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We did discover that if we had kept going the night before another half mile or so, we could have stayed in a stone cabin. But the floor was dirt, hard and dirty. I didn't mind that we missed it. Then we had another six-eight hundred foot climb out of the valley with switch backs and eventually reached Little Elk. It was a pond really, dark in the trees and steep ravines on all sides. Not hardly worth the effort that it would have been. However on this day it was a beautiful hike with grand views of distant forests, valleys and sky.
I had only back-packed once before. It was the Monday after Easter weekend about 1971. Went to Big Sur in the professor's station wagon with the professor and his five kids and a guy named Thomas. On highway 280 near Stanford we had a breakdown. The drive-shaft rear axle ball-joint broke. We had to get towed into Palo Alto to a garage. We spent the day lounging on the grass at the Stanford campus. We spent the first night at the Big Sur trail head and next morning headed up. I started out ahead and soon found I had taken the wrong trail and had to go back with everyone waiting. I was not familiar with the concept of trail heads.
That was a hike and a half - all up, with a million college kids coming down from
Easter weekend, that we had to pass on the confining trails. Convention is that on narrow trails the hiker going up has the right of way, since they are carrying a load, preferring an uninterrupted strain. The hiker coming down steps aside to let pass, but these kids hadn't a whim of trail etiquette.
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