Thursday September 11, 10.0mi/16.1km

Bubbs Creek Campsite (431.8/6240ft) to Copper Creek Trail (441.8/9040ft) (CA)

I left camp at 7am and for some reason all the other hikers were still there. Some of the groups had been awake for a while, on their third cup of coffee, and gave me a very energetic, Good morning! The trail down Bubbs Creek was a nice National park quality trail.

I think these deer were used to seeing people, they didn’t seem to care that I was passing by.

The clouds were swirling around the mountains and hiding some of the valleys.

After descending a quick thousand feet, I was on the valley floor next to the Middle Fork Kings River.

I could tell I was nearing a popular trailhead, the trail became so wide, it was like a road.

I arrived to the Road’s End Trailhead at 9am, and then waited about 30 minutes to hitch a ride down to the Cedar Grove village. The first car was a BMW and unsurprisingly didn’t pick me up, and the second car was a Subaru Solterra so I didn’t hear it coming, but it of course picked me up. Mary was a nice retired lady from Denver, visiting all the national parks. She dropped me off at the Cedar Grove general store 15 minutes later. The cafe had just closed for breakfast, so I bought some microwaveable items and had my own second breakfast.

When a place has signs like this, I know there are a lot of dirty hikers in the area, ha!

I sat at some tables in the little cafe, eventually they reopened for lunch and I ordered chicken, fries, and a salad. I sat there for 3 hours eating and charging my stuff, and then walked over to the shower building. The showers were closed until 3 pm, and I wasn’t going to wait around that long just to get a shower. I stopped by the visitor center to get an update on the nearby Garnet fire, which had grown to 50,000 acres.

There was an info board posted outside with fire information, the Rangers inside didn’t have any additional information but were nice and gave me a couple of masks, in case the air quality became bad.

I walked out to the main road to hitch back to the Roads End trailhead, and in 15 minutes a couple of off-duty park employees picked me up. They had some fun hikes planned for the end of the month during their slow season, when they can get more time off. I started the long hike uphill, gaining 4,000 feet elevation on the Copper Creek Trail.

There were dozens of long switchbacks, and after a couple hours I was high enough that I was almost in the clouds.

The view down back to the valley below was almost non-existent through the lowering clouds.

After 6 miles I decided to call it a day and set up camp at a flat spot near a switchback. I could’ve gone another mile or two and finished the big climb, but I didn’t want to camp at such a high elevation in case it’s cold tonight.