Fourth Day, June 9, 2002, Volunteer Trail Crew

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Third and fourth day's hiking
Map of the third and fourth day's hiking. From the San Joaquin River to Florence Lake.
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Ray Eric Ron Ed and Steve Dolly/Shackelton Full view
At Florence Lake
Fourth day, at Florence Lake, Ray, Eric, Ron, Ed, Dolly/Shackelton and Steve.
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When we got to the east end of Florence Lake, we called the ferry and it came and picked us up and transported us back to the Florence Lake Store.

Notice that after several days of, at times, hard hiking and working, we are all still smiling! While waiting for the ferry, I got everyone's e-mail address and will send a copy of this CD to all of a very good trail crew.

Across Florence Lake Full view
Where we hiked out to.
Looking back from the store at Florence Lake at where we came from.
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Looking back on the last day. Well we made it! Our record for this trip is:
  1. One new water bar.
  2. Several water bars cleaned out.
  3. 27 trees removed from the 34 miles of trail we were on.
  4. Four great, but long, days hiking in a beautiful place with a very good crew.
After the hike, Shane had this to say on his web site about our trip:

"This is the Trail Crew Green Beret detachment. Hard core trail folk. They haul saws, sledges, axes in addition to their personal stuff up miles and miles of high-altitude backcountry. Special Forces Trail crew."

There a couple of surprising things that happened on the hike:

  1. We never had dusty boots! Normally in Sierra hiking you are hiking in dust half, or more, of the time. (This is what causes the well known "Sierra Suntan" that most hikers get!) This trip it was very rare (might have never happened) that we had good old Sierra dust to hike in.
  2. We only had mosquitoes for about 10 minutes of hiking on the whole trip.
Full view Repeat View
Store at Florence Lake.
Store at Florence Lake.Two store employees/bystanders, Dolly, Ray.
(34_75.jpg, photograph by Eric) I don't know why the full size view isn't working. Click here.

The store had our car keys which we retrieved and returned to the Edison Lake base camp for a nice lunch and our individual trips home. Shane had gotten our cars to the store for us and had given the keys to the store to keep for us.

End of the hike