The trip to the Kern River/Sherman Pass was finally here.  We arrived on July 11th to 95*F weather (not bad for the middle of July), but by mid week it was over 100*F.  Dave Christian and his family arrived Thursday July 16th (just in time for the heat).  We had a campfire that night and determined that we would do some fishing on Friday and go to Sherman Pass on Saturday.  Friday we all went fishing, Dave was so excited he started to fish with no handle on his fishing reel!  The Christian Family caught about six fish and we caught a few also that day.

Saturday morning we left camp around 9:00am and started our way up to the trailhead (35 miles from camp).  We arrived at the trailhead and it was closed!  The U.S. Forest Service said it was closed because of snow in the middle of July at 100*F yeah right.  We then decided to drive to the backside of the trail.  When we got there we noticed two things, one it was open on this end and that Bakersfield Trail Blazers adopted the trail.  This told me that the trail should be a lot of fun.  As we got further into the trail we could see why the U.S. Forest Service still had the trail closed.  There were a lot of fallen trees and patches of snow everywhere, which made it hard to stay on the trail, but because of our trail experience we had no problems.

It now was about 1:00pm and we had only covered two miles of trail.  We came to one of the major trail obstacles which was a big hill climb that stretched a ¼ of mile (probably rated a 3) tough to tell when we both made it up with no problems.  We played on it for a while taking photos.  By this time we decided to eat lunch and play in the snow.  Now it was 3:00pm so we decided to go back the way we came since proceeding forward was another 4.8 miles.  We got back to camp about 5:30pm and it was still 100*F, turns out that the day's high was 110*F!  We all had dinner and played Uno that night.  Sunday morning we all hit the road.  The Christian Family headed to Shaver Lake and we were headed home.  We all had a great time and no problems (except Dave trying to fish with no handle on his reel).  We are planning a weekend trip to Sherman Pass later in the year when it's not so hot.

Clayton (Miller Time) Miller - MLRS TJ