I sure hope this was someone's dog since I saw these prints following the trail for a LONG while. No claw marks though, so I suspect it was a mountain lion.


The Dusy Basin is a veritable playground of rivulets, snow patches, boulder fields, crystal clear lakelets, and of course towering mountains. I had it all to myself, except for the deer.


Rivulet with fast-melting snow bridge.


OK, this is freaking weird. There is a saying that goes "Everything Works Out on the Trail." (I guess this doesn't apply to relationships, buhhhh... well there are still almost 2,000 miles to go, so I say it aint over till the fat lady sings, and believe you me, there are NO fat ladies hiking this far) In any case, two days before I took this pic I was going the long way around a river crossing that looked like it was gonna make my feet wet and unhappy. It became one of those shortcuts that take WAY longer than if you'd just sucked it up and taken your shoes off in the first place. Anyways, I had climbed and climbed above the rocks to the left and finally spotted a fallen log that I could cross over the raging torrent, perfect except that it was down a twenty foot cliff. No problem, I've dealt with cliffs before, right? So I start downclimbing and get myself into a hairy little predicament. Hanging there with one arm and one leg, I decide it's time to ditch the old monkey on my back and toss the pack down ahead of me so that if I fall, it's only to my doom and not to my death. Logical. So I remove the pack from one arm and -kerplunk,- there goes my Nalgene bottle. Now this isn't just a bottle (Yes I KNOW it is just a bottle but bear with me), I found this thing lying outside the Railway Campus in Auckland, New Zealand in front of my Land Rover Seymore. That was in 2001. Since then it's been with me everywhere and acquired a load of cool stickers, several of them just on this trip. Well, now it's swimming with the fishes somewhere along the watershed of the Kings River. I had been using the bottle to scoop water, then treat it with my Steripen. Now I had to take out my pot from my pack and treat the water in there, then pour it into my Platypus. What a pain, plus my overall water carrying capacity went down by a liter, which didn't make me feel any safer. SO, I was planning on going to an outfitter in Bishop when I got over Bishop Pass, but WHAT HO? HARK, A LONELY NALGENE MAGICALLY SITTING BY THE SIDE OF THE TRAIL! DOTH I DREAM? NO, I DOTHN'T! Seriously, what is that all about? There I am, freshly in need of a water bottle, and there is one just sitting pretty wayyyy the hell up in the mountains all by itself. I yelled out four or five times but all I got were echoes. This was an omen from the Force that the Mountainjedi was on the right track in his quest for whatever it is he's questing for. Well, it may or may not have been such, but it's fun to believe that. So what's the nuttiest part of this? The bottle is green, my favorite color.


Having a post-magic-bottle-finding religious experience on Bishop Pass, knocking on the door of 12,000 feet.