The Planning Phase:

Planning a trip such as a through-hike on the John Muir Trail can be a difficult task. There are the logistics of how many days to take, where to camp to setup for the passes, how much food to take and where to do the re-supply. Even trying to figure out whether we go north to south or south to north is difficult. You also need to figure out how to get to the trailhead and how to get picked up at the end.

Mike lives in Northern California and I live in Southern Nevada. So it's not like we can get together over the weekend and do some planning. E-mails and web-sites can help out a lot in planning a trip like this. I was also lucky that Mike had just recently done the trip and we were able to gain from that experience. We decided to do our re-supply through Muir Trail Ranch. This will be on about our 9th day into the trip. I'm will be looking forward to the re-supply and we are trying to be a little creative on the food to go into the cache bucket. I have read many stories of people watching others open up their caches and wishing they had thought of that. Were thinking of some canned fruit and maybe some beer!

One of the nice things about today's software is being able to transmit pictures and ideas back and forth via email. It's also nice to be able to do gear research and trip planning through the various sites on-line. The backpacking forums and trail journals are also nice to look at to see what you will be up against. My brother and I used National Geographic Topo Map software which allowed us to come up with various ideas for the trip. Unfortunatley this software is no longer available. We would trade files back and forth to come up with our trip plan. This software gives you the ability to trace the trail on the map and come up with distances, elevation profiles and even add notes. You can even print out your maps on waterproof paper for out on the trail. We will be using this approach when we leave. We have been using that to come up with the 9 plus 7-day itinerary. It also helped us gauge how to setup for lunch at Muir Trail Ranch at the re-supply and setup for each days hike. One of the other things we looked to do was setup lunch, dinner and our camp sites where there would be good fishing. Did I mention we both like to fly fish? There are many good books on fly fishing the John Muir Trail. One by Ralph Cutter and one by Steve Back. I even used Topo to display fish symbols along the way with notes on where and what types of fish are in each stretch of water. I have a link of this on this site if you want to download the Topo Map file: Fly Fishing Along The Trail!. The data for this map was taken from Steve Beck's Trout-Fishing the John Muir Trail.

So the trip is planned and at the time of this report, is still a ways away (a little over 5 weeks!). The snow is still packed in the Sierra's but is melting faster this year than last. Mike and I have both been monitored the Snow Pack Summary from the stations along the route. It looks to be another full run-off year and I'm sure the mosquitoes will be in full force. DEET will definitely be required! Most of the gear and food is bought and the final trimmings of the pack and gear are being done. Just how much more am I willing to spend to drop the next ounce of weight?

Conditioning for Our Trip

For a detailed account of our trip please refer to the Journals section of this site!