John Muir Trail in 2 halves

The rocky half and the easy half. The difference is like day and night.

I agree with you on doing it this way if you had to split the trail.

The backpacking part of going that way is fine although NOBO you'll need to be prepared to climb from ~7200 at Florence to ~10900 over Seldon Pass the 1st or 2nd day. And if it's another low snow year, the Ferry may not be running adding ~4 mi. or so.

The big issue is transport. Florence Lake access is via a winding slow drive, especially past Huntington Resv. I don't know of any transport options to close loops other than getting someone to drop you off and pick you up and/or hitching.

You might think about going from Bishop Pass or somewhere else on the east side where the transport issues would be less. It adds a few miles and the NOBO section would be longer, but you'd only need to get from the TH to Bishop to have transport options.

Check out Edison on Google Maps.

You have to zoom in some in order to get the newest 2014 pic.
The lake is almost completely empty.

Is there a way to tell how old the satellite image is? For instance, Google Maps and USGS EarthExplorer show Florence Lake pretty low but Mapquest shows it full and Flashearth shows it near full. How is a person to tell which is the most recent (and therefore most useful) image?

Edit: answering my own question with regards to Google. When viewed in Google Earth, the age of the image is displayed. Right now the Florence Lake image shows 9/14/2013. Don't know about other sources or where one might find an image that it within a the past few weeks for instance.

The google image says 2014, but???