Loooouuud Nooooiiiiises!!!! - June 28

That's one of our favorite quotes from Anchorman. All the fellas are in Ron Burgundy's office complaining that the news station hired a woman and they're yelling. All Brick (slightly mentally delayed) yells is 'loooooud nooooiiiises!!'. Anyways, more on that later.

So we started today just shy of Marjorie Lake. We camped up high, near a stream that fed that lake, and the morning was pretty frigid. Our latest sleep-in yet. Maybe 6:30 or so. I woke Julia up and we grabbed some breakfast, cleaned up real good and got to hiking around 8:45AM. The morning was amazing. Such easy, mostly downhill walking with beautiful views of all the little lakes around us and the massive mountains that tower overhead. We know that we'll have to climb over one of them, eventually, but which one we never know until the climb begins. This morning's pass was Mather. A relatively easy one. It's 12000+ feet, but the majority of the climb up is so gradual you barely notice it, and it starts around 10000 feet. We had lunch at the top with Waffles, a Belgian, Hollywood, another Canadian named Jesse and an American named Tyler. Waffles had been around us most of the day. Him, Jesse and Tyker are a part of a foursome that includes another Canadian that left Independence earlier because he was on a deadline to meet his girlfriend in Mammoth. Anyhow, Waffles left the pass first and then we left about a half hour later. The rest of the day was descending, from the pass to about 8000 feet. Sometimes it's nice and you just walk, but the majority is steep, with big rocks to go over, steps to walk down and downed trees to climb over or find a route around. We're just now getting to the area that suffered the massive windstorm last November that caused thousands of trees to fall. The crews have done an amazing job clearing it all, but there are still a lot of trees that have fallen on the trail that we must navigate around, over or under.

In the late afternoon we were descending down along the river (can't remember the name) and Waffles was in front of us. After I stopped for a quick pee break, he was probably about a minute ahead. A few minutes later I saw a bear! I stopped for a second to check him out and see where he was heading. The guy was literally walking the trail! Julia was a little hesitant to move down the trail at all at first, but once he was out of sight we continued slowly. Again we saw him up ahead and so we started making loud noises so that he would at least know we were there. Bears are more or less content leaving you alone, they just don't do well with being startled, and if you've got food they want, they'll challenge you for it! We were literally yelling 'looooooud nooooiiiises!!!!' and laughing too. I yelled very loud once and he looked back at me and then kind of jogged off the trail to the right. He slowly went out of sight, but we continued to talk aloud, mostly gibberish. About a minute later we came up on Waffles, just setting up for dinner, probably not the best idea. He must've heard our loudness and thought we were insane, but once we informed him of the bear he was more than happy to pack up his dinner and move on. The three of us had dinner together a couple of miles down the trail. On the way though, we saw another bear, a smaller one in the distance. We are in bear country! Neon and OnAMove came by during dinner and we let them know about the bears. They continued down the trail and we caught up with them a little later ad they were by a campfire with Natty, Navi, Snow Turtle and her boyfriend, can't remember his name. We stayed there and chatted with them for a bit and then moved on. It was evening now and getting darker. We went another few miles, past Neon and OnAMove and are camped beside a meadow at around mile 828.

Tomorrow morning we climb to Muir Pass!!

What a day!