Читать книгу 50 Best Short Hikes: Yosemite National Park and Vicinity онлайн

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Once across the dam, you enter a tunnel, which cuts through an otherwise impassable cliff. It has recently been updated with new lighting and a flatter floor. Beyond the tunnel (0.3 mile from start), you are on an old road, created during the construction of the dam. When full, the water will be just a few feet below the trail, but this is a rare occurrence, and you will almost always see the bare, bleached talus piles that form a bathtub ring around the reservoir.

You begin your walk beneath live oaks, manzanitas, and bay laurel trees. Poison oak is abundant at the perimeters, but the trail is plenty wide here to avoid it. Wildflowers, including harlequin lupines, color the path’s edges in spring. Note one location where a recent rockfall has cleared a strip of vegetation above the trail and sent boulders tumbling onto the trail. Gaining little elevation, you continue along the pleasant trail to a junction where the left-hand branch climbs to Laurel Lake and Lake Vernon, while you turn right on the trail to Wapama Falls and beyond to Rancheria Falls (1.0 mile).