By Michael Lanza
Although California’s Desolation Wilderness had long been on my list of places I wanted to explore, my first dayhike there happened serendipitously. We had just finished a 65-mile backpacking trip in Yosemite National Park and were planning on launching straight into an 86-miler in northern Yosemite, but wildfire smoke sent us packing. So we wound up in the Lake Tahoe area, which wasn’t getting smoke from the fires, looking for a dayhike. And we found a great one.