There is a line.

Even on an early morning in late September, about a dozen backpackers, trekkers, weekend warriors, Euros and other wanderers spill out of Yosemite National Park’s wilderness permit office in Tuolumne Meadows.

They’re looking for backcountry passes to Cathedral Lakes. And they have come for bear canisters in hopes of avoiding the stumbling trail dance of hunger-induced dementia after losing their lunch or breakfast or dinner to the wild.

They get what they want — as well as a lecture on backcountry etiquette — before locking up the car and heading for the hills and shores and into a forest made crisp by the onset of Autumn.

For me and my partner, Kara, it’s a two-day, out-and-back trip to lower McCabe Lake about 15 miles north of Tuolumne. Despite the line at the permit office, crowds have thinned considerably since Labor Day weekend, making for maximum solitude down the trail.

Glen Aulin

Meadows are clearings — open expanses of grass that rest in the shadows of mountains. They are cut in two by the slicing power of rivers and streams, calming retreats from the jagged hunks of geologic masterpieces nearby. Their images flash across television screens in darkened bedrooms, show off on calendars tacked to office walls and stick to the canvass of nature-loving, yet starving artists. Tuolumne is everything in those pictures and obviously more.

Late in the season at the end of a month that sucks less than an inch of rain from the clouds passing over Yosemite, the trail leading from the meadow is a dusty mix of silt and granite nuggets that have broken free from huge, gray slabs. It rises up briefly, levels for a spell then dives into a cavernous valley brought to life by the icy and somewhat diminished waters of the Tuolumne River. Six miles in is Glen Aulin, a lunch stop for us and a last stop for others.

Glen Aulin is one of five high Sierra camps that dish out tent cabins and hot meals to overland travelers lucky enough to get reservations that book a year in advance. Its borders touch the sandy beach at the edge of waterfall splash pools and the base of the hills that would lift us another 2,000 feet in the next nine miles.

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