Day 14 – 7/14/18
~11.7 miles
Red’s Meadow to Iceberg Lake

We took the bike park shuttle out of town and caught our return bus to Red’s Meadow. Oh, so many tourists, oh so much heavily scented soap and deodorant and perfume. Some idiot even put bug spray on inside the bus (all seats and standing room taken).

We sat a few minutes at Red’s Meadow to decompress and and eat snacks to let our bellies settle from the ride, finally getting moving about 11:30am. It was a nice trail walk over to Devil’s Postpile, and we looked at it a few minutes before moving on.

We had a few more miles of trail before Nancy Pass, which had a bit of bushwhack involved. Our pants became soaked from all the wet plants we pushed through, but it wasn’t bad.

Following Steve Roper’s description, we found a nice easy route down and around the next basin as a thunderstorm rolled in. We decided to set up the tent to wait it out for a bit.

It was around 4:30. and having just had a zero and only gone like 7 miles so far today, I was antsy to keep going. So we packed up and continued past Minaret Lake, with the dark towers of the Minarets looming above, and then on to talus-bound Cecile Lake, where no camping was to be had. Oops!

We had to keep going to Iceberg Lake. In the end, I’m glad we hit Iceberg late in the day. If we’d hit it first thing in the morning, the snowy traverse around the lake would’ve been pretty terrible without microspikes (we’d have had to just wait it out for the sun to come up and soften the snow).

Yay camping!