It Finally Happened, a Camp in The Woods + The June Lake Loop | Living in a Trailer | Eastern Sierra

Well, good morning, everyone. I have returned to the Eastern Sierra after a hometown visit. I spent six nights down there spending some quality time with family. I stayed with my mother. I got to spend a lot of quality time with her. We went down to visit San Juan Capistrano, which is absolutely charming. We went to one of the littles in the family's five-year-old birthday party down at Doheny Beach and spent a nice day at the beach. I got to see three of my siblings, two sisters and a brother. I went to see my sister Jill at her new home. She has a beautiful new home. She has an amazing garden. She gave me some jalapeno peppers from her beautiful garden. They are gorgeous jalapenos. I can't wait to eat them. I got to visit my niece dog, Birdie. A lot of you know Birdie. I love her so much. It was wonderful to get to spend time with her and cuddle on her a little bit. It was just a fantastic visit. I also had to take care of a few things, which you might remember if you watched my last video. I had a pretty serious issue with my receiver hitch. I got that taken care of. I have a super heavy-duty new hitch put on there. Let me show you that now. Well, here's the new hitch. It is a CURT CD commercial hitch rated for 18,000 pounds, gross trailer weight. I think it's going to be well taken care of. It's secure. This is a bad boy. If you want to get caught up on what happened there, make sure that you watch last week's video. I don't want to go over the whole thing again, but it could have been very devastating or catastrophic. I now feel much safer and I know that there are some things that I need to put on my checklist going forward. Go ahead and check that video out for a full explanation of what happened. The only regret I have about going home is it was such a quick visit. I needed to cram a lot into that amount of time, so I wasn't able to reach out to any of my friends to visit with them. If any of you are watching this, I am so sorry. I will be back for the holidays, so I will have more time then and I'll definitely want to put together a meet up or meet up with some of you individually then. I miss you all. I love you all. And, uh, yeah, please forgive me. While I was at my mom's, I got to pick up this bad boy, my YouTube play button for passing 100,000 subscribers. I had it sent to her for safekeeping since I'm on the road, I knew it would be safe until I could pick it up. And here it is. I was able to pick it up. One of my friends and a patron, Mark, suggested I place it right here. What do you guys think? Would that be a good spot? Let me know in the comments. I try not to get too caught up in numbers, but I will say that it feels really good to have surpassed that milestone. I have been doing YouTube now since 2016, but full time as a business and as my sole and primary gig since 2019. So it has taken five years to reach this milestone and, uh, it feels really, really good. I couldn't have done it without all of you. You are the reason for this. Thank you all so, so much. If you haven't subscribed, please subscribe. It really helps. And it's absolutely free. It's going to be an awesome week. I've got some friends coming in from North Carolina for a beautiful trip in one of the nearest national parks. I'm sure you can figure out where that is. I cannot wait. I'm feeling good. I'm getting things taken care of. It's beautiful up here and yeah, life is good. After taking care of just a couple of minor household chores, I was ready to get out and seize this gorgeous day. Since things have been pretty hectic lately, I thought that we keep today nice and calm and relaxing by visiting one of my favorite places, the June Lake Loop, and just enjoying the beauty of the Sierra. It is a quintessential summer day here in the Eastern Sierra. Bluebird skies, beautiful warm breeze, perfect temperatures. The water is crystal clear and blue turquoise at the shore. You really takes your breath away. June Lake is a charming mountain village less than 15 miles north of Mammoth Lakes off of Highway 395. Within the village, there is lodging, dining, and a general store and brewery. The loop contains a ski resort, many hiking trails, and four lakes. There is June Lake, Gull Lake, Silver Lake, and Grant Lake for your fishing, paddle boarding, kayaking, or swimming pleasure. June Lake holds very sentimental value to me because it's the first place I really discovered the mountains. I kind of wound up here by accident on a weekend with a friend and the rest is history. I fell in love, I spent the weekend photographing landscapes of the beautiful scenery, and I continued to return again and again and again. It's beautiful here any time of year, but the fall is an especially magical time to visit with all the aspen and cottonwoods and their golden hues. Good morning, I'm catching up with you the next day. Today is a moving day and it'll be the first time hitching up the trailer to the new hitch, so I'm anxious to see how that goes and if it's going to need any adjusting. Hopefully all goes well. The first thing we'll do is drive into Mammoth and dump the tanks there and fill up with water and then take it over to the new camp. I did pick up Joey yesterday afternoon from his trip, so he's back with me now and let's get this day going, get this move going. We are here at the Mammoth Community Water District where you can dump tanks, fill up with fresh water. It is a $10 fee, so you just drop $10 in the box over here and you are good to go. That's what Roberto's tacos sound like after 24 hours of acid. And smell like. Dirty job. All right, we have made it safe and sound to an epic campsite. This is a free campsite. You can stay here up to 14 days just outside of Mammoth Lakes. The one that I was at previously was called Glass Creek, or is called Glass Creek. And that is a Forest Service campground. It is technically free, but they do ask that you give a $10 a day donation, which I happily did. But this is beautiful, free, you're spaced out from your neighbors, so there's lots of privacy. If you're a regular viewer of the channel, you probably recognize it. But yeah, this is going to be an awesome place to call home for the next little bit. Going to make a little afternoon snack consisting of these rosemary and olive oil triscuits, some cheese, and a beautiful jalapeno pepper that my sister Jill gave me from her garden. She grew this. Should be pretty tasty. I can smell them. Smells good. Cut exactly the right amount. Now it's time to pop them in the microwave. I added another