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 Most of the summer school trip of 1977 was spent hiking into the Minarets Wilderness area. If your looking for this, it's now called the Ansel Adams Wilderness area.We followed the John Muir trail for a while and then broke off from it and moved up towards the minarets, skirting past Mt. Banner and Mt. Ritter. Along the way, we did ecoli bacteria studies in all the lakes we came in contact with to see how polluted they were. What we found was somewhat startling at the time. All the lakes we tested, with the exception of Iceberg Lake at the base of the Minarets, had ecoli bacteria counts high enough that the Health Department would have chlorinated the water had they been in the area. Pretty sad to say the least. Wednesday and Thursday of that week were spent trying to stay dry as a fierce summer storm descended upon us and drenched us. The first night the storm blew in, we had been staying up above treeline so we got pretty wet.  Fortunately, the sun came out the next day to help dry us and our gear off before another set of rain showers forced us back down in the trees for the remainder of the trip. It was a fun trip made a little soggy by the rain but tempered by the fact that I got some pretty good shots. I'll probably put some more from this trip on another page when I get the chance to look through my photo box. I have to tell you one last story though. When we came back down into Bishop, California, I bought a copy of the LA Times just to catch up on the news of the day. When I noticed the front picture showing twenty white Cadillacs in downtown Memphis, I said to myself, "I wonder who died in Country and Western?" Looking farther along in the caption I realized the funeral procession was for Elvis. So anyway, I missed all the hoopla over his death, which is fine because I'm sure the media beat it to death. Hey, they still are. If you have any comments about this page, please sign my guestbook.
Next California site. Back to the California Page. This backpacking trip also included stops at Devils Postpile and Manzanar.
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This page was last updated on October 14, 2000
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