My major trip for the summer of 2003 was a pair of backpacks in the Sierra Nevada in California. The first was 8 days solo on the John Muir trail starting at Kearsarge Pass and exiting at Piute Pass. I started intending to spend 9 days hiking to Red's Meadow, but I pushed too hard the first day, had a couple of slow days, and then opted for the shorter hike instead of pushing so hard that I would not enjoy the trip. The second hike started at Devil's Postpile and followed trails and Steve Roper's Sierra High Route to Yosemite Valley in 6 days. Tom Morgan was with me for all of that trip. Dave Woody was with us for the first 2 days and nights, then exited at Agnew Meadows to get back to work. At the end of the hike, Dave and Dianne kindly picked us up in Yosemite.

This page contains a number of the best photos. The photos will look best on your monitor (or at least on mine) if the room lights are low. The "Full Size" links will be broken for this web version.
 
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Click on the image for a screen size version. The "full size" version is larger.

Full size	The remnants of a tree along the trail to Kearsarge Pass.	Full size	Upper Le Conte Canyon on the approach to Muir Pass.
Full size	Looking toward Le Conte Canyon from near Muir Pass.	Full size	A stump at Minaret Lake.
Full size	Minaret Lake near the outlet.	Full size	Minaret Lake near sunset from near our campsite.
Full size	Minaret Lake from near our campsite. The sun is behind the tip of Clyde Minaret.	Full size	Dave Woody in the rain above Ediza Lake.
Full size	Sunset from the upper end of Thousand Island Lake.	Full size	Upper Twin Island Lake.
Full size	Bench Canyon	Full size	Tom at our campsite in upper Bench Canyon
Full size	A tree (whitebark pine?) on the approach to the upper Isberg Pass trail.	Full size	Along the Merced River near Bunnell Cascade.

All of the photos were taken with my Pentax ZX5 SLR using Fuji Velvia. Most photos with blue sky were taken with a polarizing filter. The slides were scanned on my Minolta Dimage Scan Elite film scanner using Vuescan running under Linux. The web pages were made using my own Perl scripts and a text editor (emacs). Some of the photos have had some processing done after scanning. For simple cases, I used xv and the photo name will have "xv" after the number. For more complicated work, I used the Gimp and "gimp" will appear in the name. For efficiency, I determined a set of scanning parameters from one fairly standard photo, then used that for nearly all scans. For some, that was probably not optimal and I may go back to a few in time and rescan.