Convict Lake → Lake Genevieve & Laurel Lakes

Itinerary

Weather

Sunny and clear every day. NOAA / NWS Reno point forecasts, issued Oct 12, 2026. Links open the current forecast.

Route map

Trail geometry from the OpenStreetMap path network, routed leg by leg; tap a line for its mileage and a marker for camp details. Switch base layers top-right. The red marker is the Convict Creek crossing where OSM maps a bridge that 2022 trip reports say is gone.

Getting there

Valhalla driving route, 268.0 mi / 5.9 hr. The amber marker is the CA-120 junction where you must take New Priest Grade. Mileage differs slightly from the table below because that was routed with OSRM — different router, slightly different line.

Route options

OSRM times are free-flow car-profile estimates — no traffic, no grade penalty, no weight penalty, no stops. For a loaded tall diesel Sprinter budget roughly 7.5–8.5 hr door to camp on the Tioga route. Leave Morgan Hill early enough to clear I-680/I-580 Altamont before commute traffic and to reach Lee Vining before the Mobil closes at 21:00.

Diesel

Two things about the drive

Satellite

Two dated aerial sources cover this route, plus undated USGS cartography. NAIP — 0.6 m ground sample distance, captured 2022-07-10 across every quad in this area (date decoded from the catalog item names returned by the USGS ImageServer; a single flight date, no mosaicking). Esri World Imagery — here it is not the usual undated case: the service's own metadata returns SRC_DATE 20241119, 0.5 m, WorldView-2, provider Vantor "Vivid", stated positional accuracy ±8.47 m, and identify at every sampled point in every frame returned that same scene. USGSTopo frames have no capture date at all — they are compiled cartography over shaded relief, not photography. The newest pixel anywhere below is 2024-11-19, about 22 months before the trip. Only the Sentinel-2 creek-flow frames are from 2026. All crosshairs and labels are drawn from OSM/recon coordinates, not detected in the imagery.

Creek flow — October

Jun 4, 2026

Jul 9, 2026

Oct 7, 2026 — no snow left in the basin

Sentinel-2 L2A, 10 m, 7 km frame centered on the upper Convict basin (Genevieve, Dorothy, Mildred). Copernicus data via Earth Search.

Convict Creek crossings — the bridge question

What is legible: Convict Creek reads clearly in the July 2022 NAIP frames as a continuous bright whitewater ribbon at both crossings — it was running hard and turbulent in mid-July, which is real information about the character of the ford even though depth is not. And the scree is unmistakable: the entire east bank between Mildred Lake and the mile-3.62 crossing is one continuous pale talus apron. Terrain-scale features like that are far above the resolution limit and are the most trustworthy thing in this set.

Mapped bridge node, mile 4.87 (37.547408, −118.874219 — red crosshair). NAIP, captured 2022-07-10, 0.6 m native, 340 m frame rendered at ~0.24 m/px — resampled past native, so no additional detail exists at this zoom. Snow-free midday, and contemporaneous with the 2022 trip reports. A 6 m span is 2–3 pixels here: this frame cannot show a bridge present or absent.

Same node. Esri World Imagery / WorldView-2, captured 2024-11-19 (SRC_DATE 20241119), 0.5 m native. Newer by 28 months and still cannot resolve the span — and it is a mid-November capture, carrying early-season snow and low-sun canyon shadow that hide more ground than they reveal.

Main-stem crossing, mile 3.62 (37.559899, −118.872687 — amber crosshair; untagged in OSM). NAIP, captured 2022-07-10, 0.6 m native at ~0.24 m/px. The creek is unbroken whitewater through the frame. No structure is resolvable, and none would be at this pixel scale.

Same crossing. Esri / WorldView-2, captured 2024-11-19, 0.5 m native. The west approach sits in full canyon shadow in this frame — that ground is not readable at all here.

Context, 1,900 m frame — Mildred Lake to the mile-3.62 crossing. NAIP, captured 2022-07-10, 0.6 m native. The continuous pale grey talus and debris apron running the full length of the east bank is the clearest thing in this whole section — landform-scale, well above the resolution limit, and it corroborates the reviewers' scree reports. Canyon geometry is plain: steep-walled, narrow, trail forced onto the west side. The trail itself is only intermittently traceable as a faint tan line across open slopes and is invisible under canopy and in shadow.

Same 1,900 m frame. Esri / WorldView-2, captured 2024-11-19, 0.5 m native. Recency and usefulness point in opposite directions here — this is the newer image and it shows materially less ground, with early-season snow on north aspects and a long low-sun shadow over the creek corridor.

Route overview

Frame 37.535,−118.9193 → 37.5991,−118.8476 — 4.96 mi N–S × 2.75 mi E–W, rendered in EPSG:3857 so the aspect is true. Delivered resolution is the binding constraint, not source resolution: to keep each file under 900 KB these are 3.99 m/px (NAIP, topo) and 4.99 m/px (Esri), so the native 0.6 m and 0.5 m sharpness is not present in these files. At 4–5 m/px you can read the drainage geometry of the whole Convict Creek trench, the position and outlet of every itinerary lake, the large light-toned talus aprons, treeline, snow distribution and gross steepness by shadow. You cannot read trail tread — a 2–3 ft footpath is well under one pixel, so the trail is not visible anywhere in either aerial frame. Any trail line the eye picks up on the topo image is drawn cartography. The Genevieve washout is likewise sub-pixel; absence of a visible scar is not evidence the trail is intact.

