A Backpack to the Remote Lyell Fork of the Merced River

Booth lake from the trail, west end.

Booth lake

A Trail and Cross-Country Route to the Lyell Fork, July 2007

Moving down the level trail, I began to see Boothe Lake between the trees. If I had been thinking, I would have gone down to the shore (retracing my steps of 16 years ago) and followed it to the Booth Lake trail, and avoided the rougher bouncy main trail to the junction. It would have been more scenic and possibly easier. I had camped there in the "magic zone" long ago with my brother. An interesting fact was that Booth Lake was the original site of the High Sierra Camp, before they moved it to its present Vogelsang location. When I was there at Booth Lake, I could still finds remnants of the camp on the northwest shore of the lake. Also at the time they had "bear cables", a cable stretched between two poles, from which you were to hang your food. We used that setup, as I did once at Cathedral Lake, where I watched one of the biggest bears I have ever seen in the Sierra walk below the hanging food and morosely eye the out of reach food. Later I heard shouting and banging from around the lake as the bear dropped in on others for a snack.

 

Booth Lake and points beyond.

Booth Lake and looking towards the spot where the High Sierra Camp used to be (1991).

My brother Steve at the 1991 camp at Booth Lake.

But I stayed on the trail, which did the old Sierra roller coaster thing, unnecessarily gaining and losing altitude before reaching the Booth Lake trail junction. From there it climbed to the trail junction (9992 Feet) to end the about 700 feet of elevation gain from the Emeric/Fletcher trail junction. Dave was at the junction taking care of some pack business. The first thing I did when I joined him was to drop my pack and get out the deet because we were being swarmed by hundreds of aggressive mosquitoes! We had seen worse, but it had been a while. After I took care of some business of my own (food and doing something about a leaky fuel canister), we beat it out of there, with Dave taking the lead.