Details, details, details...

As the time drew near, we settled on a date in July (about the only one that would work for me). I took a look at the planned site and realized that it was not far from the place where my father died while climbing 37 years ago: Temple Crag.

This planted a new thought in my mind. For the last couple of years, I had been considering making a pilgrimage of sorts to the place where he died. I was not sure what the "pull" was, but it just seemed like a reasonable thing to do, and certainly had a lot more appeal than visiting a cemetery.

As fate would have it, once we started the process of getting permits, we found that we could only get a wilderness permit for the Little Lakes Valley for the Saturday night. This left us "homeless" Friday night, so I started exploring camp sites within striking distance of Temple Crag. The thought that was emerging was visiting Temple Crag on day one, then proceeding with the originally planned hike on Day 2.

This is what settled: We spent Friday night at Upper Sage Flat campground along Big Pine Creek. Friday afternoon we hiked to Temple Crag, or at least as close as we could get (we were delayed significantly by the fact that I failed to see the clearly written instructions for putting up our tent, costing us a lot of sunlight...). We broke camp Saturday morning and drove to the Little Lakes Valley trail head (Mosquito Flats in case you are interested in the details), then hiked in and spent the night at Chicken Foot Lake, and hiked out Sunday.