No more driving!!!

Mike and I finally finished our road trip in Bakersfield yesterday evening. On the drive south from Salt Lake we decided to stop in St. George to go climbing at Chuckwalla wall. I was really happy to get one last climbing session in before we commit to 4 months of backpacking!

Total miles traveled since Seattle = 4,880 miles

We're finishing up a few last minute items before we start the trail tomorrow. Ever since we packed our resupply boxes I've been wondering if we packed enough food for ourselves. I decided that I wanted to put an additional 80 calories into my diet each day on the trail so I bought some various kinds of granola from the bulk foods section in WinCo and threw those in to each box. I'd rather have too much food than not enough food!

We also created some light-weight scrabble tiles to accompany our cloth scrabble board. Mike made the cloth scrabble board a few years ago specifically for backpacking and traveling. Now we upgraded those heavy scrabble tiles to some paper tiles. We printed out all of the letters onto blank labels and then stuck the labels onto a manilla folder. Then we cut out each letter and wrote its point value on the tile. They turned out really nice and sturdy! The only down side is that we won't be able to play in the wind...

Weight of our home-made scrabble game = 2 ounces of fun

Mike and I are expecting to lose quite a bit of weight over the next 4 months. As of this morning, I weigh 148 lbs and Mike weighs 183 lbs. Men tend to lose more weight on the trail than women, so we're expecting to weigh 138 and 150, respectively, by the end of the trip.

Tomorrow we're getting dropped off on the trail at mile 652:  Walker Pass (even though Mike really wants to push our start date back a day so that we can watch the first U.S.A. game of the world cup on Monday). Our first stretch of the hike is only 50 miles long until we get to Kennedy Meadows. Our biggest worry for the first leg of the trail is going to be the water availability. We only have three sure-fire, totally reliable water sources across those 50 miles. Hopefully we'll find some other streams to refill water along the way but we aren't counting on it. We're planning to get to Kennedy Meadows on Friday and we will try to write our next blog post there. [Disclaimer to mom: Kennedy Meadows is a very small town and we may not have service--don't panic if we fail to write a post on Friday!]