All I can say is, that looks cold out there.
By evening the temperature dropped steeply and we sat around in our kitchen sharing stories, food, and hot drinks. At about 9 pm, when my thermometer read about 15 degrees, I decided it was time for bed and crawled into my cozy -20 degree sleeping bag. I had a great night of sleep, like usual. I sleep better in a tent in the mountains than I do in my own bed at home.
My one rationalization for hiking the low country on the coast is I’d never get any sleep in the real mountains anyway.
Oh, Tom, you don’t have to go snow camping in the mountains to have a terrible, freezing night’s sleep. Take this past weekend at the Sunol backpack camp: I’ve never been so happy to have a troop of Boy Scouts announce the coming of morning!
By way of public service, Murietta Falls is just a trickle. The whole wilderness still felt very thirsty, because there’s barely a trace of all the recent rains.
I noticed the same thing at Black Diamond Mines … it wasn’t muddy at all (though that may have changed by now).
A few years back when we had a really rainy autumn (same year the Japanese climbers died at Yosemite), Henry Coe had so much water in the fork of the Coyote Creek on Hobbs Road at the base of the Shortcut that there was a rope strung across it for hikers to hold onto while crossing the creek, which was over waist-deep at New Years.
Last year, by contrast, was so dry that it’s taken all the rain we’ve gotten this year to make up the difference… probably won’t see that kinda water till February and the ground gets wet enough for run-off rather than absorption.
I crossed that creek at the base of the Shortcut just last Sunday and was able to do it with my hands in my pockets – it was little more than a trickle! Kind of surprised me, too.