Backpackers Paradise - Yosemite In September

For backpackers, there's nothing better in the entire park system. How much of it can one hiker see in a week?

- Michael Lanza

We’re floating on a granite cloud.

At least, that’s the sensation we get walking across the slender spine of 9,926-foot Clouds Rest, which levitates between sphincter-puckering abysses of deep air in the heart of Yosemite National Park. Below my left elbow, the rock plunges several hundred feet to forest. Below my right elbow, a cliff face sweeps downward a dizzying 4,000 feet— that’s 1,000 feet taller than El Capitan. Half Dome lies just a few miles away and below us—a view that makes anyone with a camera feel like Ansel Adams. Yosemite Valley sprawls a little lower, and, farther off, the Clark Range, Cathedral Range, and the peaks of northern Yosemite slash at the sky.

We can’t help but linger over the vista, which is something considering how rarely we’ll slow down in the coming days. My friends Todd Arndt, Mark Fenton, Jeff Wilhelm, and I are 7 miles into the first morning of a roughly 150-mile hike through most of the vast swath of far-off mountains and canyons surrounding us. First, we’re hiking a 65-mile horseshoe-shaped route south of Tuolumne Meadows, then we’ll resupply and embark on an 86-mile trek north of Tuolumne.

And we’ll do it all in a week.