Tinkle and I left Mammoth after saying goodbye to Daisy, who would be staying in town another day. It was pretty smoky from a nearby fire and while we’d been in Mammoth, ashes had been falling like snow over the whole town. The smoke got better as we got a little higher. That night, there were a ton of mosquitoes and we tried some advice from Husk, to run around the tentsite before getting in so that the mosquitoes can’t catch up. We did so, running in circles around the tents. I think it worked, but had better benefit of entertainment for the people at the next tentsite over.

The next day, Tinkle said that we were only 22 miles from Tuolomne Meadows, our next stop and the gateway to Yosemite. The passes that lay between us and there looked relatively easy as well. So began the challenge. Island pass was beautiful and as its name suggests, had a lot of water and therefore, a lot of mosquitoes. There were more of the things than I’d ever seen, before or since. There were clouds of them. I started keeping a kill count. On Donahue pass, a lady hiked up the other side and sat near us. After a couple of minutes, she offered us Fireball, from a Smartwater bottle. She had a liter of whiskey. A liter. We obviously had to help to decrease the weight she was carrying, so took her up on the offer. That lady was ready to party on the passes.

We descended for three miles, then it was all open meadows and fields to Tuolumne. It was a beautiful day and we made it by 6:30, before the store closed. That meant ice cream, beer, and fruit! As we left with our bounty, we ran into the gang! Twinkletoes, Jinx, Husk, Queso, Josh, and John had just hitched from Mammoth, because the smoke had gotten worse and was hard to hike in. It was really cool to camp with them that night and embarrass myself trying to play hackeysack. Mosquito kill count at the end of the day was 121.

In the morning, we tried and failed to obtain permits to climb Half Dome, one of Yosemite’s famous attractions. Instead, Tinkle and I tried for a while to hitch into the valley. It was one of our longest hitches, both in terms of how long it took to get and also of the ride itself. We got picked up by a Mammoth employee who had semi -recently torn her ACL, as well as broke her femur and tibia. We talked about this and many other things on the hour and a half drive into the valley. Once there, we walked to a waterfall among many, many other people. At this point, Tinkle and I got hungry, so spent a majority of our remaining time eating pizza and ice cream and drinking beer. The shuttles in the valley gave us a great excuse to walk as little as possible. We also met a few people and had to explain why we were carrying large backpacks. Most of the responses were confusion as to why we’d want to do what we’re doing.

We didn’t walk around much more, just towards the exit where we got a hitch almost immediately from another Mammoth employee! Go Mammoth employees! This guy was an avid snowboarder and burgeoning rock climber. He took us right back to Tuolumne, even though it was a bit out of his way. When we got out of the car, we noticed that Daisy Dukes was sitting right outside the store! That night, we watched the rangers perform songs before going to bed. Yosemite was a strange experience in that we spent the day how most tourists would, as though we were on vacation in the middle of a very weird and strenuous vacation. The PCT is nothing but a vacation, after all!