FWIW Trinity Alps has some pavement-grade approaches as well, for instance you can get onto the PCT right off a fairly major road (Sawyers Bar, which is not bad

FWIW Trinity Alps has some pavement-grade approaches as well, for instance you can get onto the PCT right off a fairly major road (Sawyers Bar, which is not bad for the area -- although to be fair you've described 299 as a bad drive, which I didn't find it to be, although it's two lane undivided highway for most of it and maybe city-folk aren't used to that). However forest roads are a given for most trailheads as you've described, at least in all the California wildernesses I've spent time in. I haven't taken the road you're describing, although it sounds a lot like a forest service road I ended up on to see the eclipse north-west of Bend, OR. That was fun. Also you should probably never take 101 up to Trinity Alps: take 5 up to Redding and then cut west on 299 instead of going up the coast and cutting east. I enjoyed spotting all the places I've been in this fun guide, and the other thing I want to impress on people is that these "distance from road" measurements are crow-flies distance from the closest "road". You've done a good job describing how bad the road might be. People who have no experience with this kind of wilderness will have even less appreciation for how much work might be involved in actually getting to that the center point. It will _never_ be a 12 mile hike or whatever the distance they measure is. In many cases it's twice that, in some cases it's worse, and the trails (if there is one) are in some fairly steep terrain, so you can expect to do 15 miles on a strong day in good conditions. I went looking for my favorite wilderness and was surprised not to find it, because I know how remote it is and Trinity Alps feels significantly smaller in comparison. In looking at it, I realized they've combined the contiguous region north of Yosemite Park as the "North Yosemite Complex", which includes Emigrant (my favorite), the northern part of Yosemite, etc. I was there for four days a week ago and after I got off the main trail I saw one person while I was hiking out. The rest of the time was spent off the trail and with no sign of another soul.