Route finding on Ten Lakes

Hello All,

I have a question about the Ten Lakes trail to Ten Lakes. How easy is it to follow the trail? I am an avid mountain biker (intermediate hiker) from Colorado, spending lots of time mtnbiking on remote roads/trails in the Rockies. Some friends of mine and myself are heading to Yosemite in a few weeks to car camp, hike, and do one overnight backpack trip from Ten Lakes TH to the Ten Lakes. While we are in good shape, and will be prepared with our packs, I am not sure how "easy" it is to stay on the trail heading to Ten Lakes (a google search returns results of hikes getting lost)? I will have a GPS on my phone, a pocket compass, and a map, but I am by no means an expert with these 3 tools. In Colorado, the trails generally stay a very visible singletrack. When I read abot Yosemite and look at pictures, sometimes I don't see the actual trail people are on, and many times I see people walking through large fields of granite slabs (no trail). I assume there are craines that show you the way, but I not sure sure how easy it is to follow those (if they stay in your field of view)? Should I be worried about route finding from TL TH to TLs? Or, is it pretty manageable to find our way to the Lakes? Are there any .gpx files avaliable to download to the GPS I will be using on my phone?

Any help is appreciated!

It's a big trail. Well-defined singletrack the whole way as far as I remember. It gets a lot of traffic and also a lot of trail maintenance. If there are any open granite areas, they are generally well-cairned and you won't have to walk more than 30-40 yards before coming across the singletrack again. But I don't remember any of those specifically on the Ten Lakes trail. As long as you aren't totally zoned out and not paying attention you should have no problems. If you do lose it at a switchback or whatever just walk back 100 yards until you are on the highly visible single track again. The fact that people get lost is more a statement of just how many people hike the trail than any particular difficulty of following it IMHO.

I've had someone wander off the end of a switchback before, following a water bar into the woods. There are often use trails in these places because of people who hike with all their sense turned off - march, march, march, suddenly there's no trail anymore, whuuuuuutttt???? Just turn around 180 degrees and go back at this point if it happens to you instead of continuing into the woods like the others... or just mind the trail heading up the pass. It's not hard to follow the many footprints on the maintained trail if you pay attention.

Thanks for the info guys. Much appreciated. Looking at some trip reports of this route has me excited to say the least. It'll be nice to see the difference between the Rockies and the Sierras. Hopefully I haven't been too spoiled by some of the ranges out here. :-)

You'll love it. My favorite part was the view from Ten Lakes Pass. The lakes themselves are great too. You picked the perfect time of year to go.

It's a pretty well traveled trail. I've visited the area twice. If your GPS supports uploading of GPX files, here's a route I created on CalTopo. Hit the EXPORT button, and save as a GPX file or Garming GPS file for your unit.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 08/15/2014 12:16AM by pakoR.