Sierra City, CA - mile 1,197.5

Greetings from Sierra City, a cool old mining town tucked into the mountains.  It has a library, a general store, a few inns & taverns, a post office & a few other cool shops & stops all crammed into the same historic buildings that have been here since the gold mining boom in the 1800's.  Our favorite place here, though, is of course The Red Moose Inn, owned by Bill & Margaret, who cater almost entirely to hikers.  They have created a lovely little hiker oasis & last night was our second night here in town.  The hike out of here is basically straight uphill & quite exposed so we are spending the day here & hiking out this evening, once it cools down a bit.

Bears?  Technically, no, we have "seen" no more bears since the young guy we wrote about earlier (before Kennedy Meadows).  However, we did have a bear "encounter" in Yosemite...but it's a shameful story to tell...  So here's the thing:  before we entered into Yosemite National Park, we had come across a few bags of food (& an old pair of shoes) that some other hiker had ditched from their pack & just left out.  Apparently their pack was too heavy so they decided to just ditch the weight & figure that once it's out of their sights, it's no longer their problem?  (Unicroc is the king of picking up other people's crap...any time we come across anything left behind by others, we carry it out, if possible...even if it's truly an inconvenience.)  Anyway, so we picked up those bags of food because they were destined to be found by a bear or an animal & obviously that's a terrible, terrible thing.  Bears & wildlife should NEVER get food from humans.  So we carried that extra food (& shoes) & had plans to throw it in the hiker box about 30 miles down the trail...in Tuolumne Meadows.  As soon as we crossed into Yosemite, 2 nights later, we were required to put our food into bear canisters overnight, which we did...but with the extra food we had picked up, we didn't have enough room in our bear canisters, so we put the rest into a bag & did the next best thing (we thought) & hung the bag PCT-style, like we would do anywhere else.  But the Yosemite bears are truly a different breed.  They are skilled & talented & dexterous...& they are used to humans leading to food.  [This is why it is now actually illegal to use anything other than a bear canister in Yosemite...the bears have gotten too smart.]  So when I went to collect our canisters & food bag in the morning, I was glad at first to see that our bag was still hanging but I noticed right away that it looked a little funny & that there were empty wrappers & empty containers laying all around underneath it.  The bear had somehow managed to slit the bag from the bottom so all of the food just fell out to the ground & it had eaten every single little piece of everything that was in the bag!  It was amazing!  Amazing in such a bad way, though...we felt terrible, horrible & despicable.  We were well aware of how bad it was that this bear had gotten food from us & we decided we were going to report the incident to a ranger once we reached Tuolumne later that day.  The ranger pretty much made us feel like crap & I understand she was just doing her job (because if I were her, I would've been frustrated, too...especially in Yosemite, this is far too common of an event) but when we asked her what she would've done with the extra food we had found, she gave us no answer.  Needless to say, we have decided to keep our bear canisters for the remainder of the trip.  Now our food will be safe from bears, rodents, whatever & we won't have to worry about another similar incident while we're out here again.

One animal we have seen plenty of, but I have yet to mention on here is the yellow-bellied marmot.  This animal seems to be everywhere, especially in high elevation & they just kind of chill on or around the trail.  They don't let us get too close, but they're really not too concerned when we're coming through.  They're definitely the most frequently seen animal out here.  We've also seen some beautiful bucks, young & old as well as does.  The grouse around here seem lazier, they don't fly off when we get close, they just kind of meander on.  We've seen a couple sets of mamas with her babies.  Plenty of lizards, even still, which I thought would disappear after the desert.

We have slowed our pace down & feel like we are kind of slowly falling behind in the pack.  People are spreading out.  Some people we hiked with early on are like 8 days ahead.  Others are just a few days behind.  But most are now getting ahead of us.  The thing that I've found frustrating about this trail is the constant pressure to do high mileage, but we've recently decided that we're going to just do the mileage that's comfortable to us & keeps us happy.  If we're not enjoying ourselves, what's the point?  We keep having to remind ourselves that we have no deadline.

Life.  Is.  Good.

Miss y'all.