Californian wilderness

Yosemite Valley is "California's ultimate natural spectacle", says Tony Perrottet in the Sunday Times. On beholding its immense cliffs with their thundering waterfalls, its groves of giant sequoia trees and its towers of sheer granite "like cathedral spires", most visitors feel the urge to "cry out in ecstasy", as did the eccentric Scotsman John Muir when he first peered over the valley's rim in 1868. Muir spent the following years wandering among the surrounding peaks of the vast Sierra Nevada range and writing passionate, "lyrical" books that made him an early hero of the environmental movement and led to the area's designation as a national park in 1890.
The valley lies in the centre of California, about four hours' drive from San Francisco and seven hours from Los Angeles. It is now "one of America's most popular destinations", its main trails "cacophonous conga lines of hikers". But you need only wander 100m from the trails to find yourself "completely alone" – and the rest of the park, which extends for over 3,000 square kilometres around the valley proper, remains a wilderness, unchanged since Muir's day. The easiest way to explore its "high-altitude mountain expanses" is by staying at the High Sierra Camps, a series of European-style refuges a day's walk apart, where you can sleep in bunks and eat good hot meals.
From the verdant, subalpine Tuolumne Meadow ("the most delightful high pleasure ground I have yet seen," wrote Muir), a path weaves across shallow streams "set in buoyant heather" and then climbs up into a "raw, treeless landscape" 11,000ft above sea level, where "wild flowers decorate every boulder and marmots scamper for cover at your feet". It is a day's walk this way to Fletcher Lake, a "vast natural mirror" surrounded by bare mountain peaks that glow with magical intensity in the sunset.

BA Holidays (08444 930 787) has a week's fly-drive from San Francisco from £479pp. Go to www.yosemitepark.com for information on the High Sierra Camps. ·