After a few days of lift-assisted skiing at Mammoth Mountain, my brother Nate and I decided to hike back through Yosemite instead of driving all the way around.

If this sounds insane, it is. The plan originally formed because Nate and I had hiked the John Muir trail last year, from Yosemite Valley to Mt. Whitney, and about 40 miles from the valley the trail passes right by Mammoth. Meanwhile, Mammoth isn't all that far from Stanford but driving from here  to there  takes between 7 and 10 hours because you either have to go around the Sierras to the south, or cross them too far north near Lake Tahoe with the attendant highway hassles. The direct route, through Yosemite over Tioga Pass, is never open in the winter. But if you could just drive to Yosemite and hike the rest of the way...

Well, that would be really really cool but take more time than we had. So instead of doing the JMT in both directions (maybe someday!), we drove to Mammoth and hiked the return trip only, and instead of using the JMT (which involves about 45 miles of up-and-down trail hiking) we'd just go over Tioga Pass, hiking along highway 120 to Tuolumne Meadows, then follow trails back to the valley. The highway is less interesting but easier going, and even though it's still 40 miles, we figured this way we'd be able to do the trip in 2 days. (I'm still holding out hope that the other trip might be possible in 2 days each direction, if you planned ahead and were prepared with snow experience and physical condition -- but after our experience this trip, I'd want to budget at least 3 days!)

On to the trip...

Here we reached the top of the pass; I didn't get any pictures with my camera but Nate did so after they're developed and scanned, I'll add some here. After the pass, we hiked 8 miles downhill toward the Meadows -- these 8 miles seemed longer than they should have because we were expecting to be able to ski/snowboard, but the snow was too soft and the grade of the road too gentle and only rarely could gravity pull us downhill. We ended up walking/shuffling most of this distance.

At this point we stopped and ate dinner, it got dark, and we hiked another couple miles after dark. With the moon out, it was easy to see the snowy road glistening before us, and it was really pretty going. Then we stopped and camped in the snow, and when we woke anything wet had frozen -- unfortunately, this included my socks and boots! We both had other socks, and Nate was able to struggle into his boots but I wasn't -- they'd gotten too wet the day before (my carelessness) and were really frozen! So I was back to leather boots for a while, which was fine because the snow was also frozen enough to walk on easily. And by the time the snow melted too much for me to walk without breaking through, my boots would thaw too.

To avoid keeping you in too much suspense -- well, the skiing/boarding turned out to be short-lived, as just below where we could see, the snow was invaded by bushy patches and rock gardens. We kept trying to traverse over to the right, where the slope faced west instead of south, but this just prolonged the agony... pretty soon, we ended up hiking. After a bit more descent we had to hike a mile or two through foot-deep slush -- at this point, I was sick of snow (since it never ended up helping us very much!) and wished it would just make up its mind and melt. Then we reached the valley wall and a steep switchbacking descent dropping 3000 feet to the valley floor, and we made it out just before sunset!