# Hiking & Backpacking

Source page: https://carsonriverresorts.com/explore/hiking

Fourteen trailheads within an hour

We timed fourteen trailheads from our own front door, one at a time, because nobody publishes drive times to any of them. Two are wilderness you can be alone in by lunchtime. None of it needs a reservation — and that is the fact most people get wrong.

## There is nothing to reserve

This is the part people get wrong, and getting it wrong costs them a trip.

**Neither the Carson-Iceberg nor the Mokelumne Wilderness is on
recreation.gov. There is no quota. There is no lottery. There is no
reservation system.** An overnight permit is required from 15 April to 30
November, it is free, and you fill it in yourself at a board at the
trailhead. Bring a pen.

**Bear canisters are not required in either wilderness.** Stanislaus National
Forest says so explicitly. The Humboldt-Toiyabe is silent on it, which is not
the same as permission — carry one if you would sleep better, and most people
should.

Anyone who has backpacked Yosemite or Desolation assumes the opposite and
plans around a permit lottery that does not exist here.

**One thing you do need**, and it catches people: a **California Campfire
Permit**, free, which is required for a **portable stove** as well as a fire.
Get it online in five minutes, or in person at the Markleeville Visitors
Center, 3 Webster Street, open Friday to Monday 11 to 3, with a driver's
license.

And check this before you pack: **fire restrictions on the Carson Ranger
District change with the season.** Under Stage 1, which ran through October
31 in 2026, there is no wood fire anywhere outside a developed campground,
and gas and liquid-fuel stoves are exempt — which is why the permit
matters. Ask at the store or the Visitors Center for this week's rules.

## Fourteen trailheads within an hour

Times measured from our gate, one at a time. Where a road turns to dirt, the
figure is a floor and we say so.

**Under twenty minutes — the ones you can do on an afternoon**

**Hangman's Bridge · 2 min.** Not a trailhead so much as a river. An old
jeep track runs downstream from the south side toward a gauging station.

**Charity Valley East · 9 min.** Free parking, no restrooms, on the Hot
Springs Road about a mile short of the state park — which is the point, since
it reaches the same country without the park's $8. Opens Charity Valley and
the long climb to Burnside Lake. Open May to October.

**Grover Hot Springs · 12 min.** The meadow boardwalk, 0.84 miles each way
and genuinely accessible; and the waterfall trail, whose published length
nobody agrees on. $8 to park.

**Indian Creek · 17 min.** BLM ground on Airport Road, and the closest easy
walking to the resort — the Curtz Lake interpretive loop is a mile. It burned
in 2021 and the trail system is only partly re-established.

**Twenty to thirty-five minutes — the wilderness edge**

**High Trail / Carson River · 20 min.** *Wolf Creek Road, then Dixon Mine
Road — a sedan makes both; we drove them in September 2026.* Two trails share
this trailhead and can be walked as a loop: the High Trail, 6.5 miles out and
back with about a thousand feet of climb, and the East Carson River Trail,
which follows the river itself for about 18.5 miles out and back. Vault
toilet, no water.

**Noble Canyon · 21 min.** The one trailhead that reaches **both**
wildernesses, and the Pacific Crest Trail. No restrooms.

**Wolf Creek · 23 min.** *Wolf Creek Road — a sedan makes it.* The
main Carson-Iceberg door on this side. Wolf Creek Trail runs 9.4 miles out
and back with about 2,480 feet of climb — the Forest Service's own trailhead
page says 8.5 for the same trail, so treat both as approximate. Reaches Asa
Lake, Murray Canyon and the PCT. Dispersed camping at the trailhead itself.

**Carson Pass · 29 min.** $5 to park. The Mokelumne, and the one place
around here with a real permit system — the **Carson Pass Management Area**
allows **14 camping permits a day**, issued in person, on the day, at the
information station. You cannot book it the night before.

**Ebbetts Pass · 30 min.** 8,750 feet, vault toilet, no fee, no water. The
PCT crosses here and runs both ways: south toward Noble Lake, north past the
Kinney Lakes.

**Charity Valley West · 31 min.** The top of Blue Lakes Road, and the same
trail as the East trailhead — but downhill. Worth knowing if you would rather
descend than climb.

**Beyond forty minutes**

**Burnside Lake · 47 min.** *Most of it dirt.* Drive to the lake and the
connector trail is a mile and a half.

**Gardner Meadow · 47 min** and **Highland Creek · 50 min.** Both up
Highland Lakes Road — *paved for the first mile, then gravel, and the only
road here with a published surface.* 8,589 and 8,635 feet. Carson-Iceberg
from the west.

**Corral Valley · 58 min by the map, and closer to an hour and a half in
practice.** Over Monitor Pass and around to the Antelope Valley side, then up
6.3 miles of washboard forest road with two stream crossings and a rocky
last half mile. *Golden Gate Road needs four-wheel drive — it is the one
approach on this list a sedan should not attempt.* This is the way into the
Silver King country and Llewellyn Falls.

## Half of these close in winter

Everything reached by Highway 4 — Noble Canyon, Ebbetts, Gardner Meadow,
Highland Creek — goes behind the Ebbetts gate. Corral Valley goes behind
Monitor's.

**Monitor almost always opens weeks before Ebbetts.** In eight of the last
ten seasons Monitor was open in April while Highway 4 stayed shut into May
or later. Caltrans decides, not the calendar, and it re-closed all three
passes at least once after opening them in spring 2026.

## The trailhead that proves why we measure

**Clark Fork is in the same wilderness as Wolf Creek and Corral Valley.** On
a map it is a few miles from both.

**By road it is two hours and twelve minutes**, out to Highway 395 and back
in on Highway 108, because there is no road across. Any list of
Carson-Iceberg trailheads without drive times puts it beside the others.

## If you are sleeping out there

Stay the night before, drive out in the morning, walk in, walk out, and stay
the night after. That is the pattern people who do this actually use. The
store is here for the last of the food, and the showers up top are free, take
no key, and are open to every guest.

And the Tamarack burn closed nothing for good: as of September 2026, every
trail and trailhead in the fire's footprint on the Humboldt-Toiyabe is open
and accessible. The burn scar still asks two things of you, from the Forest
Service's own guidance:
**hazard trees come down without warning**, and **burned stump holes collapse
underfoot** — the root chamber is gone and the ground over it is a lid. After
rain, debris moves fast in the drainages. And carry a map and a GPS track:
in the burn you should expect stretches with no tread and no signs.

Carson Ranger District: **(775) 882-2766**, weekdays 8 to 4.30. They are
the ones who know what the road did last winter.

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Carson River Resort · 12399 Highway 89, Markleeville, CA 96120 · (530) 694-2229 · store open 8am to 6pm, every day.
Machine-readable facts, units and policies: https://carsonriverresorts.com/api/agent/index.json