layer of cheese to the top and I've tried one and they have a really nice kick to them. They're really good. As I mentioned earlier, I have a couple of friends that are going to be showing up in the Eastern Sierra today from North Carolina. They're making their way here now and we will be setting out on a multi-day trip in the back country in just a couple of days. So one of my projects today is to gather what backpacking food that I have here on hand together to see if I have everything I need or if I need some things to fill in the gaps. So I'm going to show you all an example of what I take on a multi-day trip. So this is for a four night, five day trip and I'll start with breakfast. I usually bring some type of a bar for breakfast and then I've been using these Taster Choice coffees. They are hazelnut flavored and they're a lot cheaper than the Starbucks. And I do like them. They're really good. So I bring two because I like my coffee strong. I have some different types of bars here. I might get something else at the store, more exciting, we'll see. And then I have this bacon jerky and I split it up over the several days. For lunch I usually bring a bar of some type and then I will supplement that with trail mix of some kind or some nuts. So I have some salted almonds here and then I have this sweet Cajun mix, trail mix. And I have some extra bars here and I might get something to mix it up a little bit when I get to the store. Maybe some Larabars or something so it's not Cliff Bars every day. And for dinner I have a little bit of variety here. I have these Backpackers Pantry single serving meals and they both sound really good. I haven't had either one of them. And then my favorite meal here, this Peak Fuel Chicken Pesto Pasta. I absolutely love it. It tastes so good. Really really good. And then I have a good old Mountain House Spaghetti with Meat Sauce. And if you notice, they all have pasta in them. I didn't really plan it that way but I do love pasta. Also I'm going to bring some various teas. I'll probably add some ice teas to this and some electrolytes. And yeah, that's basically it. I'll probably change it up a little bit, like I said, adding some different types of bars and things once I get to the store. And I will also be adding some candy of some kind. Maybe Tootsie Rolls or Peanut M&M's because they don't melt. Of course you can always get creative and make pizzas in the backcountry or something like that, which you've seen me do in the past. But this time we're just going simple, going light, and just taking your standard backpacking meals. For dinner we headed back to the June Lake Loop to one of my favorite spots, The Tiger Bar. They offer down-home fare in a fun atmosphere and they even have a pool table. There are great views of the village from the booth seats inside. I ordered a patty melt and Joey had fish and chips but substituted the chips with onion rings. I had the world famous tiger chips with my meal. They are homemade potato chips. I definitely recommend you give it a try. Good morning. We are waking up to some smoky skies this morning and it's smelling a little bit like wildfire, unfortunately. I don't know where it's coming from. We looked at the smoke maps and it doesn't look like they're showing any new fires. But it's very unfortunate because our friends came all the way from North Carolina for this trip and we were originally supposed to do one in Oregon. We canceled that and had them come here instead because it was so nice and clear. They just arrived yesterday on a beautiful day and today it's smoky. So hopefully, whatever it is, the wind shifts directions and it blows on out of here. But we will be hiking in an area where it might not matter too much. You'll have to wait and see where that is. It was a very peaceful first night here at this new camp. I absolutely love it here. I continue to come back here again and again. And I prefer this type of camping. The boondocking type where you don't have a lot of neighbors nearby. There's a lot more privacy. I'm well equipped and set up to deal with being off-grid and dry camping. So yeah, for me, this is my preferred type of camping. I would like to hear what your preferred type of camping is. Is it car camping with a tent? Maybe sleeping in your car? Do you prefer camping in campgrounds where you have more amenities? Do you like glamping where you're in something like what I have? Like a trailer or an RV? What type of camping do you prefer? And that's for everyone, not just people who are out here doing this full-time. The great thing about the Eastern Sierra and this area in general is there are many different types of camping to choose from. You can choose from any of those kinds of camping. There's lots of free camping, which I really like. And it's nice to enjoy some free camping for the time being. I do get asked the question often how I find my camping. And I did make a video on that topic several years ago, but it all still applies today. So I'm going to go ahead and link that below. And it gives kind of an overview of how to find places like this. Sometimes I don't always give the exact location while I'm here just for my own safety purposes. But go ahead and check out that video and you too can find amazing campsites like this. I'm super relieved to have my hitch repaired. It seems to be working great. I'm feeling so much better. Things are looking up. All the little issues are getting taken care of that I talked about last week. And yeah, it feels good to feel good again. I hope you enjoyed touring the June Lake Loop. It is a smaller village, if you will, as opposed to Mammoth Lakes, which is a bigger town, although it is still a small town. Mammoth Lakes tends to be busier than June Lake. And sometimes I prefer the quieter, more mellow aspect of June Lakes. It's just charming as you saw. It doesn't have quite as many amenities as Mammoth Lakes does, but it's definitely one of my favorite places in the Sierra. I'm going to go ahead and wrap up this video here. Today I'm going to quickly edit this video and also get ready for the trip which starts tomorrow, the backpacking trip, which I'm very excited about. I'll be meeting up with my friends later this evening for dinner after taking care of all my various errands. And it's going to be fun. I can't wait for that. As always, I appreciate you coming along. I appreciate you taking the time to view this video. Thank you again for getting me over the 100,000 subscriber mark. Couldn't do it without you all. I appreciate you all so much. And I will see you on the next adventure. See you soon, everybody. Bye-bye.