Snow Creek Trail

Snow Creek Trail is Yosemite's leg day — a relentless series of switchbacks that hauls you nearly half a mile straight up out of the Valley floor. You start near Mirror Lake and immediately begin climbing through oak and pine forest on a well-maintained but punishing trail. The switchbacks are the main event: dozens of tight turns carved into sun-exposed granite slopes, each one offering increasingly jaw-dropping views of Half Dome, Tenaya Canyon, and the Valley below. Snow Creek itself appears partway up, sometimes as a roaring cascade in late spring, sometimes as a modest trickle by August. The upper reaches open into meadows near Snow Creek's headwaters, where the crowds vanish entirely. This trail is for hikers who want to earn their views the hard way and who consider a two-thousand-plus-foot climb a feature, not a bug.