San Bernardino Backpacking Trip on Memorial Day Weekend

I have to admit that I was scared before taking on the trip. It's a 3 days 3 nights backpacking trip in San Bernardino mountains with about 30 miles and over 10,000 ft elevation gains. It turned out a great trip! I survived and I had a great time!
We started at Forest Falls trailhead at around 8:00pm on Friday night. We hiked the first most steep miles in San Gorgonia for about 4 hours in the dark mountain night and camped out at Halfway. On Saturday we submitted San Gorgonia Peak, traversed to Jepson peak, little Charlton peak and Charlton peak. It's the most strenuous day and we hiked about 8-10 miles on and off trails, dropping and climbing, scrambling and rolling with an over 10,000 feet elevations. That night we camped at High Meadow Springs. On Sunday we made out way to Alto Diablo, Shields, Anderson, San Bernardino East and San Bernardino peaks. It's a relatively easy day. We camped at Limber Pine Bench Camp- one of the most beautiful camping spots I've ever been and enjoyed the most spectacular sunset and inland empire lighting ever! We headed back to civilization world on Monday via the San Bernardino peak trail to Angelus Oaks. It feels like heaven when I got back to my car and took the first bit of a fresh apple I saved there before.I had a real salty BBQ meal after 12 food bars over 3 days. Lack of variety of food is one of the biggest challenges!
It's a great conditioning hike for my Mt. Whitney trip. With my hikes getting bigger and longer, I'm more ambitious for challenging and exclusive outdoors experience.

San Jacinto Day Hike

A 17-mile day hike at San Jacinto Park, with a 3200 ft elevation gain and a brisk pace. A brisk pace? Are you kidding? we were flying! It's a group of big hikers! (except me). I was struggling keeping up with them throughout the hike! We made very few stops at an average speed of approximately 3 miles a hour. We started with Devil Slide trail to the tram station and took a loop back to Devil Slide and came back down. We had a lunch break at tram station to compliment ourselves on all the hard work that took us all the way to the top. As always, coming back down seems easier and shorter except the first hour after lunch of exposing in the sun and climing up on the trail. That was a very very tough hour and I was just counting down the time! Then we got to the peak ( Wellsman's Peak). It's all good with an overlook of saddles of the mountains. After that, it was basically all downhill and I got to smell flow and enjoy very much being in the mountain! On this hike, I met some really cool hikers-Justin, my ride and also my fellow Whitney hike, Rita who will be going on her Bolivia trekking in this summer, Nicole-trail runner!
It's a great conditioning hike! The hikes I will be taking on later will be bigger and higher! Way to go to Whitney!

New Orleans: Jazz, food, Katrina

I went on a trip to New Orleans from April 24 to May 1st. It's a week trip. I had sufficient time to thoroughly cruise this town, stuff myself with food and drinks and of course the Jazz, see, hear and feel about Katrina!
During the trip, we hang out at French quarter most of time, drove all over of New Orleans including uptown, garden district, riverbend, mid-city, east New Orleans, South New Orleans etc., visited the Katrina devastated areas, went to Jazz Festival on Saturday, did bars crawls at nights, took walk tours around Garden District, checked out a few Jazz shows, shopped at French quarter, had dinner with Glenn's local cousin, had breakfasts at a little Trolley stop cafe where local working class hang out, listened to other's Katrina's stories, cruised around a community park where people were packed in the late afternoon, had the best bloody marry in my entire life, also the best bread pudding! tasted Creole's food .... so on so forth.