Yosemite Mirror Lake (#0576)

One of the most memorable parts of my earliest trips to Yosemite was visiting Mirror Lake. My first visits to Yosemite were with four other servicemen when I was stationed in Monterey in 1967-68. On our second, Spring, trip, two of us skipped the skiing that the others were doing and hiked to Mirror lake.

My memory of Mirror Lake is as a very dark, magical, reflection of the surrounding mountains. My memory, however, has one defect. In my memory the lake was a fairly sizable lake, not a relatively small flooded area such as shown here. Looking at a poor copy of that original picture I see that my memory is incorrect, the lake even back then looked fairly similar to this. Here's that 1968 photo: Yosemite Mirror Lake circa 1968