Filling up water at Merced Lake before setting off up Lewis Creek.

Hiking past the Merced Lake backcountry ranger station. There was no one around.

Climbing up Lewis Creek, with Half Dome poking out far to our west. We thought the smoke might be starting to clear in advance of the coming cold front, but we couldn’t tell for sure.

We hiked up the Lewis Creek Trail for a few hours, finding it somewhat more scenic than the Cathedral Fork Trail. There were occasional views of Mount Clark to our southwest and the trail passed through lovely sections of forest. When we reached the junction where the trail splits between Bernice Lake and Vogelsang Pass, we stashed our things in the woods. We thought we’d head up to climb Vogelsang Peak from Vogelsang Pass and then come back down and hike up to Bernice Lake and camp there.

Looking up at the head of Lewis Creek from the Vogelsang Pass Trail.

Beautiful Vogelsang Lake from near the pass.

Just after Vogelsang Pass we left the trail and began hiking cross country for the obvious gully we could see that climbed up to the ridge of Vogelsang Peak. It wasn’t difficult cross country hiking, but it was definitely harder than the trail we had been hiking on.

Looking down the gully towards Vogelsang Lake.

When we crested the gully on to the slope of Vogelsang Peak we were greeted with lots of scrubby little pines that grew in every sandy area along the slope. It made for quite a chore to make upwards progress between the large boulders and pine trees. After a couple hundred vertical feet or so we reached the class 3 rocks of the summit and scrambled up to a little perch.

Looking north towards Tuolumne Meadows.

Northwest to the Cathedral Range.

West towards Emeric Lake, Half Dome, and Yosemite Valley.

Southeast towards Bernice Lake and Mount Maclure. There was no summit register on Vogelsang Peak. But there was faint cell phone reception, so we downloaded a fresh forecast from the National Weather Service. It called for the cold front to arrive this afternoon, which we could already feel and see in the air, and then for temperatures to plummet into the mid-teens for the next couple of nights, much colder than we expected, before a gradual return to the previous day’s conditions by the weekend. That all seemed to line up with our expectation that the smoke would clear and it would get very cold for a couple of days, but we expected that the smoke would make a gradual return by the end of our trip. So, we figured we’d go ahead with our plan.

Looking north over Vogelsang Lake from the slope of Vogelsang Peak before dropping into the gully.

Vogelsang Lake again.

The other side of the pass, with Mount Maclure way off in the distance. We finished the easy hike back down to the trail junction, reloaded our packs, and started climbing up to Bernice Lake, which we reached at about six o’clock. We passed another camper near where the trail meets the lake and found a campsite a few hundred feet farther down the lake.

Late afternoon light on the cliffs above Bernice Lake.

There was an impressive sunset that colored the lenticular clouds that had formed over the mountains. We hurried to set up camp, cook dinner, and filter water as the temperature started to drop, before turning in for the night wearing all of the warm clothes we had.