This night I slept pretty good again although once when I woke up at night to go to pee I was a little bit disoriented at first. It happened to me the night before as well but I guess that’s normal since we are at a different place every night. When we got up everyone else was already gone but it didn’t matter since today’s pass – Pinchot Pass, 3 696m – wasn’t sketchy ascent or descent. The only exhausting thing was that we still had to do around 4.5 miles (7.2km) of a pretty steep uphill so we got warm quite fast. I also had to reapply sunscreen couple of times because the sun was really strong and well we were above 3 000m. We reached the summit around 10am and well another beautiful view was waiting for us there. After a little snack we started descending again and also today we passed several lakes. 

There were also more river crossings (around 10), nothing too sketchy but some pretty fast flowing streams. Even though it is not that dangerous (and hopefully will stay that way), just today I started feeling a little bit more confident and less freaked out anytime I hear water gushing in the distance. I guess that’s fear comes from the times when we would go rafting back home (which I absolutely love though) but at the end of some JEZ our raft/kanoe would flip over. Nothing serious ever happened but still rivers shouldn’t be messed with. In the afternoon we had to do another circa 4.5 miles (7.2km) to get to the base before summiting Mather Pass (3 686m). Together with Glen Pass, Mather Pass is considered the most technical challenging but honestly in this low snow year we will be fine. In other years people wouldn’t be even able to pass the Sierras so this year we are actually really lucky to be honest.