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

[Jackie McDonnell]

I think that was David's point exactly:  trail conditions change quickly.

yogi
www.pcthandbook.com

On Tue, Jul 5, 2011 at 12:46 PM, Eric Lee <saintgimp at hotmail.com> wrote:

> 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 though anything I read now is going to be wildly out of date by then.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
>
>