Cathedral Lake Hike, Yosemite, Independence Day 2008

The other day, I posted about a hike of White Mountain Peak, California's easiest fourteener. Today I'm adding some photos from our "warmup hike", which we did the day before, to acclimatize to the high altitude. This hike starts from Tuolumne Meadows in Yosemite at 8800 ft and its highest point is at 9500 ft; so it's a modest hike that can be done in a few hours. The only downside to it were the plentyful mosquitos. I'll post the highlights here; check out the album of the Cathedral Lake hike for more pictures.

A marmot was out and about near the shore of Cathedral Lake.



Cathedral Peak itself is a weird looking piece of rock; I guess it's what happens when god himself makes a cathedral. :-) Ah, not too bad - here's a shot of its summit pinnacles.



As with many hikes, this one featured beautiful flowers along the trail.



I couldn't resist climbing up on Cathedral Peak's north side a bit, to the point where it got too steep to be safe. The view was pretty nice.





Overall a pretty nice hike. We could have gone a little bit higher and hiked longer, but it was scenic and did its job; we were both reasonably well acclimatized for the higher altitude on the next day.