Day 62-July 9

21.6 miles

We woke up this morning to a smoky view. The sights of the mountains we could see while eating dinner last night were gone. The near hills I could just barely see the outline of. As we started hiking through a meadow, the smoke looked like heavy fog over the trees and it burned our throats and noses. We knew the fire was a long ways away. A friend had contacted her mom who said the fire was on the opposite side of the park in the Mariposa grove of sequoia trees. I was very sad to hear about these thousand year old trees going up in flames. This is why we want to thru hike things now before lands are destroyed by natural disasters or it becomes too dangerous to hike.

Soon we met two rangers coming down the trail. I thought they were there to tell us we had to leave the trail. They were just checking permits and if we had bear cans or not.

Recently, Kevin listened to a podcast by thru hikers that describes how the future of thru hiking will begin to include fire closures, road walks, and perhaps not being able to walk every mile between the southern and northern terminuses of long trails. This is disheartening as we have already seen evidence of this happening in the last few years. Understanding our earth and how to care for it is so important.

Since there was so much smoke, we tried our best to push more miles today to get away from it. The passes were so steep and coming down Benson pass was rocky and difficult to go fast over the uneven trail. We ended up camping at Benson lake which had a nice breeze to keep away the mosquitoes and a mostly blue sky since the wind had changed to keep the smoke away from us.