Much as our hiking adventures in Maui three years ago centered around our walk through Haleakala’s crater, most of our various hikes this year have been oriented toward preparing for a six-day backpacking trip in the high country of Yosemite National Park. Until this year, Chris had done a handful of backpack excursions, but none at all since a two-night trip to Mineral King in 1992 – Jane, on the other hand, had never spent the night in the backcountry outside of established campgrounds accessible by car. In anticipation of adding backpacking to our list of favorite outdoor activities, we started accumulating the requisite gear about a year ago, often at a not-so-insignificant cost that stretched our budget with attendant consternation, particularly in the absence of trip plans that were anywhere near concrete. In looking around for appealing backpacking options several months ago, Jane had run across information on the High Sierra Camps of Yosemite – first established 100 years ago and expanded over the next few decades, the High Sierra Camps were designed to allow visitors to experience the Yosemite backcountry with relative ease. Located a day’s walk apart, the five camps offer bedding, tent cabins heated by wood stove, and hot meals to guests hiking between them, typically burdened only with light loads, having to carry just clothing and other essentials for their trip. Today, the camps operate as rustic but comfortable hostel-style hotels – space in the tent cabins is often shared and meals are taken communally in a central dining tent, and some camps offer hot showers and flush toilets (what?!) for their guests. The camps also offer a “meals-only” option, under which guests carry their own tents and sleeping gear, stay in backpackers’ campgrounds adjacent to each High Sierra Camp (HSC), but share in the meals provided to the other “registered” guests. This meals-only option sounded great to Jane – she would get to experience the alpine scenery and backcountry environment without having to carry food for six days – and Chris concurred. So, back in February, we got our wilderness permit and obtained our meals-only reservation (an arduous process, about which there is here insufficient space to fully describe), all of this the back story that informed our excitement as we drove up Hwy 395 from Bishop. The plan today was to pick up our wilderness permit at the Wilderness Center in Tuolumne Meadows by mid-morning, then tackle what we expected to be about 6-1/2 easy miles to our first night’s campsite at Glen Aulin – we would walk northwestward over gently rolling terrain, eventually meeting the Tuolumne River and following it in its tumbling course off the Tuolumne Meadows plateau to Glen Aulin, losing about 900′ of elevation over the last two miles of an otherwise fairly flat hike. The Wilderness Center was a mad house when we arrived at 9am – there was a long line just to get previously-reserved permits, and an even longer line of folks waiting to snag any no-shows that the rangers make available at 11am each day. It was well after 10 by the time we got going, and we ended up leaving the Jeep there as opposed to parking it at the Lembert Dome trailhead a half mile west as we’d planned. This meant a road walk now of that same distance (Chris didn’t realize there was a parallel trail we could have used until we returned here six days later), so west we hiked down Hwy 120, arriving at Lembert Dome within a few minutes. Here, we crossed the highway and followed a dusty dirt road lined with other hikers’ cars for several hundred yards, eventually passing the Tuolumne Meadows stables and leaving the cars behind. The path curled north and then west around the Soda Springs area, where we found the official Glen Aulin trailhead about a mile-and-a-half from our starting point. Immediately, the trail took on a new character, that of a trail and not a road – the single track led into a shady wood which became alternately sunny and shadowed as we followed the path northwest. This trail segment sees a tremendous amount of use as it’s both the PCT and the principal supply route for Glen Aulin HSC (each camp sees 2-3 pack trains a day 2-3 times a week to bring in supplies and haul out trash), and the surface is quite loose and dusty this time of year. The day was quite warm, and it was nice to reach the river section after an hour or so in the woods – despite the drying meadows and dusty trail, there was still a lot of water in the river that flowed effortlessly across the plateau and through several twisting, beautiful bends. Our course stayed fairly straight, sometimes at the water’s edge and sometimes a little further away. We soon came to a section where we climbed up a set of granite slabs above the river, then descended through the forest to a pair of footbridges allowing us to cross to the west bank. Other hikers were taking their midday breaks here so we decided to seek more solitude further downstream, pausing briefly to allow a southbound pack train to pass. Beyond the footbridges, the river begins to drop through a series of shelves, each one with rapids or falls at its crest and calm pools at its bottom – we picked our way northward down the trail, stopping here and there to take in the views, which were gorgeous. Not far downstream, we found a large pool with a sandy beach not far from the trail, so we stopped here to eat our lunch – it was a lovely spot for an extended break. Once we resumed our walk, the trail began to lose elevation more steeply, leading us west away from the water through a set of cobbled switchbacks – abruptly, we turned back east toward the river, emerging from the forest at the base of the exquisite Tuolumne Falls, a short (by Yosemite standards) waterfall about 40′ high. It was quite stunning, the cascade dropping through several layers of granite with more churning rapids below. As we continued down the canyon, we were treated to more whitewater views, crowned with the vista back southeast to Tuolumne Falls at the head of the shallow valley. We passed the junction with the May Lake trail we’d be following tomorrow, and we knew we had less than a quarter mile to go. After a short, steep descent, we found another footbridge back to the east side of the river, then another bridge leading to the High Sierra Camp. The Glen Aulin HSC is not actually in Glen Aulin, that place being a small wooded valley through which the river placidly flows immediately below and to the west of the last footbridge, but the camp was before us as we crossed over Conness Creek. Glen Aulin does not offer the meals-only option, so there was no check-in process for us this afternoon – we continued east of the camp to the backpackers’ campground, choosing a site in some rocks a few hundred yards east of the HSC. Dinner was ramen and leftover snacks from the hike in, which we enjoyed after walking back to the river to soak our feet – the riverfront at the camp is wonderful, with a large swimming hole below White Cascade, and many of the camp’s guests were already on the scene when we arrived. After dinner, we walked out to a hilltop overlooking Glen Aulin to watch the sunset – we didn’t get the same alpenglow experience as at Pear Lake back in June, but the setting sun was magical as we watched the canyon sink deeper into shadows. We went to bed shortly after sundown, satisfied with finishing Day 1 of 6 but perhaps a bit apprehensive of what lay in store for the next 5.