Mike Carter July, 2002
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My buddy Craig and I decided to take a 4-day weekend and head up to the Dinkey Creek area. Located in the High Sierras south of Yosemite, it is hard to find a more beautiful spot on earth.
We arrived in Shaver Lake late Thursday afternoon, gassed up and headed off to Bald Mountain. This was a fun trail that lead up to a granite playground on top of a mountain with ledges and inclines to test our vehicles on.
My new low-profile bumper worked great on the ledges,
however I need to figure out a better location for my spare tire.
Next, we drove up to an old abandoned fire lookout tower.
There isn't a lot left, but it is still sturdy enough to climb. It was a fairly hazy day, but the views were still impressive.
We took a different route on the way back which proved to be exciting:
It doesn't look as bad in the picture, but I thought I was going to flop for sure!
I was trying to straddle this notch,
lost track of where my tires were, and slipped down into it. After taking a few pictures, Craig told me my best option was to keep driving forward. Last thing I wanted to do, but it was the only way out. He put some weight on my left rear corner and I inched out. Whew! That was too close for my taste, but it turned out to be a good thing because I got a better feeling for how tippy I could get without flopping. This came in handy as there were numerous times I had to get tippy to make it past an obstacle, and I was a lot more confident then I would have been in the past.
The remainder of the trail was pretty fun. Here is Craig taking an optional line up one of the many Granite slabs.
That night we camped near the entrance to the Swamp Lake trail. Craig really wanted to run that trail, but he heard the there was a Jeep club running the trail and they were headed our way. Not wanting to deal with a lot of traffic, we decided to run the first part of the Dusy instead. As we were sitting around the campfire, a deer came wandering through camp, foraging for food. It didn't pay any attention to us at all. That was pretty cool, although I got to wondering where the nearest bear was lurking. We hung our trash away from camp and turned in for the night.