Quotas apply year-round (no off-season exemption). 60% of the trailhead quota reservable on recreation.gov in a continuous rolling window from 6 months up to 14 days before entry (bookable until 1 day before if space remains); the other 40% is also on recreation.gov, released for shorter-notice/walk-up booking. No phone reservations. Permit must be picked up in person at the High Sierra or Bass Lake Ranger District by 10am the day of entry, unless prior arrangements are made.

Notes

Permits and quotas are required year-round for overnight trips into the John Muir, Ansel Adams, Dinkey Lakes and Kaiser Wildernesses; day hikes need no permit.

Travel into neighbouring units

Honored for continuous travel into Yosemite National Park via Isberg Pass (e.g. Clover Meadow/Isberg trailhead to Foerster Peak) or into Sequoia/Kings Canyon — no separate NPS permit needed, but per the official page the National Park must be listed on your itinerary when you reserve for the interagency permit to be honored there. Conversely, a National Park permit is valid on this forest's wilderness only if it's listed on that itinerary too.

Rules in force

What applies once you hold the permit. Rules marked with a scope other than "this permit" are inherited — state law or an agency-wide policy — and are stored once rather than restated per permit.

Fire

A free California Campfire Permit is required before you may have a campfire, camp stove, lantern or barbeque -- but holding one does NOT mean fires are allowed where you're going. Local restrictions override it. Two different permits exist; for everywhere this project covers, take the one for federal- and state-controlled lands, not the private-lands one. CA state law

TWO PERMIT TYPES, and the wrong one is not a valid document. CAL FIRE issues one permit for federal- and state-controlled lands, covering campfires, barbeques and portable stoves, and a separate one for private lands, which additionally requires written permission from the landowner. Both carry the same caveat that local burn restrictions may apply. Every trailhead in this project sits on federal land -- national forest, national park, BLM, or the Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit -- except two on East Bay Regional Park District land (Del Valle and Stanford Ave), which is a special district fitting neither category cleanly; which permit applies there is not confirmed. The same portal also issues permits for burning debris, which is a different product and not what a backcountry traveller needs. THE PERMIT IS A PRECONDITION, NOT AN AUTHORISATION: CAL FIRE's own guidance says to check local rules, since many areas restrict or ban campfires outright, especially at elevation or in high fire danger. Where a wilderness bans fires, the permit still matters for a camp stove. YOU MUST CARRY IT: Eldorado NF states the permit has to be available for rangers and other officials to check while you are camping, so an unproduced permit is a permit you do not have. The lantern question is settled: CAL FIRE's permits FAQ omits lanterns from its enumeration, but the campfire-safety page and Eldorado NF's own FAQ both include them, so the fuller list stands on two sources against one summary. The issuing forest states it is also required in some developed campgrounds -- being in a campground is not a reliable exemption. Free, valid for a full calendar year (January 1 to December 31), and available from CAL FIRE, US Forest Service or BLM offices as well as online. The signer must be 18 or older, so a group of minors cannot self-issue. Obtain it at readyforwildfire.org/permits, which links to the portal at permit.preventwildfiresca.org. NOTE: Eldorado NF's own camping page cites 'www.preventwildfiresca.org', which does not resolve -- readyforwildfire.org is the working entry point. · 36 CFR 261.52(k); PRC 4433 · source

Verified 2026-09-12 · evidence none-2026-09-12-01, none-2026-09-12-02, none-2026-09-12-03, none-2026-09-12-04

Stock and livestock

Maximum 25 head of stock.

source

Verified 2026-07-22 · evidence sierra_nf-2026-07-22-01, sierra_nf-2026-07-22-02

Location

Peaks nearest this trailhead (8)

Assigned by straight-line proximity, not by a verified approach. Permits attach to where you enter the wilderness, so a peak listed here may well be climbed from somewhere else -- and a long point-to-point route may pass peaks that list a different trailhead entirely. Treat this as a starting point, not an approach list.

Provenance

Those are different claims: a source can be current and still not have been re-checked here recently.

Checked	Verdict	Source
2026-07-22 sierra_nf-2026-07-22-01	new-group Initial May1-Sep30 seasonal-quota guess and 60/40 6mo/2wk-release-style split guess -- BOTH later found wrong by a primary source.
2026-07-22 sierra_nf-2026-07-22-02	corrects-existing CORRECTED the 2026-07-22 web-search entry: quotas are year-round, not May-Sep seasonal (fixed a real code bug in in_quota_season() that assumed no-season-bounds meant never-in-season). Reservation is a continuous 6mo-to-14-day rolling window, not a two-stage 60/40 release. Fee, pickup-in-person requirement, and no-phone-reservations detail corrected/added.	source

Florence Lake

Permit

Key dates

How reservations work