Clouds Rest, Yosemite: 9,930 ft, No Permit, Above Half Dome

This is a long, exposed day hike, not a scramble. There is no chain, no cable and no rock-climbing on the standard route from Tenaya Lake — the whole thing is a walking trail, and the summit crest is walked, not climbed. That is exactly why it deserves a straight safety note rather than a dramatic one: the things that hurt people here are weather, distance and altitude, not the terrain.

Be off the crest before the afternoon. The last mile is bare granite at nearly 10,000 feet with nothing taller than you on it, and Sierra thunderstorms build in the afternoon. There is no shelter on the summit and no fast way down — you are three miles of open ground from anywhere sheltered.

Snow lingers. Tioga Road usually opens somewhere between late May and June, and the trail can hold snow on the shaded switchbacks and on the crest for weeks after the road opens. Snow on an angled granite slab is a different problem from snow on a trail.

Carry your water, and expect the top half to be dry. There is seasonal water in the basin between the Sunrise Lakes junction and the Forsyth Trail junction — a creek and a tarn — but nothing above it, and nothing to count on late in a dry season. The climb to the crest and the crest itself are open granite with no shade.

The drop is real even though the trail is easy. At the narrowest point the ground falls roughly 270 feet within a hundred yards on both sides. The tread itself stays off the edge, but a slip, a gust, or a dog on a long lead is a different kind of mistake here than it is on the way up.

Outdoors is not a guide service and this is not a substitute for current conditions. Check the park link above and a mountain forecast before you go.

Current conditions, closures, and permits: Yosemite National Park current conditions: Tioga Road status, trail closures, wilderness permits, and park alerts

Yosemite rations Half Dome. About 225 day-hiker permits go out per day when the cables are up, through a March lottery and a daily one, and people plan a year around getting one.

Two and three-quarter miles behind it, on a bearing of 238 degrees, is a granite fin called Clouds Rest. It is 1,090 feet higher than the top of Half Dome. It requires no permit of any kind. And the way up it is a hike — a long one, but a hike: a maintained walking trail from the trailhead to the summit, with no chains, no cables, no fixed protection and nothing you would call scrambling.

The catch, such as it is, sits in the last half mile. The trail crosses the top of an arete — a thin ridge of rock left standing when glaciers took away everything on either side of it — and for a while the ground falls away steeply on both sides at once. It is still a walk. It just stops being an ordinary one.

Summit: Clouds Rest, 9,930 ft — 806 ft of prominence, in Yosemite National Park, Mariposa County, California
Trailhead: Sunrise Lakes Trailhead on Tioga Road, at the west end of Tenaya Lake, about 8,155 ft
Round trip: about 12 miles on the traced line; published figures run from 12.5 to 14.5 miles (see below)
Gain: 1,773 ft net trailhead to summit, but roughly 2,560 ft of actual climbing one way and about 3,350 ft over the round trip, because the route drops into a basin in the middle
Grade: Class 1 — a walking trail the whole way, no chains, no cables, no hands
The crest: the final half mile is an open granite arete; at its narrowest the ground falls about 270 ft within 100 yards to both sides
Permit: none for the day hike. A wilderness permit is required only if you stay out overnight; Half Dome's cables are the one Yosemite day hike that needs a permit of its own
Half Dome: 2.77 miles away and 1,090 ft lower
Season: whenever Tioga Road is open — usually late May or June into November, snow allowing
Water: seasonal creek and tarn in the mid-route basin; nothing on the upper climb or the crest

The numbers, and why nobody agrees on them

Clouds Rest is one of those hikes where every source gives you a different distance. Rather than pick one and present it as fact, here is what each says, including us.

Source	Round trip	Gain quoted
National Park Service, Sunrise Lakes Trailhead	14 mi (22.5 km)	2,300 ft
Wikipedia / yosemitehikes.com	14.5 mi	1,775 ft
Joe's Guide to Yosemite	13 mi	about 2,000 ft, in two climbs
HikingGuy	12.5 mi	3,200 ft
Outdoors, measured	12.06 mi	2,564 ft one way

Our figure comes from the polyline this page draws: two unmodified OpenStreetMap ways, both named Clouds Rest Trail, that join at a shared vertex and are cut at the summit — 9,701 m, or 6.03 miles, to the top. Elevations along it are read from USGS 3DEP one-metre lidar. It is not a guess and it is not an average of other people's numbers.

