At 5 a.m. last Saturday a significant rockfall occurred on the John Muir Trail, within a couple of miles of the Happy Isles trailhead. The fall was loud enough to be heard throughout the valley. A second rockfall happened several hours later. The portion of the trail depicted, below, is closed indefinitely. The Mist Trail will be the best alternative.
According the daily update published by Yosemite National Park this area is “currently closed” and per the Yosemite National Park Facebook page it will only be closed for “a couple of weeks”.
http://www.nps.gov/featurecontent/yose/upload/daily.pdf
Thanks for the update, Andy. Also, some photos are available here: http://ht.ly/l2wk9
UPDATE: This portion of the trail has re-opened!
We walked downhill across the rockfall area around 11:00am that day – we calculated only minutes after the second slide occurred – and a an hour or so before they closed that portion of the JMT. We were very lucky not to arrive a bit earlier, but a group of about a dozen scouts walking uphill were even luckier we suspect – they reached the safe higher side only minutes before the rockfall.
Pleased to hear it has re-opened – that’s fast work – it was quite a large expanse of rubble and rock and broken trees.