I just had a great little Vacation backpacking across part of Yosemite. We started our journey at the Tuolumne Meadows trailhead and headed up about 7 miles towards the Vogelsang High Sierra camp at 10,130-foot elevation. My pack weighed about 40 pounds, a little too much munchies I think. We had it easy in Vogelsang, where we had our own tent in the camp. We had the luxury reservations where they served us dinner and breakfast. Loads of first quality food all brought up on pack mule. We explored Fletcher Lake and the little waterfall that feeds it. Next day we headed down toward the Merced Lake High Sierra Camp, about 7 miles. This is the furthest camp from any road. It was a beautiful decent and we had lunch at Babcock lake. The Switchbacks between Babcock Lake and Merced camp were brutal, even though we were going down them. We passed many people heading up the switchbacks, and they all looked miserable.
Once we reached Merced camp, at 7,150-foot, we went swimming at the waterfalls that flow past the camp. They were great but barely on the too-cold side to stay in for too long. Another huge dinner and breakfast, and the next morning we set out for a relaxing half day hike. We were staying at Merced Lake for 2 days. We went downstream past the Merced lake and all the way past the junction in Echo Valley. We were able to locate the little “Fern Grotto” that one of the old timers had mentioned, it was a little off the path. On the way back we passed a large cascade in the river, it spilled into a very inviting pool and we all spent an hour or so playing in the pool. One of the girls discovered a leech and was freaked out for a moment... it was tiny, about the size of a mosquito wiggler, so no big panic, still, we continued to play in the water.
We relaxed on the smooth, sun-warmed rocks until we were dry and then headed back up to the Merced Lake camp. We set out immediately after breakfast for out longest hiking day, 10 miles and an altitude gain over all of 2300 feet, this sounds easy, but first we had to descent into Echo Valley (7020-foot), then climb up out of the valley and on to Sunrise Camp at 9320-feet. We had hoped to get to camp by 3pm, but got there a little early. The hike was hard so we were putting extra energy into it. We averaged 2 mph, over that 10-mile uphill trail.
The camp at Sunrise was beautiful, neat to a large meadow, surrounded by mountains and long views. During breakfast the next day, a large helicopter landed in the meadow and offloaded 2 men with nets. We were all like “WTF?” They came to pack up the old refrigerators in the camp, the copter left them and they began getting the friges ready to fly out. After an hour or so, the copter returned with 3 new friges dangling a hundred feet below them, they were dropped off and the old ones hauled away… Cool copter action!
After that we headed down the trail on our last day, about 5 miles towards Tenaya Lake. At the 2.5 mile mark, the trail passes a great, somewhat hidden view point, you can see down the canyon, towards Half Dome, and Little Yosemite Valley, and part of Yosemite valley. This is where I took that picture.
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