John Muir Trail by night

James Vlahos in National Geographic:

… It’s midnight when I emerge from the forest atop a plateau beneath an infinite canopy of blackness and stars. The terrain ahead glows under the moon as if lit from within. Moving slowly, I cross a meadow and pass clusters of wizened mountain hemlocks. To the right something glimmers white, drawing me magnetically. Soon I stand transfixed by reflected moonlight that sweeps across an alpine lake to the base of a snowy massif. A light breeze drops to nothing, ripples in the lake go still, and the light coalesces into the single dot of the moon, the water around the reflection so placid that it reveals the pinpricks of stars.

This view at Island Pass in California’s High Sierra is sublime and rarely witnessed, too, though not for lack of hiker traffic. Every summer hundreds of people follow the route I’m hiking the John Muir Trail (JMT), which runs for 211 glorious miles from the base of Half Dome in the Yosemite Valley to the top of Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the lower 48. En route are a dozen major passes, alpine lakes photographed by Ansel Adams, and granite whipped skyward like the surface of a giant lemon meringue pie. The trail is well loved—too well loved, if you value unbroken solitude in the wilderness. But almost nobody sees Island Pass like this, when scenery that’s merely pretty during the day becomes downright magical at night.

I’ve made moonlit hikes before, out-and-back walks of only a few miles. Those jaunts were so memorable that I was inspired this past summer to tackle the entire JMT that way. My plan was to sync my movements to the rise and set of the moon, which would typically encompass late afternoon, dusk, and several hours of moonlit night. …

read more – Star Trek: Yosemite to the Moon