[pct-l] Trail conditions report from Tuolumne to South Lake Tahoe

[Eric Lee]

David Christofili wrote:
>
Don't want to sound arrogant, because Don't Panic and Wing it are good
people and very strong hikers, but as long as you're with someone and/or
confident in your river crossing/navigation skills, then it's doable, and
the river/water levels should be peaking or already have peaked by now.
>

It's interesting to watch people publish their trail reports each year and
other people react to them.  Conditions change so swiftly in the mountains
that we quite often have situations where person A says, "The trail is
impassible!  Don't try it!" while person B comes along a week later and
says, "I don't know what person A was smoking but the trail was fine."  I
suppose the lesson is to not pay attention to previous trail reports . . .
except for that strange thing in our brains that says any information is
better than no information at all.  I know I'm certainly gleaning every
scrap of information about the section I intend to hike in two weeks, even
though anything I read now is going to be wildly out of date by then.

I'm sure that both Don't Panic/Wing It and David were correctly reporting
the conditions they saw.  It sounds to me like Don't Panic and Wing It hit
those rivers at just about the exact peak of the runoff while David hit them
after the peak.  An extra foot or two of water level in an already-raging
river can easily spell the difference between passible with patience and
care vs. utterly impassible.

Eric