Route Advice: 8 night-9 days off trail high route in Ansel Adams wilderness

[Wandering Daisy]

Your proposed route (shown on the map) is MORE than 41 miles! Use a better program to calculate the miles (one that you actually draw the route instead of using GPS point-to-point), then add the elevation gain for each day and see what it really involves.

Hutching Creek and the Lyell Fork are two really nice secluded locations, worth spending a night.

Depends on what you want, but I think following Roper's high route up Bench Canyon is more scenic than staying on the ridge. But if you are into climbing/ridge running, then maybe stay on the ridges.

[tnhgmia]

Hey all! Thanks again for all the recommendations. The trip got heavily modified because of weather (got blasted with 20-30mph winds for like 48+hr which made things tricky at a critical juncture), my friend was still acclimating and struggled the first few days, and then my knee got a minor injury. The gist of it is that we ended up doing DPP to superior lake and high Sierra route until 1000 island lake. The bad weather (looked like a storm) and behind schedule had us head to Davis lakes which ended up being incredible! That whole area was completely empty of people with lush meadows and a spectacular panorama of peaks. We relaxed there a while and explored a little (until the knee problem), but checked out clinch pass which looked quite doable and now I have lots of ideas for things I want to see north and west of there. As an aside I thought the eastern side of all the lakes people rave about were actually less impressive than the western high route side (1000 island, garnet, Ediza). Next time I would have skipped the PCT/JMT sections and probably come out of June Lake or Yosemite and head straight into the high country.