For our fourth weekend in Mammoth, Shannon and I planned a backpacking trip. Two weeks prior I had jumped through all of the hoops to secure a permit for us to do a one night outing from Tuolumne Meadows up Lyell Canyon and back. Our goal was to climb Mount Lyell and Mount Maclure.

Mount Lyell is the highest peak in Yosemite National Park and home to one of the park’s two remaining glaciers. The standard route up this peak leaves the John Muir Trail just north of Donohue Pass and climbs directly to the glacier which is then crossed before climbing to the summit almost along the ridgeline from the north. This route is somewhat notorious for having become much more difficult in recent years. When the most recent edition of The High Sierra, Peaks, Passes, and Trails was published it was common to climb directly up the north side of the glacier and then up onto the rocks. Nowadays after a low snow year, the peak is often climbed without any snow gear at all. However, this is reportedly more difficult. Reliable sources put the difficulty of the route at the easy end of class 4 without the help of the glacier, more difficult than Secor or the SPS Scrambler Ratings suggest.

While Mount Lyell receives much attention as the highest peak in the park and an SPS emblem peak, Mount Maclure is a bit less popular. The route is supposed to be more of a straightforward class 3 scramble from Lyell-Maclure Col.

So, the night before we packed up all the things we needed and got ready for our trip. We decided to pack our microspikes and ice axes as we couldn’t tell exactly what the extent of the glacier was this year or find a reliable trip report on the internet, and we didn’t want to be in a situation where we needed them but didn’t have them.