This week’s dream: hiking through the high country in Yosemite
With its silent forests, “mirror-still” lakes and bare granite summits (among them the famous El Capitan), the Yosemite National Park attracts four million visitors a year. But 95% of those cram into just 5% of this wilderness, in California. In the “vast” area beyond, you can hike for hours in solitude – and that needn’t mean “roughing it”, says Aaron Millar in The Times. Along the High Sierra Loop, a 49-mile trail through some of Yosemite’s most “breathtakingly remote” scenery, are five catered camps, with decent beds, flushing loos and “surprisingly gourmet” home-cooked meals under canvas. This remarkable adventure is not open to all, however: if you want a bed in the camps, you must enter an annual lottery.
Most hikers start in Tuolumne Meadows, in the far north of the park, and walk up to ten miles a day, in order to complete the route clockwise in six days, but it can be done in four. From the grasslands and rock domes of the Meadows, the route follows the
Tuolomne River to the high alpine spires of Vogelsang. Next comes Merced Lake Camp, an old cavalry station, and the “razor-edged” ridge of Cloud’s Rest. Heading north, you climb Mount Hoffmann, an 11,000-foot summit at the park’s geographical centre, where there is the option to make your way “deeper into the backcountry” and stay at Glen Aulin, an “idyllic” camp beside a waterfall.
The path is steep in places, but demands only a “moderate” level of fitness and – if you’re bedding down in a catered camp that night – there should be plenty of time for swimming in “secret” lakes, reading books by rivers or snoozing on slabs of warm stone. There’s something “ethereal, almost spiritual” in the landscape: as the 19th century “grandfather of the environmental movement” John Muir said, hiking up into this “glittering emptiness” is like “coming home”. For more information, visit yosemiteexperience.com and travelyosemite.com.