Click on the index pictures below to start cycling through the regular size pictures; clicking on one of the individual picture pages will bring up the full-size original. I've lightly annotated the pictures I took. Below those pictures you can find Christina's Pictures -- she has a better camera and eyes than I do.
Views from the Teneya Lake overlook, on the way to Mammoth. It was overcast, and we had bits of rain.
The next day we were going to go to Devils Postpile, but it is now necessary to board a shuttle bus to do that, and we didn't feel in the mood for a shuttle bus. We drove to the Minarets Overlook, and snapped a few pictures:
We then drove to Tuolumne. The first stop was by the headwaters of the Tuolumne River...
Next stop was on the west side of the meadows, where we took a little hike across the meadows to the low rock on northwest side of the meadows. It was a short hike -- maybe almost a mile, all together. There were still clouds, which made for very scenic views. Below are several shots of Cathedral Peak, Unicorn Peak, and other landmarks. The plan was to climb Cathedral the next day.
This is Cathedral Peak, to the left of the dome in the foreground -- you can see Eichhorn pinnacle; the true summit peeks just over the top of the north flank of the peak.
Finally, we drove over to Tenaya Lake. Sauvanne and Sara got absolutely soaked.
The next day we tried to climb Cathedral. Here's a bit of the topo. We start at the Cathedral Lakes trailhead, and follow the John Muir trail to the peak. We cut up the slope at that point, and made it to the "X".
[The normal route is to catch the unmarked Bud Lake trail, and go up the East side of the peak, but the view from the saddle between the summit and Eichorn Pinnacle is extremely fine, and the saddle also provides an excellent intermediate stop.]
As you can see from the topo, the trail starts out at a fairly steady uphill, then levels off. Sara and Sauvanne struck out in the lead, while I wheezed up the slope, and Christina pushed me from behind. But it turned out to be a rabbit and tortise thing -- the two high energy 10 year olds were great at sprinting ahead, but they faded badly around lunchtime.
This was as far as we got. The girls were hungry, and a bit stunned by the size of the mountain, so we had lunch here ("X" on the topo). I'm convinced we could have made it to the top from a purely physical standpoint, but it would have required motivation, and I was a bit nervous about the weather. So we headed down from here. You can see the summit in the last picture here -- it was perhaps an hour away.
On the way back the girls seemed to pick up a lot of energy from somewhere, and they kept charging ahead. We caught up with them a few times.
At Ellery Lake, at Tioga Pass, we pulled over and let the girls play in a snow bank.
