[pct-l] Sleeping bag

[markwright at lazy-son-of-a-bitch.com (Mark Wright)]

> I guess my question is what are the lowest temps I should expect on  
> the JMT
> and whether the bags we're using should be adequate based on our
> experiences.

I was camping at Crabtree Lake (just south of Whitney) one year in  
August and the nights got very cold. Probably in the 20s. To get a good  
idea of the temps along the JMT you can go to my Web site and look at  
our maps along the JMT. At the bottom left of the page is a list of  
nearby weather stations that are maintained by the California Dept of  
Water Resources. Click on one of the "Local Weather Stations" to see  
its realtime data - generally updated every hour (this will pop open a  
window that will take you out of our site to the California Dept of  
Water Resources web site). You can then click a specific sensor (the  
Temp sensor for instance, though not all weather stations have a temp  
sensor). This will give you a graph with the last 48 hours data. At the  
bottom of that page click "Plot more data." This will give you a graph  
with the last week's data. At the bottom of that page you will see a  
"Plot from date" form. Enter a date (in mm/dd/yyyy format). The  
resulting graph will be all messed up if you entered a date far in the  
past. However, below that messed up graph will be another form where  
you can enter the beginning and ending date that you want data for. I  
know this is a little complicated and we could make things easier by  
making our own forms to grab the weather data from the California Dept  
of Water Resources. But we haven't gotten around to that yet. The point  
of all this is that you can see the high and low temps for a specific  
location during 7/10/03 - 7/15/03 and then check that info again for  
the last year and the year before that. For example, here you can see  
temp data for eight days beginning 7/25/99 at Agnew Pass:

http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cgi-progs/histPlot? 
station_id=AGP&sensor_num=4&dur_code=H&start_date=07%2F25%2F1999+00%3A00 
&end_date=08%2F02%2F1999+00%3A00&geom=800x300

If the above link is broken into multiple line be sure to copy and  
paste the whole thing (with no spaces) into your browser or else it  
won't work. The below link will take you to a topo map of the Thousand  
Island Lake area. As you browse the maps along the JMT the weather  
stations listed on the bottom left will be updated to show the three  
stations nearest the center of the map. Hope this helps people figure  
out what sort of temperatures to expect.

http://www.abovecalifornia.com/maps/map.jsp? 
cols=3&rows=3&scale=100&x=307764&y=4176875&z=11

Also, it should be noted that most stations will have weird or missing  
data on some dates and the data should be considered more of an  
estimate than 100% accurate info.


Mark

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