This week’s travel dream: Hiking the Sierra Nevada by moonlight

The appeal of the John Muir Trail isn’t hard to understand, said James Vlahos in National Geographic Traveler. For “211 glorious miles,” the route from California’s Yosemite Valley to the peak of Mount Whitney offers stunning vistas of plunging waterfalls, alpine lakes immortalized by photographer Ansel Adams, and “granite whipped skyward like the surface of a giant lemon meringue pie.” Or at least the vistas are stunning when the unflagging foot traffic isn’t blocking your view. To recapture a modicum of the unspoiled beauty that haunted the trail’s namesake—“eco hero” John Muir (1838–1914)—I recently decided to make the trek at night, setting out on each leg of the journey only once the throngs were snoring inside their tents.

As dusk turns to night, the first thing I notice is this: “It’s dark. Really dark.” Soon enough, though, my other senses kick into overdrive. “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.” Eventually, the eyes adjust, and my surroundings become a mysterious, moonlit wonderland. The silvery light captures the vertical striations on the face of the mountain before me but leaves the forests below obscured. I think again of the trail’s namesake: “Muir appreciated how nighttime vistas such as this one were revealed artfully and selectively rather than with the bland equality of daylight.”

The next three weeks bring many surprises: I see a dark lake so still that its surface “reveals the pinpricks of the stars.” I clomp over snowfields so barren I feel like an astronaut. I watch the sun flood a valley with orange light as “rich and thick as syrup.” The trail ends, fittingly, with its most dramatic gesture: a 14,949-foot climb up Mount Whitney. “A billy goat trail etched into the mountainside snakes upward,” and it’s so dark I feel as if I’m traveling “through” the stars, not below them. As I reach the summit, “existential revelation” envelops me. For a moment, the very workings of the universe seem as clear as the view.

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