As beautiful as last night’s sunset was, it was rivaled by the sunrise! This view greeted us in the morning as we ate up the last of our backpacker meals and packed up for the final leg of this section of the TYT. Dominion did not have a great night sleep and we were both pretty achy so we while we were sad to be leaving this amazing place, we were anxious to get back to the comfort of civilization.
The hike out begins with a fairly long walk along the shore of Lake Aloha. It is a photographer’s dream come true – there’s just nowhere to look that doesn’t beg for a picture. After Aloha there were four more lakes between our camp and our end point at Echo Chalet: Lake of the Woods, Tamarack, and then Upper and Lower Echo Lakes.
The trail climbs past Aloha and stays pretty high until it drops down at the Echo Lakes area. the trail in between is very rocky so even the downhill segments are rough. After a fairly good amount of time we finally spotted the Echo Lakes far in the distance.
not too long after the Echo Lakes came into view we reached the border of Desolation Wilderness. Form this point on you are in public lands – and it shows. This segment of this trail was not exactly described in glowing terms by Thomas Winnet. In fact he recommended simply skipping it by taking the “water taxi” to Echo Chalet. Fortunately or unfortunately depending on how you look at it, the water taxi was not running this late in the season, so we had to hike out every step.
I thought this part of the trail was fine – but I did see why Winnet didn’t seem to care much for it once we got to the cabins. At this point the trail basically becomes a path through the backyards of a series of rental cabins along the lake, then climbs somewhat dramatically well above the water for the duration of the hike.
If I do this trial again I’d certainly consider taking the water taxi but more for the novelty of it than any real need. The trail isn’t at all ugly and although you can’t get down to the water easily and the cabins are annoying (mostly because none of them are mine), there’s really no reason to abandon the hike at this point.
Eventually we reached the western end of Lower Echo lake and dropped down to the parking lot, docks, and the chalet (which was closed). We took a minute to high five and then crossed the parking lot to hike one last hill up the road to the car we had left four days ago. It was time to go to In-N-Out, and head home.
Section 1 of the original Tahoe-Yosemite Trail was complete!
Backcountry Pilgrim 