Quote
tomdisco
If you wanted to hike Lyle Pass to the Minarets and come out at Mammoth for the purpose of picking up the Yarts bus I presume one would go from Minaret Lake to Devil's Post Pile and then take the Mammoth Pass/Reds Meadow trail to its trailhead at Horseshoe Lake. How does one get from there to the nearest Yarts stop, presumably in Mammoth Lakes? Is this a hitch-hike on Rt. 10? I'm sure the best bet is simply leave one car at Horseshoe Lake and another at Toulumne Meadows but was curious if anybody has done this using Yarts.
We started at that trailhead about a week ago. We did not want to shuttle two cars so we took advantage of the fact that Mammoth has great public transportation. The YART is a bummer because of the time it puts you east of Yosemite (it gets to the Mammoth Mt. Inn @ 8:50 pm so we did spend the night in Mammoth the day before we started the hike. We initially left our car at Tuloumne Meadows even though the plan was to go clear to Happy Isles( we wanted an escape if things were not going well) and were supposed to ride Yarts twice but hitched a ride for the leg that involved getting from Tuolumne to Mammoth. It took 45 minutes to find a ride. Might have been a little easier for us since we are two women... I do not know. We stayed at the Mammoth Mt. Inn - and then took free town trolley shuttles to trail head - day hiked Red Cones to Red's Meadow for acclimation, took the red's Meadow shuttle back to Mammoth Mt. Inn, stayed another night then rode the shuttle back up the next day and stayed in for good. When we hiked to Tuolumne Meadows, we took a day, drove the car to the Valley and rode YARTS back to TM and stayed the night in the BP camp (Which is not a backpackers c.amp at all...its really just a walk in unles all those people are planning on pulling those coolers with them!) and continued with our trip. YARTs bus was nice...good A/C comfy seats with a potty and on time if you do have to ride it.
The Mammoth Pass trailhead at Horseshoe lake is called Red Cones trailhead by the Inyo NF. That area where Horseshoe lake and lake Mary etc are located is called Mammoth lakes Basin and there is a Lakes Basin Trolley that is free that makes stops up there - check this link to the public transit map and info
https://123mammothcondo.com/transit_map_of_mammoth_lakes_summer.pdf for times and such. The Yart bus stops two or three times in Mammoth... the Mammoth mountain Inn is its final stop. I believe it also stops at the Shilo Inn and may make one other stop.
A vender does operate the red's meadow shuttle... it is 7 bucks per person, you pay the driver cash. It makes 10 stops along the Minaret Road/Devil's Postpile. It starts at the Mammoth Mountain Inn...you can drive there and park your car or ride the Yarts there.
Hope you get to go on your trip. The Inyo permit we got that granted us entry into Yosemite via the JMT was very vague so we got to wander all over in the place in the park before finally exiting at Happy Isles. We had 12 days on our permit, stayed in for 11 and spent 6 of then exploring clouds rest, echo valley and the Merced River Canyon.