Walking California Revisited

Almost 6 years ago I embarked on a journey with my friend Brian that would take us from the Mexico border to Cedar Grove in Kings Canyon National Park on foot. We initially planned to hike the length of California on the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) in 3 months but for various reasons we stopped short but for a 4 day extension from Tuolumne Meadows to Sonora Pass (about 76 miles). All together we hiked 880 miles in the summer of 2000.

I find myself returning to that time very often, remembering the myriad of feelings and experiences. Mostly I am grateful I had the opportunity to go and to share the experience with a good friend. And I am always amazed at how so many people, especially my family supported and encouraged me to follow my wandering spirit. Now that I am embarking on my first log or journal of sorts since that summer, it's time to stroll down memory lane a bit. So I am posting a few photos taken on the trail and a link to the original web journal website on Fresno Bee.com (see below). Noone was really using the 'blog' term in those days and the journal entry posting process was much less automated - we emailed our entries via a digital-analog-digital phone line system and the FresnoBee.com posted the content to their site.

This trip back through time is just the beginning, or middle as it were. You see, I am planning to run my blog in reverse. I've been taking photos and hiking for a while and I thought I shouldn't only throw in what I've been doing this weekend each entry. I should go back through all the great experiences I've had hiking and traveling back at least 10 years but starting with the most recent. So I've got a backwards blog you might say. My 2000 trek is only somewhere in the middle. I've no intention to bore you with the Ots (as in Ot-6) version of the old guy bringing up a stack of old slide carousels from the basement. I have too much respect for your time and my own. But I hope to share with you just the most interesting or funny moments and build up what will become a sort of hiking guide to the Central Sierras so you can search through it for good places to visit yourself. There's a lot of beautiful places to see and don't let anyone tell you there's nothing to do around Fresno.

Walking California Site from 2000

And now for some more photos (these are ones that were never put up on the Walking California site or were since taken down..



All photos in this post were taken with an Olympus fixed lens point-and-shoot camera using Fuji Velvia 50 ISO film. Slides were scanned on a MicroTek ArtixScan film scanner.
More to come soon...