Mount Lyell

Mount Lyell is the highest point in Yosemite National Park at 13,120 feet, and doing it as a day hike out of Tuolumne Meadows means committing to a genuinely enormous day — the approach alone follows the Lyell Fork of the Tuolumne River for miles of flat, scenic canyon before the trail finally starts climbing toward Donohue Pass. Somewhere along the way, the route leaves the John Muir Trail behind entirely and heads cross-country toward the peak itself, one of the most beautiful and remote-feeling stretches of the whole Yosemite high country.

The last real obstacle before the summit is the Lyell Glacier — the last remaining glacier in Yosemite — which has to be crossed or skirted to reach the saddle below the final summit block. From there, the actual top is a genuine class 3 scramble over loose, ancient metamorphic rock, nothing like a simple walk-up despite how far you've already come just to get to its base. It was a little smoky out there on the day, which softened the long views out over the Cathedral Range, but nothing that took away from finally standing on top after wanting this peak for years.

The best moment of the whole day, though, might have been finding the old Sierra Club summit register at the top — a battered metal box placed in 1935, still bolted to the rock, still doing its job nearly ninety years later. Round trip this hike runs somewhere between 26 and 29 miles depending on the exact line taken to the summit and back, with the rock near the top being genuinely difficult to climb — tough enough that I'd tried for a backpacking permit the year before and never got one, so this ended up being a very long single-day push instead.

This is, without question, one of the two hardest single days I've ever put together, right alongside Mount Whitney — and if I'm being honest, this one might edge Whitney out just slightly. Longer, harder rock, and a much lonelier, wilder feeling stretch of the Sierra to earn it in.