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