The Majesty of the Eastern Sierra

I am attending a meeting in Mammoth for the next couple of days. So yesterday we drove down 395. Most north south traffic in the state takes place in the central valley. 99 and 5 are quick but not especially interesting. With the problems the state is having in water right now much of the land on the west side of the valley looks a lot like it did when I lived in Bakersfield in the late 1950s.

But the trip up 50 and then down through 89 to 395 is awe inspiring. You go through a couple of major mountain passes (I like monument pass), then down 395 through Bridgeport which looks a lot like it did when my family would camp in the area in the 1950s. RIght out of Bridgeport you have a chance to see Bodie - which was a mining town through the 1930s that took out a lot of gold and silver. It is in "arrested disrepair." Bodie is worth the visit although not in the winter - the winds can be quite fierce there in the winter and it can get to 30 below. (All three pictures are from Bodie.)

The town is dominated by a stamp mill - which was the device used to extract precious metals from the quartz. The manager of the mill around the turn of the 20th century was Herbert Hoover's brother.

Below Bodie is Mono Lake - which is an alkaline lake. There are lots of stories about Mono - mostly revolving around the water wars in Los Angeles. Twain wrote about it in Roughing it. (Two chapters - the quote is from Chapter 38.)

"Mono Lake lies in a lifeless, treeless, hideous desert, eight thousand feet above the level of the sea, and is guarded by mountains two thousand feet higher, whose summits are always clothed in clouds. This solemn, silent, sailless sea—this lonely tenant of the loneliest spot on earth—is little graced with the picturesque. It is an unpretending expanse of grayish water, about a hundred miles in circumference, with two islands in its centre, mere upheavals of rent and scorched and blistered lava, snowed over with gray banks and drifts of pumice stone and ashes, the winding sheet of the dead volcano, whose vast crater the lake has seized upon and occupied.

The lake is two hundred feet deep, and its sluggish waters are so strong with alkali that if you only dip the most hopelessly soiled garment into them once or twice, and wring it out, it will be found as clean as if it had been through the ablest of washerwomen's hands. While we camped there our laundry work was easy. We tied the week's washing astern of our boat, and sailed a quarter of a mile, and the job was complete, all to the wringing out. If we threw the water on our heads and gave them a rub or so, the white lather would pile up three inches high. This water is not good for bruised places and abrasions of the skin. We had a valuable dog. He had raw places on him. He had more raw places on him than sound ones. He was the rawest dog I almost ever saw. He jumped overboard one day to get away from the flies. But it was bad judgment. In his condition, it would have been just as comfortable to jump into the fire. The alkali water nipped him in all the raw places simultaneously, and he struck out for the shore with considerable interest. He yelped and barked and howled as he went—and by the time he got to the shore there was no bark to him—for he had barked the bark all out of his inside, and the alkali water had cleaned the bark all off his outside, and he probably wished he had never embarked in any such enterprise. He ran round and round in a circle, and pawed the earth and clawed the air, and threw double summersets, sometimes backward and sometimes forward, in the most extraordinary manner. He was not a demonstrative dog, as a general thing, but rather of a grave and serious turn of mind, and I never saw him take so much interest in anything before. He finally struck out over the mountains, at a gait which we estimated at about two hundred and fifty miles an hour, and he is going yet. This was about nine years ago. We look for what is left of him along here every day."

Below Mono is Lee Vining which has a Mobil station unlike any other. Inside the Tioga gas mart is the Whoa Nellie Deli. The food is exceptional. The options range from fish tacos, to pork medallions with cherry sauce, to lobster taquitos.

All through the area is some of the best fishing in the country with the East Walker river, June lake, and Hot Creek. Mammoth has grown a lot in the last several years. Below Mammoth is Manzanar which was one of the Japanese internment camps during WWII.

Most of the drive is in high desert (7000-8000 feet) but the variety of scenery is amazing. Last night when several of my colleagues from across the country came in they all remarked on how beautiful the drive from Reno or the Central Valley had been.