Top Trails: Yosemite

Since childhood, Lizzy Wenk has hiked and climbed in the Sierra Nevada with her family. After she started college, she found excuses to spend every summer in the Sierra, with its beguiling landscape, abundant flowers, and near-perfect weather. During those summers, she worked as a research assistant for others and completed her own Ph.D. thesis research on the effects of rock type on alpine plant distribution and physiology. But much of the time, she hikes simply for leisure. Obsessively wanting to explore every bit of the Sierra, she has hiked thousands of on- and off-trail miles and climbed more than 500 peaks in the mountain range. She is especially fond of the steep, rugged peaks in the Whitney region, and she visits the area to hike and climb each year. Lizzy, husband Douglas, and daughters Eleanor and Sophia currently live in Sydney, Australia, but they continue to consider the Eastern Sierra home and return to the mountains each summer.Jeffrey P. Schaffer has been hiking and climbing in Yosemite National Park since 1964. He's logged thousands of miles on trail in the park and has completed some 70 different roped ascents, including several first ascents. In 1972 he began work on his first book for Wilderness Press, The Pacific Crest Trail. Since then he has written and contributed to more than a dozen Wilderness Press guidebooks, including Yosemite National Park: A Complete Hiker's Guide. Today he teaches a variety of natural sciences courses at San Francisco Bay Area community colleges, does Sierran geomorphic research, leads climbs both outdoors and in climbing gyms, and lives with his wife in the Napa Valley.