Glen Aulin - July 14, 2004

On the third day of my visit to Yosemite in 2004, I had planned my longest hike of the trip - a 9-mile hike along the Glen Aulin Trail. Glen Aulin is actually one of the back country camps that backpackers stay at. I wasn't planning on staying there or even visiting - my plan was to hike out to Tuolumne Falls, eat lunch, and hike back in. The guide book and all of my literature said the hike to this point would be about 4 1/2 miles, and would go down in elevation about 600 feet over that 4 1/2 miles. Pretty flat hike, at least by my estimation.

Tuolumne River, Glen Aulin Trail

Let me just say this now - THIS IS THE PRETTIEST HIKE AT YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK!!! This is, of course, just my opinion and I have, decidedly, not been on each and every hike in the Park. But if you want a very scenic, fairly flat hike, this is the one to take.

Glen Aulin

And it was. Flat, that is. Very pretty hike too. Along the way was an awesome display of granite - the picture above doesn't do justice to what I saw. At this point in the trail (somewhere in the middle of mile 2-3), the trail goes across the bottom of this huge granite slab. The slab is actually much (MUCH) larger than my picture makes it look.

Glen Aulin

Along the trail, pretty much the entire way, was the Tuolumne River. As you can see from the above picture, the River went right along the same slab as in the first picture. (A note here - these pictures aren't as clear as some of my other pictures. There was a fire over in the western part of Yosemite National Park, and the smoke was blowing over to the east where I was.)

The trail was, as I stated before, flat and slightly downhill. A relatively easy hike, for which I was grateful. There was a somewhat rocky part but even that had nothing on the Cathedral Lakes hike, which was rocky throughout. And the trail had a lot of manure, horse manure. I was pretty amazed that the horses made it through the one rocky part, even though it was not that bad.

Tuolumne Falls, Glen Aulin Trail

After about 2 hours or so, I arrived at Tuolumne Falls. Glen Aulin camp was about another mile or so further down the trail but I wasn't planning on going there so I found a convenient rock to sit on (yes, there were several more granite rocks here!) and ate lunch. The trail bridge crosses the falls at the top, so I did not get any pictures from the bottom of the Falls. And that was fine with me as my feet felt tired and hot. I don't recall if I soaked my feet here or not. But if I did, I am sure the water was pretty cold.

Since the hike was FLAT (did I mention that before), the return hike went smoothly and quickly. Before I knew it, I was back at Soda Springs (from where I had started the hike). I still had about 1 mile to go before I reached my campsite. I limped over there - no blisters on this day but my body had had enough hiking and just did not want to hike any more.