Backpacking Virginia Lakes to Green Creek – Day 1 to Summit Lake & Yosemite

Nov 12, ’18 · by Denise · in On Adventures

The Virginia Lakes and Green Creek trails into the Hoover Wilderness can make for a stunning day hike. Curtis and I have spent past weekends leisurely exploring the first few miles of both of these areas. At one point, I think I spent a solid hour at Blue Lake willing a pika to pop out the rocks. It looks like there should be pikas there!

Obviously I said YES when Trails (Trails’ Guide) invited Curtis and I to join her crew on a three day Independence Day trip into the Hoover Wilderness. Of course I wanted to explore this area further, and actually see some pikas.

If at first you don’t find a pika, keep on looking!

Independence Day 2018 Backpack – Day 1: Blue Lake, Summit Lake, and the Yosemite/Hoover Wilderness Boundary

Trailhead: from Highway 395 you can reach the Green Creek Trailhead from Green Creek Road (map), a passenger car friendly dirt road at low speeds. Virginia Lakes Trailhead is accessed from the paved Virginia Lakes Road (map). There is a dirt road between the two that is fine in a truck, but it is easier to navigate by simply going out to 395.

Distance: 5.3 miles to Summit Lake. I didn’t have my GPS watch on this trip, so all distances are from the Tom Harrison Map for the Hoover Wilderness (which I recommend!). Overall our weekend distance was ~15.5 miles)

Trails gets all the credit for planning our trip out of Virginia Lakes to Summit Lake then to the Green Lake area. She had reserved the wilderness permits in advance – For the Hoover Wilderness this means printing the permit request and snail mailing it to the ranger station, then waiting patiently for a response. For the record I have never done this, instead hoping for good luck with first come first serve permits, which is probably why I never have backpacked on this trail prior (which seems more popular then some of the others).

Hoover Wilderness Backpacking Trail Map – Virginia Lakes to Green Creek. For larger version download the PDF.

We started the day by parking one vehicle at the Green Creek trailhead then piling in our small car to get to the Virginia Lakes trailhead. Running the trail this way meant we would start at a higher elevation. Honestly I don’t see much reason to run the trail one way versus the other, except perhaps it is nice to hike uphill with the cooler temperatures at the higher elevation? And, some less elevation gain overall.

The hike from Blue Lakes to Frog Lakes seemed to go by very quickly in my memory, maybe because I had seen it before? My highlight for the first day was the crest of the hike after Frog Lakes. It isn’t called a “pass” – but the rocky landscape up there is exposed and the wind whips like it should be a named pass. If you are looking for a longer day hike I would highly recommend this high spot. There are a number of peaks to bag in the surrounding area if you are feeling ambitious.

The trail winds back down in elevation, past a small waterfall and around a creek. I really enjoyed this stretch as well. It’s a bit of an illusion because I kept on thinking I would see Summit Lake, but looking back on it – I don’t think I did? Sometimes you are too busy enjoying the views to pull out a map, especially when the only thing we needed to remember at this point was take the left trail junction to Summit Lake.

Summit Lake is located at Summit Pass, the border between the National Forest and Yosemite. Because we had a dog with us we needed to find a campsite on the national forest side of things, which required a good bit of searching. We ended up in a sweet little durable campsite right on the border between the park and forest. Curtis and I slept on the park side of the boundary, Trails and her crew on the forest side.