Mt. Dana

Climbing Mt. Dana is like stepping onto the roof to see what the house is really made of. At 13,061 feet, second only to Lyell in the park, Dana sits right on the boundary – a foot in Yosemite, a gaze cast across the austere east. It’s a climb with very little preamble; the mountain dispenses with niceties and points you straight up its south-west shoulder.

The path ascending mount Dana is not a regularly maintained route, but a use trail, one established a long time ago. The route is the essentially the same one taken by Whitney Survey party members William Brewer and Charles Hoffman, who first climbed the peak in 1863. Yosemite botanist extraordinaire, Dr Carl Sharsmith, who worked more than half a century in the park, helped design the modern route to reduce impact on the mountains considerable alpine flora.

From the first steps near Tioga Pass, the air feels thinner, the light cleaner, the colors sharper: willow green along the creek, lichen orange on talus, the improbable blue of the sky. The route pays out in clean chapters – meadow and krummholz, then open slopes where the lodgepoles give up and the rock takes over. There’s a point where the trail seems to dissolve into the mountain’s granite blocks and ledges but the way forward is always readable if you take your time.

The humor on Dana is dry, like the wind. You think you’ve reached the top, and the mountain smiles and introduces you to the false summit – a Sierra classic. You crest it and the real summit is waiting, a little higher, as if to say: patience, hiker. Above 12,000 feet the views start to get seriously alpine, with the Dana Glacier tucked into its north basin. Then there’s Mono Lake and Owens Valley, more mountains and Nevada.

Mt. Dana is not technical, but it’s a big hike. The gain is honest, the footing increasingly talus, and the elevation is part of the bargain. Afternoon storms are common along the crest in summer, and lightning strikes without negotiation, so go early, go steady, and go with the mountain’s weather in mind.