Cathedral Lakes

We woke up at 5am and quickly got ready. We were going to head up to Tioga Road to complete the e Cathedral Lakes Trail which was a 90 minute drive to get there. We left soon after 5:30am and drove towards the national park. We were happy to see once again we didn’t have to pay to enter as we arrived early enough.

I decided to drive this morning and it was quite a long and windy drive. On the way we stopped at Olmsted Point which had views of the half dome as the sun was starting to rise.

We arrived at the trailhead carpark and packed up all our items we needed for the day. The first kilometre of the trail was flat until we turned onto the trail and we started the climb uphill. The track was essentially all uphill to the lakes and then all downhill on the way back. We walked through a forest and it was very sandy which was a nice change from walking up rocks. We entered a clearing and could see the large rock formations above us and views of other mountains in the distance. It was a really nice walk up to the turn off even though it was quite steep in sections.

When we reached the turn off we decided to go to the Lower Cathedral Lake first. It was 800m down to the lake. There was very little wind and there were reflections of the surrounding mountains in the lake. We had breakfast at the lake edge and then walked around the lake which was about 1km. From every point of the lake we could see different views and reflections of the mountains.

We then walked back to the turnoff and headed towards Upper Cathedral Lake which was about 1km away. I was watching the route on AllTrails as there was no signage to get to this lake. We entered a clearing and then saw a path leading towards the lake. This lake was smaller but it was still really beautiful seeing the reflections of the mountains in the water. There was no track around the lake on the map, however people had clearly made their own trail and we managed to walk the full distance around and scramble over a few rocks.

We started to head back to the turnoff and then uphill before reaching the point where it was all downhill to the carpark. It was quite exhausting after a while and the sun was quite warm as well. We made it back to the car and decided we would drive to a lookout to have lunch. In total we walked 19.4km and went up 534m in elevation.Baca lagi