The Silence of Mt. Dana (Part 5: Finale)

This blog will wrap it up the Mt. Dana hike.

Let's look to the east side which is really the main reward of the hike. There are a few high areas that block some of Mt. Dana from Mono Lake. You can see the very tip of it from down below, but these mountain peaks are what block it. It is all connected to what is called Dana Plateau. Sometime in the next few years I want to go all the way to the end down below. I will take pictures from down below back to where I was standing up here.

The highlight picture everyone tries to get is Mono Lake. Naturally, I was there a little too early in the day with the sun still on that side so it is a little more hazy that I would like, but it will do.

In one of the High Plains Drifter videos I mentioned that I was trying to find the "town" the movie was in from on top of Dana. Well, here is the picture. You can see the South Tufa formations to the right of the picture. Well, just move along the shore to the left and there is where the town would have been. I told you this all connects like a big puzzle.
This is looking toward the north again. Mt. Conness is to the far left and Matterhorn Peak is the the far right.
Mt. Conness. This was about a week before I climbed that one. It is interesting to see pictures of that mountain from different sides.
Naturally, I always keep tabs on my icon peak: Matterhorn Peak. What was funny about this one is if you look closely or click the picture you will see a small heart shaped piece of snow. This is always on there for most of the season. When I have hiked that mountain I always shoot for that heart of ice. Once around it the hard part of the hike is over. However, being a dry year the heart shaped piece of ice was gone the next week.
So, there you have it. A rough hike on the legs, but very rewarding with the views. I only wish I had done it earlier in the season with snow on the mountains. Maybe someday.

The Silence of Mt. Dana (Part 4)

Everything you see on this side is Yosemite. Mt. Dana, like Conness and Matterhorn Peak, strattle the border of northeastern Yosemite. In the middle right background would be Yosemite Valley, but you can not see it very well from up here compared to the views from Mt. Conness.

This is starting to look toward the southern side.
I zoomed into Mt. Lyell here which is the highest point in Yosemite which is only about 60 feet higher than were I was standing on Mt. Dana.
This is an unknown lake to me. There were a bunch of lakes like this on this side that I do not think I have seen before on the ground.
This is the south side. Can you see a lake in the upper left part in the background?
That looks like Lake Crowley. It is about 35 miles away.
I will try to wrap this up with the next blog.

The Silence of Mt. Dana (Part 3)

Originally, this was going to be the final blog on this hike, but I am going to extend it.

All the rest of the pictures are from the summit. After looking at the pictures I realized that this is a good area to show the connections to other areas I have mentioned before on this blog. The following is looking to the northern side. In the background I think are the two twin peaks that I showed from the other side in regarding Belle Starr's Daughter; I will have to check up on that though. I believe Mt. Warren is the peak to the right. Tioga Peak, which I climbed a few years back, is much lower to the middle left of the picture. Saddlebag Lake is what you see on the extreme left side of the picture. More on that lake below.

We are still looking in the northern direction here, but I moved the camera a bit more to the left from the above. Tioga Peak is now in the middle right of the picture; it is kind of hard to show because it blends in with the rest of the peaks. Saddlebag Lake is in the background. Tioga Lake is dead center. The peaks of Conness and Matterhorn are in the background, and I will show zoomed in pictures of them in the next blog or two.
I have good memories of Tioga Lake. My dad and other relatives liked to fish this lake once in a while. You can barely see a small rock formation that is in the lake that is obvious when you drive by it.
Here is Saddlebag Lake. When I did that blog entry last week I totally forgot I had a picture of the boat that takes people across the lake. The same situation happened when I zoomed in while on top of Conness.
This is looking toward the western side of Yosemite. From here I was able to zoom back in on the car 3,000 ft. and 3 miles below.
I will continue to show the south and east sides in the next blog.

The Silence of Mt. Dana (Part 2)

We continued that morning at our very slow pace. I was not used to doing a hike this slow. It was really hard for me to speed my legs up. We were right on time though because it takes about an hour for the average person to go up a 1,000 ft. vertical like this. In the picture above you can see the rocky peak that was to the left of Mt. Dana coming up. It was in the first picture in the last blog. Another route one can take is from that direction starting out near Tioga Lake. I tested it a few years ago and it is a good class 2 route, but you eventually come to this point anyways. As far as I can tell it is the same amount of work either way with maybe some more rock scrambling on that side to get to this point. The picture below again shows how steep this area is. With something like this you just have to tell yourself to keep moving and not think of it. Slow, but steady is the attitude one should have. Usually, I get to the top of where this picture is and then see that I have more to go until it flattens out a bit. That was only partially true here.

This is looking back down. You can see two men coming up on the trail. If you look way down there you can see the eastern entrance station to Yosemite, the trailhead, and where we parked.

Eventually, about half-way up, there is a plateau with a rocky cairn (you see this in the video with my backpack and hiking pole against it; also, part of it is visible in the last picture below). It does not really flatten out too much here, but this is the resting point that marks a few things. One, you are half-way, but more importantly, two, the clearly defined trail is about to end. The scramble over rocks is about to begin.

The above is more toward the west. This does show the plateau is big! The picture below is again looking back down.

Mt. Conness is the high point to the left in the following picture. If you look closely you can see Saddlebag Lake in the middle right side of the picture.

After all the work it took to get here we still had to get to the top of this, but the bad news is most of this would be a rock scramble.

I should have up the concluding video and pictures over the weekend.

The Silence of Mt. Dana (Part 1)

(GPS: N°37 54. 010 W°119 13.280)

Here is one I have wanted to show for a while. I am going to take a few blogs for it. With all the hikes I consider "major" hikes I tend to take hundreds of pictures, but only show about 30 pictures at most in these blogs.

Mt. Dana is one my brother had wanted to do for a few years. I wanted to do it, but not as much as other mountain hikes. The time seemed right so we went off to do it. I should mention that I started to compose the "Why I Do I Climb?" blog in my head the few days before this hike and after it. Part of the problem is we had to wait around to do this one which created a bit of anxiety in me. I knew I would be alright once we got going, but waiting around and thinking about it was bothering me. I was not really enjoying being in the Eastern Sierra those few days before it. The day arrived and the next thing I knew we were at the trailhead. Okay, here we go, 3 miles and over 3,000 ft. in about 3 hours to get to the top.

You can see Mt. Dana from the trailhead that starts at the Eastern entrance to Yosemite. I do not know what that lower rocky peak is called to the left. I will show a picture of it looking back down in my next blog. Now keep in mind we actually started the hike early in the morning before the sun came up. My basic strategy is I rarely take pictures or video in the morning to save battery because I would rather have the sun out for lighting. So, most of what you are seeing is done in reverse order on the way down, but I do it this way so you get to see it in good daylight conditions.
You pass a lot of these little ponds on the way in the early part of the hike. The first 20-30 minutes is easy just walking through a forest with lots of trees.
I have read that earlier in the year after spring the flowers are really nice up there. Unfortunately, I was there at the end of summer. I still was looking for whatever nature pictures I could get. After meandering through the forest for the first 20 minutes we finally got a taste of what the hike was really going to be about.
This is probably the steepest hike I have ever done. I may have been in areas where short portions of a hike were steeper, but this is just straight up the rest of the way. Sometimes I can go up steep portions of a hike really quickly and then recover slowly on the rest of the hike. I tried going fast, but it just did not work that way here. I realized I was just going to have to put one foot above the other at a very slow pace. I felt like I had no choice.