June 17:Seldon Pass & VVR

Seldon Pass has been called by some "the easiest pass," and thus far, I wouldn't disagree. We had 3.9 miles to the top and only 800 or so feet to climb, making our morning climb fairly gentle. Our goal was to make it the 17.2 miles to the trail junction to Vermillion Valley Resort, then walk the 1.4 mile side trail to Lake Edison to catch the ferry boat acros the lake.

It didn't take long befoe we were standing on top of the 10,900 ft pass. The descent was snowy, but gentle, passing from snow to trail and back again.

A few miles later we crossed Bear Creek. In '05, this was the scariest creek crossing we had. Crossing it at the trail wasn't an option; we had to go downstream a bit to where it forked into three branches and melowed out a bit. This year, all our stream crossings have been much lower than in '05, so I was hoping that this one would be managable as well. And it was. It was definitely one of our deepest fords, with water at the mid-thigh, but it was managable, even at the trail crossing.

We hiked down through some meadows, not pausing for long unless we were sure the mosquitos weren't really around.

The only deterrent from our descent was a 900 ft climb up Bear Ridge, which wasn't bad compared to the 2000 ft descent down the countless switchbacks that led us to the trail junction that led us to the VVR shuttle.

We walked up to the lake, in awe of what we were seeing. JZ had mentioned that last Sept the lake had been so low he'd had to hike an extra 2 miles to catch the ferry. We didn't have to walk that far, but we did have to walk at least a quarter of a mile down what is usually the bottom of the lake in order to get to the ferry pick-up. The guy who picked us up (in a small fishing boat instead of the bigger ferry boat) told us that he thought the lake was at 40% of what it could be. At the other end of the ride, we hopped into the back of a truck and drove even farther over what is normally lakebed to VVR and a fantastic hot meal. As an added bonus, we got to watch the Celtics kill the Lakers in the NBA Finals' last game. Perfect timing...hot meal, basketball game , other hiker friends, and a bed. It was definitely worth the extra effort to get in early!

Total Miles:877.2
Miles Today:17.2 (+1.5 to shuttle)
Camp 51:VVR

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