So what's next? Since then we've been doing some anxious relaxing back here in Ridgecrest as we wait for Monday's mail and the big batch of dehydrated food that will bring. We've been reading every trail report we can get our hands on and I've been getting very handy at loading the daily snow analysis into Google Earth to scrutinize the the daily changes in the snow pack. The whole situation has been driving us nuts as we contemplate every imaginable combination of biking / hiking etc that would somehow get the whole trail hiked before heavy snow fall at the north end of the trail or back down here (e.g., if we we were to "burn" snow melt time by biking north to Canada to hike south). For the moment, Tina's concluded that she's just going to go straight ahead into the snow, ice, and rushing water to see for herself how things are!
Assuming she can fit all 10 days of food in her bear canister, and that everything else can somehow get into or onto her pack, and that she can carry the result load, the plan is to get Tina back onto the trail sometime tomorrow afternoon so that she can spend the night re-acclimating around the 10,000 foot level. If that works out the next day will hold a full day hike to the base of Mount Whitney to set up for a summit attempt on Wednesday. From there, it'll be onward for another week to VVR or out earlier via Kearsarge Pass if the 10 day load just won't work (it's looking bleak tonight as Tina packs and repacks).
On Tuesday or maybe Wednesday I'll be headed out on the bike for either VVR or Bishop -- I haven't decided yet.
In a strange turn, it looks like we'll be taking Sweep & Tripp up to Horseshoe Meadow with us. We originally met them at Hiker Town and then bumped into them again last weekend at a McDonalds we stopped at in Isabella Lake while we were on our way to Monterey. They were just about to catch a bus to Bakersfield as the first leg of a long journey to Soquel, a town very close to Monterey! So instead they hopped in with us and made our own trip much shorter too. Anyway, the strange turn is that when I wrote Tripp today for some of her Sierra snow knowledge I discovered they were planning to drop a vehicle off at Walkers Pass *tomorrow* and get a ride to Horseshow Meadows from a friend who was going to spend the day driving up from LA and back. So now the stars have aligned again and it's going to be easy to fetch them on our own way to Horseshow Meadows -- a classic trail coincidence! :)
/David