Stanford Stories V – Backpacking in Yosemite National Park

I guess most of you have heard the name “Yosemite National Park / Valley” and already know that it is one of the most spectacular places to visit in California. Coincidentally, I was invited to go there for a four-day backpacking trip by two friends (Beth and Anne) that I met during my bike ride to the Pulgas water temple a few weeks ago. For those of you who have never done it, backpacking means carrying all your stuff (tent, water, food for four days in a bear canister …) in a big backpack to hike and camp in the wilderness.

Our initial plan was to start from the valley, following Snow Creek trail to Hidden lake and to come back via Clouds Rest. Unfortunately, when we arrived in the Valley, everything was covered in smoke from a nearby wildfire. The air quality was so low that we decided to abandon our plan. Fortunately, the very friendly and helpful rangers in the wilderness center were willing to change our permit for a permit to backpack to the Young Lakes off Tioga Road in Yosemite’s “high country”.

After passing spectacular vista points, such as Olmsted point, on Tioga Road, we could start our backpacking adventure at the car park at the Tuolumne wilderness center. A beautiful but quite exhausting 10.5 km hike (my backpack was ca. 15-20 kg, and we were hiking between 2500 and 3000 m) lead us to our beautiful camp site near lower Young Lake. Tired but very happy, we set up our tents, had a quick “dinner” (all our “meals” were planned to optimize the calories to weight ratio) and went to bed after it became dark.

On the next day, we were day hiking to the upper Young lake enjoying a magnificent alpine landscape and total solitariness. In contrast to the very accessible Yosemite Valley which suffers a bit from the high amount of tourists coming there every day (I know that I am part of that problem …), there are far fewer people backpacking in the “high country” of Yosemite. Back at our camp site, we had another two-star wilderness dinner and went to bed early again. During the first half of the night, a heavy rainstorm hit our camp site. Thankfully, all of our tents withstood the storm well and were even completely dry again the next morning.

On our third day, we hiked back to our cars on a slightly different route that allowed a gorgeous view on Tuolumne Meadows and the Echo Peaks. Before heading back home, we visited Tuolumne Grove to admire some giant Sequoias trees before spending our last night on the Yosemite Creek campground, which brought us the luxury of a pit toilet.

After being back from the wilderness, the beauty of the “high country” in Yosemite is still hard to grasp for me. I hope I could capture some of it in the photos below.