon in the morning was beautiful as it was steadily illuminated in the strengthening morning sun. It’s a classic Sierra valley, u-shaped and flanked by steep granite walls, carved out of the earth by a glacier some 12000 years ago. And now here I was, a little wee atom moving slowly down its side, all these eons later.
As I descended, at around 6000 feet I picked up a hearty cadre of face flies–so glad to know I would get one more chance to hang with them before ending, and I finished to the fanfare of their irritating whine in my ears and whipping them away from my face.
I was walking toward the road, thinking I would start the walk in to Cedar Grove, six miles west, because it was early and it didn’t seem like a hitch would be forthcoming, when I ran into a pair of other hikers who were sitting by the side of the road waiting to hitch. We stopped to chat and as we were a talking a car drove by and stopped to pick all three of us up. (It was guy who had just started a long, twelve day trip into the wilderness but came out almost instantly to go buy a headnet because the face flies were so bothersome.)
In Cedar Grove, I had a shower, did a load of laundry, and have eaten their snack bar meals for most of the day. Tomorrow I’ll catch a ride a couple hours west to Fresno and fly home–I’ll be landing in Seattle around 8:30p. Back home.
Descending into Kings Canyon
The end
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