NAIP, captured 2022-07-10 (four Category-1 quarter-quads, all one flight date), 0.6 m native but delivered at 2000 px ≈ 3.99 m/px. Snow-free apart from a few high residual patches and evenly lit — the better route-overview image despite being the older one.

Esri World Imagery / WorldView-2, captured 2024-11-19, 0.5 m native (resampled to 0.3 m by the provider) but delivered at 1600 px ≈ 4.99 m/px. An older 2023-10-12 WV02 scene underlies this footprint, but identify at all six key points returned 20241119 only. Newest imagery available and the worse frame to read terrain: early-season snow and very long November shadows black out much of the western and southern ground. Not representative of the trip window.

USGS "USGSTopo" seamless topo. No capture date exists — this is a cartographic tile cache, not photography. The service states only that it "combines the most current data in The National Map" and publishes no per-tile or per-quad vintage. Treat the contours, trail lines and labels as undated compiled cartography, not as an observation of current ground conditions.

Trailhead, parking & campground

At 0.5–0.6 m the paved day-use loop, the boat-launch lot, the gravel lots by the resort and the separate Convict Creek trailhead lot to the north are all clearly outlined, with individual vehicles countable in both years — useful for judging where a long tall van can actually turn and sit. The campground loop road and individual site spurs are distinct. This is also the one place in the dossier where the trail itself is genuinely legible: 28E03 shows as a thin line leaving the lake's northeast corner across open decomposed granite. It disappears wherever it enters the willow, aspen and conifer corridor. Nothing vertical is readable from nadir imagery at any resolution — overhead limbs, low branches over spurs, height and length limits, site levelness or surface, gate position, or whether the campground was open on any date. No signage or kiosks are legible. The Convict Creek crossings are 4–5 mi up-canyon and lie entirely outside all eight of these frames.

Convict Lake, lots and campground — annotated. Labels drawn over NAIP pixels captured 2022-07-10, 0.6 m. Markers are OpenStreetMap geometry drawn on top, not features traced from the image; do not read continuity of a drawn line as continuity of visible tread.

Same extent, unannotated. NAIP, captured 2022-07-10, 0.6 m (catalog item m_3711826_nw_11_060_20220710; the service returned null acquisition fields, so the date is decoded from the quad name per standard NAIP convention, with Year=2022 confirming independently).

Esri / WorldView-2, captured 2024-11-19, 0.5 m, stated positional accuracy ±8.47 m — so drawn markers can sit up to ~8 m off their true ground position.

Trailhead close-up — annotated. Labels over Esri / WorldView-2 pixels captured 2024-11-19, 0.5 m.

Same close-up. NAIP, captured 2022-07-10, 0.6 m. Trail 28E03 leaving the lake's NE corner is visible across the open granite here.

Same close-up. Esri / WorldView-2, captured 2024-11-19, 0.5 m.

Campground loops and site spurs. NAIP, captured 2022-07-10, 0.6 m. A July capture with sites occupied — RVs and trailers are individually visible, which gives a real length reference against each pad.

Same loops. Esri / WorldView-2, captured 2024-11-19, 0.5 m. Empty and leaf-off, so the loop road and spur geometry read more cleanly than in the summer frame. The two years are complementary — use both.

Convict Creek scree — Mildred Lake to Lake Dorothy

What the July 2022 frames do show at ~0.84 m/px on the corridor: the broad light-toned unvegetated aprons flanking the drainage below Lake Dorothy read plainly as continuous open rock and talus, consistent with the reported ~6 mi of loose scree — consistent with, not independent confirmation of. Lake outlines, the creek cascade into Mildred Lake, treeline and large blocky boulder fields are all legible. Whether the scree is loose, sized or passable is not: the aprons are visible as landforms, their surface character is not.

Corridor, ~0.79 × 0.89 mi. NAIP, captured 2022-07-10, 0.6 m native, rendered ~0.84 m/px. Snow-free and well lit.

Same corridor. Esri / WorldView-2, captured 2024-11-19, 0.5 m. Included only to document that it is unusable here: mid-November at 9,776–10,275 ft, fresh snow across the drainage, Mildred Lake partly iced, and the entire west wall — including all of Lake Dorothy and much of the trail corridor — in full black terrain shadow with zero recoverable detail. The trail is not visible anywhere in this frame.

USGS "USGSTopo" of the same corridor. No capture date — a rendered composite of National Map vector layers over 3DEP shaded relief, whose component vintages the endpoint does not expose. Cartography, not a photograph.

Full drainage strip, ~0.95 × 1.83 mi. NAIP, captured 2022-07-10, 0.6 m native, rendered ~1.69 m/px.

USGSTopo of the same strip. No capture date. Resolves the mapped dashed route labelled "Dorothy–Bighorn Lake" from Mildred Lake up to Lake Dorothy, plus contour spacing showing the gradient — all drawn, none observed.

Tightest crop on the mapped bridge node, ~0.30 × 0.22 mi. NAIP, captured 2022-07-10, 0.6 m native rendered at ~0.33 m/px — resampled beyond native, so no extra information exists at this zoom. A 6 m span is about ten pixels at native GSD; at that size a plank bridge is not distinguishable from a light-toned rock band, a patch of bare tread, or a log. There are faint light linear features near the node; they are not callable as a bridge or as its absence, and are not presented as either.

Same crop. Esri / WorldView-2, captured 2024-11-19, 0.5 m native. Snow and shadow; no better answer here than the older frame.

Terrain

Conditions from AllTrails reports dated Jun–Jul 2022. Nothing newer than Jul 2024 exists for this route — treat trail condition as unverified.

Distances from the trailhead