The trailhead is in Tuolumne Meadows.
For our second hike we picked a trail in the Tuolumne Meadows area, to Lower Cathedral Lake. It’s about 7 miles round trip and gains about 800’.
Granite domes pop up like mushrooms.
The trail does most of its climbing in the first mile or so.
You don’t get many vistas until you reach the lake, but occasionally a granite dome will suddenly appear.
Some of the granite along the trail.
As the trail gains through the trees, rock features begin to appear.
Approaching Lower Cathedral Lake.
The advantage to hiking Yosemite in the fall is that there are no crowds and no mosquitoes. The disadvantage is that the waterfalls and lakes are greatly diminished.
A large part of this area is a bog in early summer.
Cathedral Peak (10,940’) is in the background.
Once you reach the lake, there is granite everywhere.
Lower Cathedral Lake has a massive granite bowl for its southern boundary.
The huge, smooth sheets of granite are a little disorienting. It’s odd to wander around on dunes of solid rock.
The lake has a large granite bench for its eastern end.
The weather was perfect the entire trip, except for an overcast sky and some chilly winds that came in the afternoon.
Crossing streams is easy when there’s no water.
We got back the the truck pretty quickly, as we were hoping to score a campsite in Yosemite Valley on a Sunday afternoon.
Good luck with that!
Toasting our crappy campsite.
We drove all the way in to Yosemite Valley only to find the campgrounds full, so we had to backtrack 40 minutes to the crappy campground at Crane Flat.
None of the campsites looked appealing, and the one we resigned ourselves to had moon dust instead of solid earth, no level ground anywhere to put a tent, crappy bathrooms, highway noise, and bears wandering through at 4:00 in the morning.
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