Hiking season is almost over, so we (me + hiking buddies) decided we should do an epic end-of-season hike - the Cloud's rest. We did the half dome almost two months ago, and now we decided to get another view of it from afar! We originally wanted to camp on the summit so that we can see the sunset, milky way, sunrise, but unfortunately, it is a little late for that. It already started snowing a little! Oh well, we will just do a day hike instead!
It was a 15-mile hike from Tenaya Lake on the Tioga Road (which will close in early November), and only about 1800 feet elevation gain. Having said that, the trailhead is at 8150 feet elevation and the summit is about 9930 feet, which for people like me (who get affected by altitude quite a bit), is not an easy hike. If you have more time, I would recommend spending a day chilling around the mono county to adapt to the altitude before hiking!
As you can see from the photos, there are patches of snow everywhere already! I am glad that we didn't wait any longer to do this! You can get a very nice view of the half dome from the cloud's rest summit, and we just couldn't believe we were actually on top of that! Look at that!!! It's so STEEP!!!! That's crazy. It took us about 9.5 hours to finish the trail, which was kind of expected. The trail was a lot easier than anticipated, but it's still not an easy hike because of the high altitude.
On the way back to the airbnb, we decided to stop by the Mono Lake to see those peculiar rock formation. I didn't know until we came back to LA that there were a couple different spots we should have gone to see the different rock formations. Oh well, next time!
After dinner, we decided to go out to see the stars. We drove all the way back to the Tenaya Lake, which is probably not necessary, but we did, and we can clearly see the milky way and shooting stars were everywhere! Unfortunately, we were all too tired and too cold to stay any longer. This concludes another crazy hike we did together, till next year!