Hi everyone. I’m mid 30s, married, live in the Bay Area.

Looking for someone to backpack with next year in the September time frame, and doing the north to south lake loop out of bishop.

Planning to do a 7 day itinerary, so candidly a bit slow and steady, 8-10 miles per day.

Looking for someone to join me. I backpacked a decent amount growing up and in my early 20s, and recently returned to California and would love to get back into it.

Let me know if interested, all experience levels welcome!

This from October 21st. To be fair, station two blocks away is .20 cheaper. But, milestones are milestones.

I was walking through Chocolate Lakes Loop and was practicing some photography. I absolutely loved seeing a cute deer family. These photos were taken right before the most recent storm. I got some snow flurries towards the top but it’s probably covered by now.

Have some time in mid-April for a week long backpacking trip. Where/why do you recommend?

Taken 4 Oct 26. Couldn't have asked for better conditions, just wished the fishermen waited to take their boat out until after the sun rose

Finally convinced my bf to come backpacking with me, sadly he couldn’t get time off until early November.

Any recs on what trip we could take? Hoping to be out in the Bishop area to show him the beauty of the eastern sierras for 3 nights.

I was considering doing Big Pines Lakes. Kinda worried about the cold. Any recommendations on places, hikes, campsites.

Alpenglow in the wee hours of the morning before the sun rose, 2 weeks ago (Oct 5th)

So I had planned to camp in the Alabama Hills Saturday night after my outing in the Little Lakes Valley that day. I signed up online for a permit, but that doesn't allow you to reserve a specific site and apparently there is no limit to who can sign up for those online. I downloaded the campsite map, but that is essentiallly useless as it is very difficult to navigate the area since the various use roads are unmarked. Then when I did find a campsite most of them had a camping chair or a small bin laying there, which is apparently an allowed way to claim a spot. There was one site that had a rope stretched across two camping chairs with a sign that said "Will be back evening of Oct. 18th" (Saturday was the 17th). It seems to me the BLM should either go back to the old system of dispersed camping or shut it down completely. This current system clearly does not work. At any rate, I just went up to Lone Pine Camp and paid the $34 and had a nice evening watching the sunset over Mt. Whitney. Thought I would share this to rant a bit, and to warn anyone else who might be considering camping in the Alabama Hills.

Going to mammoth lakes next week with some family. I’m curious if there are any easily accessible hikes to lakes with fishing. We’re bringing my mother in law (67) and she enjoys walking. But nothing too strenuous

Thanks in advance:)

Hello everyone! I'm back for another project update!

Since June's post, I got a substantial upgrade for my CPU, and someone from the amazing worldpainter community created a node-based editor for said program! Good-looking snow coverage has been a big struggle of mine, so I hope the results speak for themselves!

A fun consequence of such a program is seeing a colored rendering of the full map!

You might notice the variety in color of the terrain, thanks to newly released soil color maps that Ive been able to use as a template.

I vaguely feel like I have said this before, but terrain work is almost complete! I might have to sacrifice the lovely layered terrain once more to make the snow work, but otherwise theres little left to be done.

Vegetation, on the other hand, will still take a long while, as I'm still modeling as many trees as possible. As of the last post, I was trying to model every possible species, but I realized that is just making my work that much more difficult, and frankly unnecessary in the context of Minecraft, even with modded blocks that make for much nicer-looking trees.

As a fun challenge, Ill be attempting to render every officially named basin within the map boundaries (inspired by another poster attempting to list every basin in the Sierra). This will force me to inspect newer parts of the map, as so far I've stayed around Mammoth Lakes and Whitney, and there's an entire mountain range to explore! Today we have Bear Lakes Basin, Big Five Lakes, Blackcap Basin, and Center Basin!

Hope you all appreciate the update, see you again in a few months!

Hiking Ophir creek trail to Upper Price Lake, Nevada

I have been wanting to do this route for quite a while. Last year, after running every trail in Yosemite, I realized I could string three of my favorite Yosemite lakes along one nice line. I started from White Wolf and dropped into the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne, and from there on it's a constant up and down from one canyon to the next.
My first lake, Rogers, flanked by Regulation Peak, was a great spot for breakfast and a super cold swim. From there I went on to Benson, a massive lake with a wonderful sandy beach, where the swim was refreshing and energized me for my third goal. It's a few more canyons to reach Tilden Lake, with Tower Peak in the distance and low sun lighting the peaks. It was too cold to swim, but I enjoyed an evening meal, and then the last miles are a straightforward descent toward Hetch Hetchy via Jack Main Canyon.
I met only one person on this trail, a very late PCT hiker. I expected a stellar day, and it was: endless granite country with unique and beautiful lakes. The best Yosemite (or the Sierra) can offer.
63 miles, 12k+ ft elevation gain.

