Nee's Journeys

Emigrant Wilderness – Gianelli Cabin trailhead to Toejam Lake – 07/11 – 07/12/09 On July 11 and 12th a group of six adventures headed out to Toejam Lake about an 8.5 mile hike. I was leading this trip as part of my local Sierra Club backpacking group. After weighing our backpacks and taking some happy pre-hike pictures we were off. The trail starts out gradually climbing through a forest and soon you come to the Burst Rock Lookout. From Burst Rock we had great views looking North at Castle and Cooper Peaks and the Three Chimneys. After taking a short stop at Burst Rock we carried on to Emigrant Pass. We then headed down the trail and came to a great slope that had a good number of wildflowers including some very colorful Paintbrush, Western Wallflower and Mule’s Ear. This slope would be a source of distraction and lots of picture taking on the way back, especially for me. We also saw lots of Lupine plants but they had about a week and a half to two weeks left before they starte...

Yosemite National Park - Bernice Lake - 07/18 - 07/19/09 Yosemite high country….one of my favorite places. A lot of my initial backpacking took place out of the Yosemite high country so I have an attachment to it. This trip would lead us past Vogelsang High Sierra Camp and over Vogelsang Pass to Bernice Lake. I’ve never gone beyond Vogelsang Lake and was very curious what it was like and if I might like to explore it more in the future. The victims for this trip….oops I mean trip participants were Curtis and Andrew. This would be the second backpacking outing for Andrew and he was prepared and ready to go with many many many snack bags which Curtis would later be thankful for since they contained little Snickers bars. We started hiking out from the Wilderness permit office along the Tuolumne River. The weather was really nice and it soon became evident that we were going to see many wildflowers. …thx goodness I was toting my SLR along. By mid-day the guys were timing how lo...

06/20-21/2009 - Tahoe National Forest - 5 Lakes Basin The first backpacking trip of the summer…it’s always so exciting. This was a Sierra Club Loma Prieta section trip that I was leading with Sanjeev. Since it was mid-June we decided to have the trip at a relatively low elevation and made it easy for those who needed to brush off the backpacking cobwebs….like me. So we chose 5 Lakes Basin which is located in Tahoe National Forest close to Emigrant Gap and about 20 miles east of Nevada City. I had hiked in this area a few years before in a heavy snow year at that same time in June luckily the snow level was below average this year so we could go higher up. We headed out on Saturday morning after we had a pre-hike weigh in contest. Two of us had packs that weighed 27 pounds and no one was above 35 pounds so we were set to go. Our entry point was the Carr Lake trailhead and there was no shortage of folks headed out. The weather was cool and partly overcast which I think played in o...

06/27/2009 - Emigrant Wilderness - Leopold Lake Where do I start with this trip? It was definitely an adventure for the books. This was the second trip of the backpacking season for me and definitely more challenging than the trip the week before. The plan was to start out from the Crabtree trailhead in Emigrant Wilderness and head up Tom’s Canyon x-country and head over to Leopold Lake. I had heard and read that this lake was really beautiful and I couldn’t wait to check it out. This trip was also an opportunity for me to try out my new Garmin 60cx which we would all soon fall in love with. We got an early start (early for me). We headed to the Serene Bean in Pinecrest to get our fill of coffee and unhealthy breakfast foods. We picked up our permit from the Summit ranger station where we were warned that there was snow above 8300 and that Chewing Gum Lake was surrounded by snow. Our destination sat at 8800 feet….hmmm should be interesting. After weighing our bags and trying de...