Over a two day weekend, Scott Kreider, Thomas Vu and I (Arun Mahajan) attempted Mt Conness in Yosemite by the class-2 route from the Young Lakes.

After about six and half hours of hiking from the Dog Lake trailhead in Touloumne, we were at the lake (10500+ ft) described in Secor. To get to this place, we had to hike an hour and half north of the upper young lake. We decided to camp as high as we could but still couldnt get rid of the mosquitoes. It looked like rain and all the peaks around had clouds hanging over them, so we decided to do Conness the next day. This lake is just a collection of ponds with grassy islands in between. There was nobody else there except us three. We put the food in bear-containers but there were no bear visitations.

We set out on the use trail towards Conness and came to the base of the summit block in two hours after leaving base camp. After some careful climbing over the short exposed knife edge we were at a small but steep snowfield, but it was soon negotiated and we were at the top, 30 minutes after. There were lots of entries in the register as expected, but we saw no one else. We did see some people trying to traverse the glacier in the distance to the east. We were back at base camp at noon and to the cars at 5 pm.

If anyone goes there, get lots of bug repellant. An axe would be useful on the snowfield near the summit, but I felt that one could get by with kicking steps.