Trip Report: White Mountains or Bust! (California /Nevada, USA) Day 2

Editors note: the posts in this series are excerpts from Jason’s field notes.

Day 2 – 200180728: Started uphill early through lovely bristlecone forests, following an old road briefly. Found some wood crusts under a huge old bristlecone, then some Caloplaca atroalba-like thing on pebbles under another big bristlecone at edge of meadow; these crusts were quite similar in community structure to one of our sandstone sites in the northern Mojave. We were worried about water, but springs turned out to be flowing well. There were lots of marmots about, as well as several coyotes near and about the springs – Marvin was having a great day! We rested quite a while at the last spring waiting for the sun to lower before doing the final mile or two to camp. I found some Peltigera didactyla in moss near the spring which I noticed while going to bathe.

This was going to be our last watersource until later the next morning, so we filled up our water capacity at about 4pm and set off to camp a few miles ahead near some cliffs. Nastassja took off soon as we reached camp and explored the area looking for some springs marked on the GPS but which did not exist. Very tired this evening. No sunset, view very obscured by smoke. Smells strongly of smoke in the mornings. Some clouds formed in afternoon but never came close to thunderheads. Very cold night in which I struggle to try to keep Marvin warm, and got no sleep until Nastassja took over later in the night. What we never noticed until the next morning was that there was a lovely spring very close past where we camped!

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Up Next: Trip Report: White Mountains or Bust! (California /Nevada, USA) Day 3