Yosemite National Park is a famous reserve, but how many of its visitors reach its true wilds? Every summer the park's High Sierra camps lure a lucky few hikers away from the crowds to the best-loved wilderness trail in the US. ELGY GILLESPIEmakes the trek. Photographs by PETER DAVIES
IT’S ONLY 10am, but once again Karyn O’Hearn, a California ranger, is pump-filtering water from Rafferty Creek for my drinking tube. I’m up in the highest peaks of Yosemite National Park’s High Sierras, and I’m also suffering from dehydration and a fear of catching giardiasis from the river. Handing over my liquid, she turns and lunges across stepping stones while Rafferty Peak rises above the deep U of Tuolumne Pass like an inspirational calendar.
We were living every hiker’s dream above Yosemite Valley, breathing heaven’s oxygen-starved air at 3,350m. More than 2,000 hikers bid for 800 places on the 84km loop around five High Sierra camps, the winners determined by an annual lottery.
To encourage the passionate hiker, the US National Park Service opened the first of the camps in 1916, and added the last, Sunrise, in 1961. With spartan canvas tents around dining huts and campfires, they’re a more welcome sight than heaven itself amid the pristine wilderness. The attraction for wannabe loopers, as the hikers are called, is that there’s no lugging of tents. You also get guides, glorious food, hot showers, real beds in cabins, stoves and mules.
I’d anticipated belting out “the hills are alive . . .” with Thumper and Bambi and Walt Disney cheering us on, so why does a snooze on a rock seem irresistible? I wasn’t exactly feeling my inner John Muir, the Scot who arrived in 1869 and successfully lobbied President Teddy Roosevelt to establish national parks such as Yosemite.
And why do I worry more about giardia, the parasites that cause chronic dysentery, than I do about dehydration? Because potty breaks are pesky if you’re a girl in the wilderness with a gang of men. Ahead of us race nine typical loopers, men who can pee behind Ponderosa pines, Indian paintbrushes or pussypaws without peeling off. Two, indeed, are macho men who wade rapids, bag peaks and check GPS co-ordinates by iPhone. The rest of us are middle-aged or middling fit or just plain tired – the average age is 65. A Washington lawyer has titanium knees. We call him Bionic Man. Computer programmers tote cameras and binoculars. A female New York public prosecutor and three teachers bring up the rear.
Yosemite is California’s biggest natural attraction: 3,000sq km in size with 2,000km of trails through canyons, gorges, creeks, peaks, valleys and meadows. The vast majority of it – 95 per cent – is sheer wilderness, invisible to the buses clogging the valley. But since 1916, camps at high elevations have opened every year in June after Tioga Pass thaws.
My loop begins at 1,000m in Yosemite Bug Rustic Mountain Resort, 40km from the Yosemite gate, an affordable introduction to thinner air. Doug Shaw and Caroline McGrath’s comfortable hostel offers dorms or cabins, dinners, swimming, even a spa.
Prepared, I head to the hikers’ base camp at Tuolumne Meadows Lodge, at 2,550m, where Tioga Road crosses the John Muir Trail and hard-core hikers pick up their dried tuna. No electricity, just those tent cabins with stoves, basic showers and torches. The babbling Dana Glacier is our lullaby.
At dawn we stash our deodorant, toothpaste, gum and mints in bear lockers – the animals can smell Old Spice at 20m and smash cars for it. Next I take my cheapo wine to the mule stables for packing up to the camps. Then we travel to Parsons Memorial Lodge, a rustic clubhouse built for John Muir’s Sierra Club near Soda Springs, where he began the wilderness crusade that resulted in the Yosemite Act of 1890.
Granite alternates with pines until we ford Dingley Creek. The Tuolumne River tumbles into cascading pools and roars off White Cascade Falls into the lake at Glen Aulin and to the canyon. No showers, just eight cabins, home-baked bread and chicken for dinner, served by a 15-year-old from Tennessee helping his uncle. Camp staffers are the High Sierra’s glory – a multitalented family.
We check out the sunset alpenglow – golden-pink frosting on peaks – and sit around the campfire, staring in awe at the Milky Way.
The next morning, over breakfast porridge and eggs, we’re punchy. Trouble is, yesterday was eight kilometres downhill while today’s trek to May Lake is a heartless 12km slog up boulders through mosquito-infested pines.
Lady Prosecutor feels sick, and an engineer bursts a boot – “I take size 14 and I’m vegan!” Two down. Who’s next? O’Hearn produces an elevation map. Just as we’d feared: vertical. But our sandwiches taste ambrosial beside that 360-degree panorama with the famous Half Dome. The macho men race ahead to bag Mount Hoffmann. May Lake is a delight: fishing, showers, artistic postcards hand-stamped with “mule delivery”.
Lady Prosecutor faints, possibly due to altitude sickness. Plans to ferry her back and locate size-14 canvas sneakers proceed. On the slog up to Sunrise Camp we’re clambering switchbacks for what feels like 16km. Wait a minute: it is 16km. Finally, Long Meadow appears at 2,850m, full of ground squirrels and deer. Overlooked by Mount Clark, Sunrise’s setting is sublime. It’s freezing, though, the mosquitoes are out and the composting toilets are infested with marmots.
The following day we gallop through lilies and lupins past Echo Valley. Adios, mosquitoes. We pass Jeffrey pines and sniff their butterscotch-perfumed bark. We’re following the river, skirting ripples along vast slabs.
