June 19:Silver Pass

We woke up early, mostly because we can't sleep in anymore. We also wanted to eat a good breakfast and be packed up and ready to go for the first morning ferry. They still hadn't gotten the pontoon ferry working yet so the shuttle was still small fishing boats that only hold 4 people. The day before they had done an extra early run, and we were hoping we could be on one this morning if one went. We ate our 5th and final meal at VVR (pancakes), paid the tab we'd been running (yikes!), and were able to get shuttled out on an 8am run.

This would be a day of verticle feet. We left VVR and began our climb up to Silver Pass, which was a 3000 ft climb. The other side still had a lot of snow so we got to glissade (slide on our butt) down two different sections (I always recommend pants for this or you will have lots of snow up your shorts).

We climbed down for awhile, then back up 1200 ft to the stunningly beautiful, postcard-perfect Virginia Lake. Next a descent and then 600 more ft up to Purple Lake. Add in all the other little ups and downs and we had climbed around 5000 ft. Luckily we had all that good VVR food in us to give us energy!

We camped a bit early because we were descending, and that can quickly equal mosquitos. We found a great campsite with a fire ring, and made the first fire of the hike with our friend JZ. He even let us use his extra fuel to heat up some water to make soup (we'd gotten them out of the hiker box @ VVR), so we had a little bit of hot food too!

Total Miles:895.8
Miles Today:18.6 (+1.5 from Ferry)
Camp 53:Campfire With JZ

------------------------------
Allow us to help those in need, sell back your spare PocketMail and make some extra pocket money.