Thunder Mountain!

This weekend, we decided to go backpacking with Navi again. We found a list of trails in El Dorado National Forest, and picked the Thunder Mountain trail. We packed at the last minute on Saturday morning, lazed around the apartment until noon, packed up the car, and took off! A 3 hour drive and a visit to a ranger station later, we arrived at the trailhead and let an excited Navi out of the car to explore. She wandered around while we got our packs on and chatted with a few other hikers, and then we set off!

The hike was along a ridge with beautiful views and you climbed and climbed and climbed to the top of Thunder Mountain. I think it was something like a 2000 foot climb over 3.5ish miles. There were a lot of solar panels along the ridge when we were first starting out, which was kind of neat. After a while, the views really opened up, and it was really beautiful. I took some panoramas, and here is my favorite one:


Navi was having a lot of fun. She is like a little mountain goat! She jumps up on rocks, stampedes up and down steep ridgelines, and always seems to be wondering why Tim and I aren't going any faster.


Tim decided to copy Navi, and hop onto a rock, too! Then of course, Navi hopped up too!


We kept climbing up and up, and eventually, this was our view of the rest of the hike.


At this point, we had started to look for a nice place to set up the tent and camp. We had heard from other hikers that there were no flat and clear places to camp, so we figured that if worse came to worse, we'd just hike up to the top, have a nice look around, and then wander back down and find someplace to camp on the way down. Tim then wanted to hike off the trail to what looked like a big grassy area a mile away, but I didn't want to leave the trail. After a while more of climbing, we decided that the top wasn't going to have much camping area, so we put our packs down, took Navi's pack off, and decided to walk up to the top and leave our packs behind. We follow the path, and suddenly, Tim decides that the path is about to go into the wilderness region of El Dorado, and that it's not going to go to the top. He decides that we need to climb up a steep hillside of loose rocks and pebbles in order to see the view. I was a little skeptical because what kind of hiking path bypasses the top ridge completely, but since Tim is so smart and wonderful I figured he must know what he was talking about. We start to scamper and slide up the hill and suddenly my path up the hill criss-crosses with a real path. The path actually wound up to the top with switchbacks. Silly Timmy. He made me climb and slide up to the top, and all I had to do was follow the path for a little longer. Well, the top had a pretty view. We wandered around for a while, and Timmy followed the path a little bit longer. Of course, since we had left our packs behind, he finds a really nice camping spot. So we walk back down, following the real path this time, get our packs, turn around, and walk right back up again. I'm never listening to Timmy again when he suggests leaving our packs behind. Anyhow, we returned to the nice camping spot, set up the tent, and wandered off to have dinner far away from the camp. It was starting to get darker, so we ate dinner, tossed the frisbee back and forth for a while, and then we wandered over to see the sunset. This photo isn't of the sunset, but it's at sunset time.


After this, we were pretty tired, so we snuggled into our sleeping bags and slept through the night. We woke up at sunrise, watched the sun rise over the mountains, and then wandered our way back down the mountain. We need to do this more.