from mono lake, we went down to the east side of kings canyon park, more specifically to the big pine creek campground. very nice and well worth the steep 9 mile drive up from big pines. be sure to go through the commercial campground and pick one of the much nicer spots in the national park service campground.
from the campground there is a nice loop up to seven lakes, with a loop taking you from lakes 4-7 (lakes 1-3 are on the out-and-back part of the trail). pretty early on the run we encountered a pretty impressive snake 
, no idea what it was (not a rattlesnake), but it seemed to be in a bad mood. second lake 
is a very nice view along the trail, but you have to go quite a distance to make it to the first lake (about an hour from the campground). the trail is very beautiful and ideal for running, not too steep and meandering through very varied terrain. after third lake, the trail splits into a loop, and we went clockwise, first getting to fifth lake 
, which was still partly frozen. we lost the trail at sixth lake 
, because there still was a lot of snow around which covered all traces of the trail. after some rock scrambling, we found out that we went the wrong way, seeing seventh lake somewhere in the other direction behind sixth lake 
. finding the way back to fourth lake was not easy either, descending on the north side of a hill with a lot of snow around. fourth lake was ice-free and has a pretty little peninsula 
which probably would be an ideal place for a picnic (we had already eaten our gels and decided to run back to the fridge in the rv).
the complete tour was 4 hours, the out-and-back part to the fork was 1.5 hours up and 1 hour down, the remaining 1.5 hours were spent running a bit, and with a lot of trail searching and scrambling around in the landscape. back at the trail head, we cooled off with a (very brief) dip into the creek, supposedly good for muscle recovery, but definitely very very cold.
i found out later that technically, we were not in kings canyon national park, the eastern side of the high sierra peaks is john muir wilderness. who cares, it is very pretty!
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