The camp at Merced Lake is everybody’s favorite, bustling and sociable. Jason Ennis, an artist, is in charge; we find him making crayon artwork for the collection of a ranger named Dave Dahler. Dinner features barbecued pork and tales of Dahler’s bear encounters.
We follow that with a heavenly day off for chatting and laundry. Eightysomething Barbara Talmudge, who has come here for 64 years, describes camps in the 1940s: “Woodcutters chopped logs for the boiler, showers only 2 to 4pm.”
Dahler returns with the macho men. “We stripped to the buff to wade rapids and spread-eagled across granite, and we crawled slippery ledges past 1,000m drops,” they boast.
Finally, perched near Valhalla, at 3,103m, on jagged granite teeth, the Vogelsang camp resembles Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods. Cook Rita is legendary; tonight’s steak and cheesecake is show-stopping, as is O’Hearn’s talk on astronomy. Vogelsang’s skies are heart-stoppingly near.
I can’t feel my toes, but it’s an easy stumble downhill to our car park. Holy cow, we did it.
Where to stay and where to eat in Yosemite
Where to stay
- Only 5 per cent of the annual three million visitors to Yosemite leave the crowded Yosemite Valley floor, with its waterfalls, El Capitan, Half Dome and Ahwahnee Hotel. The rest of it is accessible only by foot or mule, where the John Muir Trail, Tuolumne Canyon or Pacific Crest beckon the hard-core and foolhardy. All the accommodation located in Yosemite itself, including all the camps, lodges and hotels on the Yosemite Valley floor, can be booked through the official website, yosemitepark.com/ Accommodations.aspx.
- High Sierra Camps. yosemitepark.com, 00-1-801-5594884. Reservations at the five High Sierra camps are awarded by a lottery, though spaces can open up again – see the website or call for up-to-date availability. The camps open sometime between June 15th and July 1st, then close in mid September. Early in the season is best for wild flowers, but also mosquitoes. Temperatures are highest in August and September, but water is less plentiful then, and shortages can shut off showers. The nightly cost per person this year is $153 (€114) for lodgings, bedding and two (gargantuan) meals, with the option of a brown-bag lunch. Mule-packing your wine is $5 per day. You tote sleep sack, clean socks, bug spray, sunscreen and water. Lodging is in four- or six-person canvas cabins with dormitory-style beds, pillows and blankets, plus wood stove. Staff try to keep them for parties, but you may share with people of the same sex. Parties can reserve up to eight spaces.
- Curry Village. yosemitepark. com, 00-1-801-5594884. There's some shoddy price gouging in Yosemite Valley, where beds book out ahead of summer, but Curry Village offers cosy tents. Tucked in near Half Dome and Glacier Point, it is a long-standing favourite with families on a budget. Tent cabins with heating for two to four people are available from late September through mid May. Call or check availability online. Ahwahnee Hotel. yosemitepark.com, 00-1-801-5594884. As high-end as they come, this iconic Julia Morgan-designed 1930s hotel houses a fascinating museum of Native American Miwok art, plush rooms, and a dining room as architecturally stunning as it is expensive (up to $482, though the recession has slashed prices). Its weekend brunches are copious.
- Wawona Hotel. yosemitepark.com, 00-1-801-5594884. Located at the southern end of Yosemite on Highway 41 is this "Victorian rustic" hotel, which is also somewhat pricy but offers slightly better food.
- Yosemite Bug Rustic Mountain Resort and Hostel. Highway 140 (40km from Yosemite gate), yosemitebug. com, 00-1-209-9666666. I've been coming to Waterford-born Caroline McGrath and Utah-boy Doug Shaw's mountain retreat for 12 years, and every year it has been a little comfier with better food. It's backpacker's heaven, but you don't have to be a backpacker or climber to stay. The accommodation varies from low-price dorms to lavish cabins; rates start at $25 per night for a dorm bunk with shared bath to ample cabins with private baths for $100. Families get cabins. Day-long spa passes are $10; soak yourself to prunyness or sack out beside the River Merced like a sausage. The Bug Bus shuttle runs twice weekly from San Francisco, and there's train service via Merced.
- Murphey's Motel. murpheysyosemite.com, 00-1-800-3346316. You can also opt for an Eastern Sierra motel on Highway 395 such as Murphey's, which is 20km from Yosemite gate and not overpriced for what you get.
Where to eat
- High Sierra camp food is exceptional, and not just because appetites are raging at 3,000m. The kids who feed the loopers – students, mainly – do wonders with whatever the mules bring, baking bread and barbecuing a treat. If you want to butter 'em up, bring whisky and fresh eggs. Vegetarians do okay, while vegans, well, they do their best. The only other place to eat along Tioga Road is the modest Tuolumne Grill.
- Tioga Toomey's Gas and Gift Mart Diner. thesierraweb.com/ tiogagasmart. Located in Lee Vining, where Tioga's Highway 120 ends at Highway 395, you'll find the fabled Tioga Toomey's Gas and Gift Mart Diner. Here, overlooking Mono Lake's crater lake, you can taste Chef Matt's halibut-cheek tacos with coriander-mango pesto – oh, and gas up for less, too.
Go there
Aer Lingus (aerlingus.com) flies from Dublin to San Francisco via Chicago. San Francisco International Airport is 315km from Yosemite Valley, or about four hours by road.