My friend, Nora, my Golden, Kali and I left the car on 302 below the lake @ 9:13am and headed up the road to Crawford Path. It was very humid, and even though it was not hot, we were soon sweating like mad. It took us until 11:35 to reach the junction of the Mizpah Cutoff, which was 1.9 mi. We kept going on Crawford to the top of Pierce, which was another 1.2 mi. We stopped just below the summit and took some pictures, and talked to people, then we summited at about 1:00pm and had lunch.

At 1:20, we left Mt. Pierce and hiked down the .9 mi to Mizpah Spring Hut, arriving at 2:00. We refilled our water bottles and left the hut at 2:20 on the Webster Cliff Trail to hike the 1.6 mi to Mt Jackson. My left knee started bothering me somewhere along this stretch. We summited Mt Jackson at 3:50 pm, took some pictures and headed down the Webster/Jackson Trail at 4:05. I'd remembered the fairly steep stuff at the top of Mt. Jackson, but had forgotten that the whole trail down was fairly rough, steep, off and on and didn't make for a fast down. It was only 2.6 mi to 302, but it was not a quick and easy 2.6 mi.

About halfway down, I slipped on a wet boulder and slammed my right knee and right shoulder into other boulders and further stressed my left knee to the point of having pain with every step. That only got worse the whole way down, so then we were having to go even slower. Nora was especially freaking out over how long it was taking and that we would be coming down in full dark. It seemed to take forever to reach the junction of the Webster side of the trail, and we knew we still had 1.4 miles to go to the bottom.

We slogged on through mud, bog boards and boulders until we finally reached the junction of the Bugle Cliff overlook. At that point we had about .6 miles left. After a few minutes we were forced to turn on our headlamps and made our way even more slowly in the dark. It was funny seeing Kali's eyes glowing at us in the lamp lights.

Even though it was not fun anymore, we did pretty good coming down the rest of the way with our lights and arrived at 302 at 7:25pm in full dark. Kali was covered in mud, and the lake where we'd thought to let her swim and get washed off a bit was nasty looking at the edges and she would have been even filthier if she'd gone in, so we loaded her and ourselves into the car and headed home to give her a bath.