The girls, Diana and Linda, have been a delight to have with me as we hike toward Park Lakes for a couple of days enjoying the quietness and beauty of these lakes and the heathery benches around the lakes. At Park Lakes we put up our tent. Before cooking dinner I check out some stakes and follow them up to a cliffy area. There I meet a gentleman who is laying out this section of the new Pacific Crest Trail that will cut across the steep west slopes of Chikamin Peak. We chat as we sit with our legs dangling over the edge of the cliff.

If I had known at the time what I discovered a few years later when the new trail sections were completed... that sections like those over Island Mountain had such a meager grade that one lost track of whether you were going up or down until you came to the next switchback. One only gained a hundred feet or so in a quarter mile between switchbacks! I got so digusted going down the other side that I bailed off the trail on the second switchback and followed deer trails until I finally intersected the trail in the valley below. Had I known what a poor job of trail layout he was doing I would have been hard pressed not to have simply given him a shove off that cliff!

Will have some pictures to show you later with the 'rest of the story'.