We cannot fully reconcile 12.06 with 14.5, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What we can say is where the gap is not. It is not the trailhead: every source starts at the Sunrise Lakes Trailhead at the west end of Tenaya Lake, and the traced line begins at the far end of a 43-metre boardwalk leading in from the road. It is not a different summit: the line ends 4.6 metres from the OpenStreetMap peak node, which in turn sits within 1.5 metres of the highest pixel in the lidar. And it is not a missing junction — the traced line hits the Sunrise Lakes fork at 2.41 miles, against the “around 2.5 miles” the guidebooks describe. The pattern that does hold is that the newer, GPS-derived figures cluster at 12.1 to 12.5 miles and the older narrative and agency figures cluster at 13 to 14.5. Treat 14.5 as the conservative planning number and 12 as what your watch will probably say.

The gain figures scatter for a simpler and more interesting reason: they are measuring three different things. The trailhead is 8,155 ft and the summit is 9,928 ft, so the net gain is 1,773 ft — which is why you keep seeing 1,775. But the route climbs to a saddle, drops several hundred feet into a basin, and climbs again, so the cumulative gain one way is 2,564 ft, and the round trip totals roughly 3,350 ft because you re-climb that basin on the way home. All four published numbers are defensible. Only one of them is what your legs do.

The route, in order

From the Sunrise Lakes Trailhead the trail crosses a short boardwalk near the west end of Tenaya Lake and stays close to level for a mile and a half, which is the flattest walking you will do all day. Then it turns uphill into a long set of switchbacks and climbs to the Sunrise Lakes junction at 2.41 miles — the first fork, the one every guidebook puts at about two and a half miles.

Go right, for Clouds Rest. The trail immediately does the thing that breaks everyone's arithmetic: it descends, several hundred feet, into a shallow basin. This is where the water is — a small creek and a tarn beside the trail, both seasonal — and it is the last of it. Fill up here if you are going to.

Out of the basin the trail climbs again to the Forsyth Trail junction at 4.44 miles, which is 1.59 miles short of the summit and the last place the route is in trees. From there it works up onto open granite, and the character of the day changes completely: no shade, no water, a lot of sky, and the ridge ahead of you resolving into a fin.

The final 0.17 miles before the summit is the crest itself.

The traced route: 6.03 miles and 2,564 feet of climbing from Tenaya Lake to the summit of Clouds Rest, out and back the same way. Two unmodified OpenStreetMap ways, cut at the summit.

The last half mile

This is the part worth being precise about, because it is easy to oversell and easy to dismiss.

Measured perpendicular to the route line on USGS 3DEP one-metre lidar, at the narrowest point of the crest the ground falls 271 feet within 100 yards on both sides at once. Push the measurement out to 100 metres and it reaches 309 feet. The crest narrows to about 16 metres, roughly 50 feet, if you define the width as how far you can walk each way before the ground has dropped 25 feet. To the north and east the drop keeps going: the northwest face of Clouds Rest falls about 5,000 feet toward Tenaya Creek, which is what makes the peak so visible from the valley despite plenty of higher summits in the park behind it.

And yet: the trail is a trail. There is tread the whole way, it is generally several feet wide, and where the crest pinches hardest the line runs slightly down the gentler southwest side rather than along the very top. You do not use your hands. You do not step over a gap. The summit itself opens back out to something like fifty feet across, which is enough room for a lot of people to eat lunch without anybody feeling crowded toward an edge.

What the exposure does is make a normal-difficulty mistake feel expensive, and that is worth respecting on a windy day or with an anxious member of the party. It is the same instinct that makes people turn round on Angels Landing or the Knife Edge — with the difference that here there is nothing to hold on to, because there is nothing you need to hold on to.

The most honest evidence that some people want no part of it is not a story, it is the map. OpenStreetMap carries two ways, both tagged Clouds Rest Bypass Trail, that together leave the route 273 metres before the summit and rejoin it 875 metres beyond — 894 metres of trail whose entire purpose is to get around the crest and the summit without going over them. Someone walked that line enough times for it to become a mapped path.

