It’s midnight when I emerge from the forest atop a plateau beneath an infinite canopy of blackness and stars. The terrain ahead glows under the moon as if lit from within. Moving slowly, I cross a meadow and pass clusters of wizened mountain hemlocks. To the right something glimmers white, drawing me magnetically. Soon I stand transfixed by reflected moonlight that sweeps across an alpine lake to the base of a snowy massif.
A light breeze drops to nothing, ripples in the lake go still, and the light coalesces into the single dot of the moon, the water around the reflection so placid that it reveals the pinpricks of stars.
This view at Island Pass in California’s High Sierra is sublime and rarely witnessed, too, though not for lack of hiker traffic. Every summer hundreds of people follow the route I’m hiking – the John Muir Trail (JMT), which runs for 211 glorious miles from the base of Half Dome in the Yosemite Valley to the top of Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the lower 48.
En route are a dozen major passes, alpine lakes photographed by Ansel Adams, and granite whipped skyward like the surface of a giant lemon meringue pie. The trail is well loved – too well loved, if you value unbroken solitude in the wilderness. But almost nobody sees Island Pass like this, when scenery that’s merely pretty during the day becomes downright magical at night.
I’ve made moonlit hikes before, out-and-back walks of only a few miles. Those jaunts were so memorable that I was inspired this past summer to tackle the entire JMT that way. My plan was to sync my movements to the rise and set of the moon, which would typically encompass late afternoon, dusk, and several hours of moonlit night.
This would be no expeditionary stunt, like unicycling to Everest. Night hiking, whether for 200 miles or just a couple, is something that many people are finding addictive. Hiking after hours, arguably more than any other way, would get me close to the wild heart of the Sierra – as John Muir himself experienced it.
Muir (1838-1914), hailed as an eco-hero and mountain messiah, was a bearded wanderer who spent years exploring the Sierra before coming down from the heights to successfully lobby for its protection. The first president of the Sierra Club, he worked to establish Yosemite as a national park and shaped the world’s view of what a protected wilderness could and should be.
Less well-known is that Muir wasn’t naturally inclined toward advocacy; friends had to prod him to assert himself publicly. But his ability to share his passion for wilderness was organic. In a typically rapturous passage from his book “My First Summer in the Sierra,” he praised the Sierra’s “domes and canons, dark upsweeping forests, and glorious array of white peaks deep in the sky, every feature glowing, radiating beauty that pours into our flesh and bones like heat rays from fire.”
The Sierra still radiates beauty, but 4 million visitors now flood Yosemite every year – six times as many people as lived in the entire state of California when Muir first arrived in 1868. But most of them confine themselves to the relatively small Yosemite Valley. And the long swath of the range covered by the JMT – set aside in three national parks and four wilderness areas totaling over 3,000 square miles – is better protected from logging, grazing, and development than it was in the 19th century. As you hike the length of the trail, your feet touch a road only when you pass through Tuolumne Meadows.
What has changed over time are the people. Even JMT through hikers, a hardy lot going all 211 miles, are marshmallows compared to Muir. He didn’t have a GPS, an 800-fill down sleeping bag, or three-course dehydrated meals. Instead, he spent hundreds of days wandering alone, off trail, without a map, a stale loaf of bread strapped to his belt for nourishment and a pine thicket awaiting him for a bed. Some of his feats were extreme. He logged the first recorded ascent of icy Mount Ritter and once charged a bear just to see how it would react. He was no adrenaline junkie, though. He merely wanted to get as close as possible to nature, to take in its untamed essence through his every pore.
A Muir-like connection to nature is harder to establish in an era when JMT hikers can check work emails or play sudoku on their iPhones. Hiking at night promised to get me closer to the earlier, wilder spirit of Sierra exploration. There would be more unknowns and less control – but an enhanced sense of discovery. Like Muir, I wanted to not just see the mountains but to feel them.
It’s 7 p.m., and the sun is rising over Yosemite. My friend Tom Colligan and I have set out on the opening stretch of the JMT in late afternoon, scaling a mountainside so steep that, from our increasingly elevated perspective, it appears that the sun is climbing from the western horizon rather than sinking. But time runs backward only for so long, and as we head northeast, color drains from the sky until it is ashen, then black. I’ve timed the three-week-long trek to maximize the light of the moon, which will grow larger and stay up later each night. Tonight, though, a fingernail crescent provides only a few hours of illumination before retiring below the horizon. Dense forest crowds the trail, leaving only a band of starry sky visible above. I can’t deny the obvious. It’s dark. Really dark.
Hiking at night isn’t as dangerous as it may sound, but it’s probably not well suited for novice hikers. Even if you’re experienced, plan on moving slowly – stumbling off the top of Half Dome or into a waterfall isn’t likely, but twisting an ankle or getting lost is if you’re careless. I switch on my headlamp’s red light, which gently illuminates obstacles underfoot but doesn’t obliterate natural night vision. The minutes pass, and my latent superpower gradually kicks in:
By starlight alone I can see. The formless darkness around the trail sharpens into looming columns of trees, each seemingly as thick as a Saturn V rocket. The stars become more numerous, variable, and bright to reveal the 3-D depths of the universe. The trail shows up as a pale stripe across the forest floor. “It feels like we’re just dreaming this,” Colligan says. “I think we’re both actually asleep in a ditch five miles back.” The forest opens up to a grassy clearing. To the north a granite mountain arcs high into the Milky Way. The map lists Moraine Dome at 8,005 feet, but the mountain hulking before me is a larger, more mysterious presence than what any chart could convey. The vertical striations on the rocky face are vivid, while the forest below lurks in inky shadow. Muir appreciated how nighttime vistas such as this one were revealed artfully and selectively rather than with the bland equality of daylight.
“This evening, as usual, the glow of our camp-fire is working enchantment on everything within reach of its rays,” he wrote of a night in Yosemite. “Lying beneath the firs, it is glorious to see them dipping their spires in the starry sky...How can I close my eyes on so precious a night?” After the openness of the clearing, the forest once again seems forbiddingly dark. But with vision imperfect, my other senses become hyperaware. A twig snaps somewhere off in the trees – too light to be a bear, probably a raccoon or deer. Next comes the fresh, green smell of water, followed minutes later by a trickling sound. A stream must be close. Make that a river, as the trickle becomes a gush. The gush grows into the roar of water blasting against rocks – a major waterfall.

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