High Sierra Camps

The High Sierra Camps are nine rustic lodging facilities located in two national parks and a national monument in California's Sierra Nevada mountain range. Open most years from June or July to September, they are staffed camps with tent cabins and food service facilities. The backcountry camps receive their supplies by pack mules.

Seven camps are located in Yosemite National Park. Five of these camps are located off the road in the wilderness, and are accessible only by hiking or by horseback riding. There are two similar camps which can be reached by automobile, located near the Tioga Road.

Six of the camps are arranged along a loop trail 51.0 miles (82.1 km) long, and each camp can be reached in sequence in a one-day hike from the previous camp.

There are also two similar camps to the south of Yosemite, one each in Sequoia National Park and Giant Sequoia National Monument.

In 1916, Stephen Mather of the National Park Service made an agreement with a private concessionaire, D. J. Desmond, to build mountain "chalets" at Tenaya Lake, Tuolumne Meadows and Merced Lake. Desmond's company went bankrupt during World War I, and these first camps closed in 1918. In 1923, the Park Service decided that the camps should be re-opened and expanded. Ranger and naturalist Carl Parcher Russell hiked through the region and selected locations for five more camps. Three of these were built the following year by a new concessionaire, the Yosemite National Park Company. That firm merged with the Curry Camping Company in 1925, forming the Yosemite Park and Curry Company, which ran the camps for many years under the management of Donald Tresidder, until his death in 1948.

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