A thousand feet above Half Dome

Half Dome is on the money. The 2005 California state quarter shows John Muir looking at Yosemite Valley's granite headwall — Half Dome — with a California condor overhead.

From the summit of Clouds Rest you look down on it. Not metaphorically: USGS 3DEP reads 9,929.7 ft at Clouds Rest and 8,840.0 ft at Half Dome — both measured the same way, off the same data — for a difference of 1,090 feet. That is the only pairing worth quoting to the foot, because it is the only one where both numbers come from the same instrument and the same datum.

Pair the published elevations instead and the answer moves around: Clouds Rest is variously 9,926 or 9,930 ft, and Half Dome is variously 8,839, 8,842 or — as Wikipedia now has it, on NAVD 88 — 8,846 ft. Mix and match those and you get somewhere between 1,080 and 1,091 feet. The honest summary is that Clouds Rest stands a little over a thousand feet above Half Dome, and that no combination of published figures puts it below a thousand.

We also checked that you can actually see it, rather than assuming. Running a line-of-sight profile between the two summits, 2.77 miles apart, the sightline clears the intervening terrain by at least 251 feet at its tightest. There is nothing in the way. Half Dome really is below you and in front of you, with the cables, the subdome, the queue and the whole apparatus of a rationed, permitted climb spread out underneath, and you got there by walking.

The two mountains are the same geology telling the story twice. Both are what glaciers left behind — Clouds Rest as an arete, a thin ridge with the rock quarried away from both sides, and Half Dome as a face where the ice took one side and left the other.

Permits, the road, and what you actually need

You do not need a permit to day hike Clouds Rest. Yosemite requires a wilderness permit year-round for any overnight stay in the wilderness, and the park's own wording is that a wilderness permit is not required for day hikes unless you are hiking to Half Dome. Clouds Rest is not Half Dome. If you sleep out there, that is a different trip and it needs a permit.

Park entry is the part worth checking rather than assuming. Yosemite ran a timed entry reservation system in several recent summers, and the National Park Service announced in February 2026 that it will not use one in 2026. That is the current position as we publish, and it is exactly the kind of thing that changes between seasons — the park's own reservations page is linked in the sources below and it is the only authority worth trusting on the day.

The road is the real gate. The trailhead is only reachable when Tioga Road is open, which is typically late May or June through sometime in November and is entirely at the mercy of the snowpack; in 2026 it opened on 15 May. There is no way to reach this trailhead when the road is closed. Overnight parking at the trailhead ends 15 October.

There are vault toilets and animal-safe food storage at the trailhead, and no drinking water.

When to go

The window is the road's window: from whenever Tioga Road opens until it closes. Early in that window the shaded switchbacks and the crest can still hold snow, and snow on angled granite is the one condition that turns this from a walk into something requiring judgement you may not have brought.

Start early. The Park Service estimates eight to ten hours for the round trip, and that is a realistic number rather than a cautious one — it is twelve to fourteen miles depending on whose figure you use, most of it above 8,000 feet, with the last third on open rock. Getting up early is not about beating crowds here. It is about not being the tallest thing on a granite fin at three in the afternoon.

Bring more water than the distance suggests. Roughly half the route is fully exposed, the upper half has nothing, and the trailhead has no drinking water either.

If you want the walk without the crest, the mapped bypass exists, and turning around where the ridge begins is a perfectly good day out — you are already high on open granite by then, with Half Dome in front of you.

If it goes well

Clouds Rest is the answer to a specific question, which is: what if you want the summit day without the permit lottery, the queue and the cables? It is higher, it needs nothing from you but a day and a working road, and the view is of the thing everyone else is standing on.

The people who enjoy the last half mile of it are usually the people who then go looking for Angels Landing, or Katahdin's Knife Edge, or the Franconia Ridge — narrow ground with a lot of sky around it. The difference is that Clouds Rest gives you that feeling on Class 1 terrain, which makes it the honest place to find out whether you like it before you commit to somewhere you cannot simply walk back off.

Sources

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Hero photograph: The Clouds Rest arete, with Half Dome behind it. The summit of Half Dome is 1,090 feet lower than the ground in the foreground. by Jimmy Harris, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Half Dome Is A Thousand Feet Below You, And There Is No Lottery