Day 71
26.3 miles
Echo lake chalet to Richardson lake through the Desolation wilderness
This morning a kind trail angel named Layloni brought us to the trail head. There was a list of trail angel numbers at HWY 50 on a post and she is the coordinator. She said she checks in with people each year to see if they still want to be on the list and she puts the lists at the trailhead. Some of the trail angels allow tenting in their yard or give rides to airports etc. Layloni said she has been doing this for eight years. We were so grateful especially since she took us to the trailhead at 6:30 in the morning. We had 26 miles to do so we had to get a good staRt.
Desolation wilderness recently changed their regulations on bear storage so we had decided to just walk right through the whole thing without stopping. Layloni told us that there is such a high density of bears in this area because the fire last year pushed the bears out of their normal habitat. Poor bears.
There wasn’t more elevation in today’s schedule than we usually do and we still got to enjoy the lakes we passed. I soaked my feet in two lakes and we ate lunch on top of Dicks pass. Lake Aloha is one of my favorite backcountry lakes. It has a snack drop of tall mountains that seem so close across the lake. The lake reflects not only the blue sky but the whiteish peaks and seems almost like marble.
More of the second half of the day was tree covered which was really nice to hike through the heat. We camped at Richardson lake, there are a lot of pretty established sites here but watch out for the dead trees.
I remember stopping here when we were hiking in the TRT and someone had left a fire unattended. Not the best thing to do in a dry forest!
It was fun to walk through in one day a section that had taken us two days when we had done the Tahoe Rim Trail. Many parts of the trail felt familiar and homey.
ashleyisoutside 