The Hike

Our purpose of coming to Sequoia National park and Kings Canyon was to hike, we picked a 46 mile loop, scheduled for 4 days.
so we woke up early and got our permit and headed out.
 7:30am, it was reasonably cool.

at the trail head

What!? Yes apparently 90% of the hiking gear I own is Turquoise, and note that Josh's is all Red/Orange, why this happens I'm not sure...
a couple miles in we hit a junction

Our goal, to make it almost to the John Muir trail.

to this point our hike had been mostly flat, now the uphill starts!

My view for about half of the trip

we hiked up these granite stairs, in the sun, it was HOT! and kind of miserable, the mosquitoes near the falls were driving us insane, so we got out some bug spray. Then as we hiked up some granite stairs we heard a rattle, Josh almost had a heart attack, and we saw a rattle snake coil up for attack, we gave it a wide berth and continued on. 

We stopped a couple times for a quick break and a drink, and about 6.5 miles in Josh says, I can not go any further, I think I'm going to puke,

I told him he needed to sit down and rest, drink some water, he said no he didn't want to take his pack off and rest he wanted to hike out pronto and had a slight break down, what he didn't realize was he was getting dehydrated I think, his whole shirt was turning white with sweat.

so after a few minutes of arguing, I said fine, we can hike out (although the closest camp site where we could have rested was only a mile the other way) and it was only 10:30 in the morning...

so we turned around and hiked out with only a few short breaks, We past the rattle snake again, it rattled and I was in the lead, I stopped dead in my tracks and almost fell over! but we kept to the other side of the trail and kept moving! I think the snake scared me more than the bear! I was getting tired, with about 3 miles left to go, I had to go to the bathroom, but there was no where off the trail that looked safe. So I had to hold it for about an hour as we hiked a couple more miles, and finally I could go, as we essentially crossed a desert in the middle of the hottest part of the day, I was starting to feel like crap, my electrolytes were low, Josh had a temperature check on his watch, 95 degrees, WAY hotter than we expected, but we made it to the car after hiking 13 miles, one mile short of our goal for the day, and then to a camp store and bought some Gatorade and replenished.

On the hike down my pinkie toes started to hurt like nobody's buisness, when we got to the car and I took my shoes off my pinkie toes were a blister, the entire thing. I had gotten blisters smaller than that when we had went hiking last. I think a new pair of hiking boots is in order.

We decided to spend the night in a campground in the park and head out in the morning. And I vowed next year we will do it again, only next time we will finish it.