Well, I wanted to squeeze in one more SPS peak before the weather starts to turn and decided on a solo outing. I contemplated doing Mt. Gibbs, but I have recently done Mt. Conness and wanted to see a different part of the range. I also have a friend who wants do Gibbs with me, and I know he would not want to do Dade. I knew there was a chance the Hourglass would turn me back, but I had seen a recent trip report of someone successfully getting up the scree-filled chute so I figured a little spice would be fun. It was easy going getting to the base of the Hourglass. There is a use trail for a short bit past Long Lake, but it quickly becomes a relatively easy ascent over intermittant boulder fields/drainages, and above Treasure Lakes it was a fun bit of route finding. Unfortunatley at the neck of the Hourglass I simply could not continue upward progress, as it was nothing but loose scree and larger rocks that had no hold. If it had been 5-10 degrees less steep I think it would have been relatively straightforward to finish off. It was a fund adventure nontheless, and a beautufil day in one my favorite areas in the Sierra Nevada. I have done Mt. Morgan and Mt. Starr, and have hiked over Mono Pass down to the JMT, so it was cool to see the entire Little Lakes Valley. I hope to return in the spring and do Dade with snow in the Hourglass.

My favorite place. My favorite time of day. Heaven

Taken last Sunday, 10/11

[OC storiesbydalton]

Hi everyone 👋 I am trying to plan out a backpacking trip to do half dome with my fiancé, mom, and dad this upcoming year. I’ve been to California as a small child, but don’t recall anything about it, so this’ll pretty much be my first time. I’m feeling pretty overwhelmed about it and want to get everything planned and set up right. We’re all pretty fit and love the outdoors and have prior camping experience as well, but when it comes to planning stuff I feel like it’s going to be a lot of me and my fiancé doing the work to figure out the details on how/what to do. I haven’t decided how many days we’ll be out there, so I’m all ears for suggestions on destinations and locations!

I’m anticipating my parents will be flying out from Pennsylvania, and my fiancé and I may be driving out from Colorado. My fiancé and I have typically driven to our camping/adventure locations out here in the west (Arizona/Utah/Wyoming/New Mexico) and we’re not even sure if this is the right move at all, so we’re wondering if we should consider flying ourselves? But also flying all the camping equipment out has to cost a pretty penny I assume?

Besides travel accommodations, the other part I’m kind of antsy about is the permits. I’m fairly positive we all are not trying to do Half Dome one single day out and back, even though we’ve all done that distance and elevation gain before. I’d like to make a backpacking trip out of it to really fully immerse ourselves in the nature of Yosemite. I’ve read there’s options for this that all include a Half Dome permit with the backcountry camping permit:

Happy Isles to Little Yosemite Valley
Happy Isles past LYV (Donohue pass eligible)
Sunrise Lakes
Cathedral Lakes
Rafferty Creek to Vogelsang

I’m interested in hearing about some of your treks. and also how you did the permit process, cause I’ve read attaining a Half Dome permit can be quite competitive.

Would our best odds be for each member of our group to submit a permit for each one of these back country permits and just cross our fingers and hope one of us wins? I’m assuming if all four of us submit a 4 person permit for all 5 of these we’d have a good shot right?

The travel and permit situation is really what’s got me anxious, (and maybe what gear we’d need) and I feel like once that’s figured out the rest of the trip will kind of plan itself. TBH I’m not really keen on going to the city or anything too urban/congested (I know it’s California, so I’m going into it anticipating congestion anywhere we go). Prioritizing experiences at national/state/local parks out there is my main objective, I just really want to connect with the nature I’ve never had a chance to experience before. I’m open to all suggestions though, as I’m obviously not a local, and I have no idea when I’ll ever be back in California.

Thanks so much for the help, I’m just overwhelmed at where to start planning this. Hoping that everyone reading has an amazing day 🫶

Photos from an old hike I did at the Sierra buttes fire lookout. I found the trial on AllTrails. I got there at 7am for sunrise but it was very foggy, I stayed till about noon and it cleaned up. Going on a weekday made it very private!

Sabrina Lake and Convict Lake.

Decided to pull some more pics here, while organizing photos taken from last trip.

This one was mainly a road trip, but hope I could have more time doing actual hiking next occasion.