A sampling of days: Hetch Hetchy 06/25/22

As a warmup for the start of the summer mountain season we grabbed a last minute wilderness permit for Yosemite through the Lake Elanor trailhead Stanislaus National Forest backdoor. The route we picked was a ~64k lollipop. The first and last ~7.5km from Lake Elanor follows an old fire road, so at times feels like a road, other parts was grown over to look like a trail. Very easy and fast because of that though. We started not too long after sunrise to get the fire road section over with before it got hot... I saw before we left it had burned less than 10 years ago in the rim fire.

The kinda fire road, kinda trail bit leaving Lake Elanor

Miguel Meadow was poppin!

Stairs to... the creek?!

Laurel lake... doesn't look like great swimming

All the signs from miguel meadow on had "The Beehive" on them. We had no idea what it was, and were very disappointed when we got to a swampy buggy meadow which was apparently "The Beehive".

A little before the beehive..

Walking on granite on the approach to Lake Vernon

We stopped for lunch at lake vernon. We found a nice spot under the shade of a tree on granite at waters edge. We didn't swim, but dipped our heads to clear the sweat and cool down slightly :)

climbing out of Lake Vernon

We had clouds building through the day and finally had some showers open up over us for about 5 mins while descending down to Tiltill valley. We saw a snake body surfing down tiltill creek when we stopped to fill up our water bladders and take a break.

Tiltill Valley

Descending down towards Hetch Hetchy

We were playing it pretty loose with where to stop for the night. I wasn't sure where we would get to so the minimum plan was to stop at Tiltill (~33km from start), but we got through there around 3pm so had lots of time to go a bit further. I suspected the good spot was down around Racheria Creek (~39km from start). It was a good guess as that is where everyone else was apparently camping (coming in from Hetch Hetchy). Even with the "crowds", there was a tonne of room and a lot of really great spots. The creek there has great shallow pools for dipping in and we took full advantage of that!

Camp spot at Racheria Creek.

Rancheria falls around sunset.

We got another early start on day two so that we could do the climb out of Hetch Hetchy before it got too warm. Incidently, we also got almost to that junction before we saw anyone as they don't open the gate at Hetch Hetchy until 8am? It was wild not seeing anyone, and then basically hitting what felt like a tour bus 100m before the trail junction to climb out.