Silver Lake to Gold Lake Trail (Bucks Wilderness)

This rewarding, easy, short hike leads you through one of the northernmost lake basins in the Sierra Nevada. The Silver Lake cirque is a broad, mile-wide, ice-sculpted bowl spread out below Spanish Peak and the Sierra crest. The cirque contains numerous small lakes and tarns and is dominated by an expanse of glacier-polished bedrock.

The trail from Silver Lake to Gold Lake is well worn and easy to follow, with only a few moderately steep grades. Vistas are panoramic for much of the way to deep Gold Lake, which offers fair fishing and cool, late summer swimming. Nearby Rock Lake, a small rockbound tarn, offers better diving from its rocky shores, but the trail to it is much more rigorous than the easy trail to Gold Lake.