High Sierra Camps 2023

Based on recent weather, it looks like the High Sierra Camps may soon cancel their fifth year in a row. Can anyone imagine circumstances under which Aramark might run the camps this year? In their favor, they have already given up on Vogelsang—the highest altitude camp—and Merced Lake—the largest camp by far—proposing only Glen Aulin, Sunrise, and May Lake camps to open.

The Sunrise Lake Camp area has had water quality advisories in recent years at the backpacker camp, so they probably need to do maintenance there and at all the other camps before opening. There will probably still be plenty of snow on the ground (except in Glen Aulin) on 4 July. I don't see how they're going to get enough maintenance done to have things ready.

Aramark's announcement from the fall is that they're going to run a loop from Tuolumne Meadows Lodge to Glen Aulin, May Lake, and Sunrise Lake for one night each and then back to TML for a fifth night as their standard tour. The old version of the standard tour was not so dependent on the front county cabin hotel at TML.

There's a chance they try opening TML (which hasn't been open since 2019) without running the High Sierra Camps.

And the fall announcement also announced abandonment of the old menus dependent on elaborate canned and fresh food items. It says the "new experience will feature culinary creations aligned with a traditional backpacking experience" meaning mostly freeze dried. I don't remember what the trails used to be like but it must have been heavy with mule trains and stinky with waste running to the camps to keep up the elaborate menus and large numbers of guests.

The Park Service sees High Sierra Camps as a pain and a barbarous polluting relic. Aramark sees them as a headache and a money loser. Backpackers see them as trail pollution and crowding. But they do have fans. You can see from old low resolution Youtube videos people were having a good time. I wonder if they'll ever open again. It only gets harder as the memory of how to run them fades away.

IMO, they won't open this year due to snow. It'll be an easy decision (excuse?) for Aramark. Even if it were a low snow year, it's difficult these days to find people to work for a short summer season. Then there's the other reasons you mentioned. So yeah, I wonder if they'll ever reopen.