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 driving licence.
And know this before you pack: Stage 1 fire restrictions are in force on the Carson Ranger District through 31 October 2026. No wood fire, anywhere, outside a developed campground. Gas and liquid-fuel stoves are explicitly exempt — which is why the permit matters.
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.
