Trail description of Twenty Lakes Basin from the Hiking & Walking website: The loop around the Twenty Lakes Basin travels through breathtaking alpine scenery, visiting nine stunning lakes surrounded by dramatic peaks and ridges. The glorious scenery and relative ease of the trail make this a very popular hike.
Map and profile of the Twenty Lakes hike copied from the Hiking and Walking website
We selected Twenty Lakes Basin as our first hike because it has negligible elevation gain - it is mostly a flat hike around a basin full of nice alpine lakes. The trailhead, however, is above 10,000', so quite a difference in altitude for me - I starting from sea level back home the previous day.
Driving north from Mammoth Lakes, we passed Mono Lake, and the air was thick with smoke from the Mariposa fire. I was discouraged by the smoke; no one wants to hike in thick polluted air. Once we turned on CA-120, we started climbing up the side of a mountain. It is an amazing road built along the cliffs - it leads into the eastern entrance to Yosemite, but we stopped just short of the park and drove a couple of miles on the partially-paved Saddlebag Lake Road to the trailhead. The air cleared as we drove up - at the trailhead there was clear blue skies and no sign of smoke. How lucky we were!
We started from the trailhead in a clockwise direction at 9:45 AM. The first stretch took us along the western shore of Saddlebag Lake, which is actually a reservoir created by a dam. The water level was quite low. The official route for this hike passes to the east of Greenstone Lake, but there are multiple trails branching off, and we ended up following a track on the west side of Greenstone. Fortunately, Jim had the All Trails app on his phone, and short cross-country tramp soon got us back on the right track.
It seemed like we saw more than twenty lakes on our hike, but maybe we were seeing some of the same hikes from different angles. Or maybe some of the bodies of water we saw were too small to be officially considered lakes. They were pretty nevertheless. After lunch, we rounded Lake Helen and headed back to the trailhead. We got back to the start at 3:15 P.M. Despite the clear skies and brilliant sunshine, it wasn't a hot day. In fact, conditions were ideal for this hike - an auspicious start to our hiking holiday!
To see this hike on the All Trails Website, click here.
Although this hike profile looks like a lot of dramatic up and down, note the scale on the left hand axis. Not a lot of elevation change.
