What a beautiful loop! It is never a bad day in the Yosemite high country, and although August can have high temperatures, a cloud cover, cool temps and rain showers in the early afternoon made for ideal conditions.
My strategy was to cruise the hills, and stride it out whenever I hit a runnable section, and stay in one piece on the rocky downhills. I started out a little fast and hit Vogelsang almost a half hour faster than Devon’s split, but kept it up for the delicious meadow trails below the camp. The route was set taking the further trail from Vogelsang over the pass, but it adds distance and elevation gain, and still takes you to Merced Lake which is the goal. I noticed Galen took the shorter option and decided to follow his lead. This trail also takes you through very runnable meadow before the technical drop to Echo Valley, which allows you to make up even more time. Highly recommended!
I jogged/walked the climb up to Sunrise, and survived the next big drop to Tenaya Lake. The road crossing is right about 30 miles, and Devon hit this point at 6 hrs 40min, and my time was 5 hrs 35min. I walked the old road to the May Lake trailhead, and hit May Lake just as it started to rain. The next section to Glen Aulin has some wonderfully runnable sections and is also a great place to make up time, BUT when you hit the trail junction you have to go down to tag the High Camp! It adds on a half mile roundtrip of steep rocky downhill and the subsequent steep climb back out, neither of which are fast. For whatever reason my track shows me skipping this, but my Strava has videos of each high camp location for verification.
The small climbs back to Tuolumne Meadows felt brutally hard at this point, but turns cruiser after hitting Soda Springs. I think starting at the Lembert Dome parking and continuing from there would allow one to really cruise those runnable sections while you are fresh. At the end, I was barely managing 10min/mi on the flats!
I created Strava segments for each High Camp leg, and was happy my effort gave me the crown for most of those (the segment up to Vogelsang is more competitive!).
I refilled my handrunner out of streams early on, filtered out of Sunrise Lakes, and refilled/filtered water for both my reservoir and handrunner at May Lake, and this lasted to the finish.
My splits from starting at the Tuolumne Lodge were:
Vogelsang 1:13
Merced 1:17
Sunrise 1:57
May Lake 1:49
Glen Aulin 1:24
Tuolumne Lodge 1:15