One of the weirder aspects of hiking in the southern Sierra: about a dozen times per day, you’ll hear a really loud noise, look up…and, if the sky is clear and you look in the right direction, see a pair of F–16s blazing past really, really fast. (More often, though, you look up and see nothing at all, as they’re either too fast for you or behind a cloud.)
They fly low enough that sometimes they’ll be on the other side of a mountain, and all you hear is the roar of jets. Apparently there’s a military base near here that sends its pilots flying up here for training. I don’t know if that’s for a strategic reason or just because it’s really beautiful…but, either way, it’s definitely one of the odder things to experience out here.
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