Hiking the circuit, staying in the tent cabins, and using the dining tent, a backpacker need only pack clothes and a water bottle. Because of this they are so popular that you have to enter a lottery to be able to use them and the odds of getting the itinerary you want at the time you want are not great.
Each tent cabin has a wood floor, cots, blankets and a wood stove and sleeps from 2 to 8.
What most people don’t know is that the odds are much better if you enter the lottery for meals only, and camp out in the backpacker’s camp at each location. That way you don’t have to haul around food (in bear bins) and cooking gear and spend time cooking and cleaning up.
Breakfast in the Dining Tent – by the way, the meals are excellent.
My brother Tim regularly enters the lottery with the same luck we have with Powerball but last month we finally scored a couple of spots on a meals only basis. He had won the same lottery a few years ago but that year there was so much snow the Camps stayed closed all summer and we never went.
So we met in LA and drove up 395 towards the east entrance of the park. We got in late so we stayed in a motel in Lee Vining on the east side of the park. Had we got there in daylight there is a backpacker’s camp in Tuolumne Meadows Campground that is free for hikers starting out the following day on the High Camps circuit. Having been there before, I knew it is hard to find that section in the dark in the general campground, so we opted for Lee Vining.