High Sierra Topix

What an entertaining trip report! The pictures atop Cartridge Pass are great. Also your picture of Triple Falls with that impenetrable wall of brush in front brought back vivid -- and fond -- memories.

That was fantastic to read and a great start to my morning. Thanks for taking the time to re-post it, and as someone else said the photos look amazing for having been scanned in.

Did "fancy freeze-dried" foods exist back then? I am probing my memory; I remember Carnation dehydrated skim milk, and was there a brand called "Bernard's" that produced dehydrated foods, out of San Jose? Knorr soups. Carnation "Instant Breakfast- Coffee flavor". I think that Pop-Tarts were around, but I never considered them country food. Uncle-Ben's Instant Rice. Some things have improved in life.

Did "fancy freeze-dried" foods exist back then?

Yes, but I was too poor to be able to afford them, and most of it was really awful. I remember sharing a spaghetti dinner with someone on the Muir Trail because he was trying to lighten his load, and while it tasted OK, that spaghetti had me heading for the hills multiple times that night. Mountain House and another branch called (I think) Richmoor were around then and widely available in outdoor stores. Just way beyond my budget.

My favorite grocery store dinners were marketed by Lipton -- the two I liked best were beef stroganoff (with real pieces of dehydrated beef) and a chicken and rice dish with bits of real chicken meat. These dinners were packaged in distinctive boxes with angled sides; they could be found on most grocery store shelves for less $1.00 a box. They weighed about 8 oz each, so they were extravagant. The Lipton dinners disappeared from store shelves in the 80's, much to my disappointment.

What an exciting journey through yesteryear. The slide scans turned out well--did not turn color much in all those years. The beauty of Ektachrome? I think that was pretty much the only film I used when backpacking in the 1970s, and it seems to hold up much better.

Either Kodachrome 25 or Kodachrome 64. I was using Olympus rangefinder cameras back then. These were taken with an Olympus PEN EE model, a half frame rangefinder that gave you 72 exposures per 36 exposure film rolls. After that camera was broken, I used an Olympus RC conventional rangefinder until the digital era.

I have to comiserate about the nasty section of Goddard Creek from Disappearing Ck. to the MFK....just hellish bushwacking in 1977. And then you went up Cartridge Ck! One tough dude. I was happy to just stroll down to Tehipite and get out of there.