Labor day weekend, 2006. We labored up the south fork of the the Stanislaus river. Pretty place with a lot of challenging boulder scrambling. Hairy in spots. Coming out yesterday I think it took us 45 minutes to come down the first quarter mile, looking for spots to get from point A to B, taking off packs, handing them up or down, and so on. I read somewhere on the internet where they called it class 3 scrambling. Whatever that is, parts definitely took some thinking.

On Saturday, the day we went in, we camped at the first available grove of trees. Just in 20 yards through a maze of fallen trees (there must have been a killer avalanche 5 years-or-so back) and a carpet of ferns there was a nice fire ring complete with a folding chair. Out by the stream we had a great view of the canyon and a bathtub sized pool that we used constantly. There were a few intrepid day hikers over the 3 days, including a young buck who came up in swim shorts and running shoes (a ten mile round-trip tromp up the canyon) who was able to swim through the pools as he advanced, rather than clambering up the crevices and over steep granite slopes like we did. We took a day hike further up on Sunday, swimming in pools along the way.

Link to Page Two of the South Fork of the Stanislaus Canyon trip.