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(Remember that you can click on the photos to see a
slideshow, and then hit "escape" to get back to the text. Also, a
note on the photo credits: as always, both Felice and I took these shots, and
many of my shots resulted from her suggestions.
I do the photo editing using Lightroom; my goal is to reproduce just
what we saw, as faithfully as possible.)
Sept. 26: We drove from Great Basin to the Oh Ridge
Campground near June Lake, about 375 miles, along Highway 6 in Nevada and then
Highway 120 in California. Both roads
were essentially empty – an easy and pleasant drive. That evening, even though we had no radio
coverage, we were able to listen to the first Clinton-Trump debate on Felice’s iPhone during an extended cocktail and snack session. Interesting, if not relaxing.
Sept. 27: The campsite at June Lake had a great view of
Carson Peak (on the left) and Parker Peak (on the right):
We headed
south to scout boondocking sites near the Mammoth Scenic Loop – there is a
whole network of forest roads in that area. We found a great place about a mile from the pavement – very
quiet and isolated:
Bear in mind,
though, that this was a weekday. I am
guessing that on weekends or holidays, this area gets heavy use. We saw a lot of ATV tracks in the forest.
We drove down
into the Red’s Meadow area beyond Minaret Summit to do a little late-afternoon
hiking. (For future reference, Red’s
Meadow Campground was dusty and crowded and not RV-friendly at all.) Throughout the
canyon of the San Joaquin River, we noticed that there were tremendous numbers
of very big old-growth trees that had been blown down. I have since learned that there was a freak
windstorm on November 30, 2011; they estimate that the winds were around 150
miles an hour.
We took the
Minaret Falls trail (4 miles, almost no elevation gain). But after five years of severe drought, it
was Minaret Trickles:
By comparison,
this is what it looked like in June of 2008:
As we were
heading back to the trailhead, we noticed this victim of the 2011 windstorm:
I was puzzled
by the big, heavy rocks on top of the tree trunk. We have never seen anything like this before: how did those rocks get up there? It took us a little while to figure it
out: the root ball (on the left side of
the shot) had trapped a number of rocks, as the roots always do. But instead of riding the root ball
gracefully down as the tree fell, as is usually the case, these rocks were
violently catapulted out of the roots by the sudden shock of the tree slamming
into the ground, propelled by that terrible windstorm.
Sept. 28: We took the Duck Pass trail in the Mammoth
Lakes area, 10 miles with 2000 feet of gain.
It was a perfect day: partly
cloudy, breezy, and cool, with no snow on the trail. And we were already acclimated to high-altitude
hiking (after a full month of it!), so the hike was not difficult at all.
The canyon headwall, seen from the perspective of Barney Lake, is a little daunting – to get a sense of
the scale, Felice is in the lower left corner of this shot:
But the trail up
the wall is well-engineered. It snakes
through the talus with a reasonable grade, and the surface is not too blocky:
From the pass
(at around 10,800 feet), we had a great view of the high country of Yosemite to
the north, in the left background of this photo. Skelton Lake is near Felice’s left hand:
We then headed
west toward the outlet of the lake:
At the outlet,
there were several big metamorphic “whalebacks,” ridges of uptilted resistant rock that
had been glacially polished and sculpted.
And on top of the whalebacks were erratics, boulders that had been
carried and then dropped by the melting glacier:
After lunch,
we climbed back up to Duck Pass. Barney
Lake is in the foreground:
Sept. 29: Just before we left for our hike, I had to
get another shot of the trailer tucked back into the forest, with the aspens
backlit by the morning sun:
We took the
Mammoth Crest trail, 8 miles with about 1700 feet of gain. After a long, steep climb (much easier than
the last time, in deep snow), we arrived on the crest, which is an anomalous
plateau. (After some research, I could
not find a geological explanation for the wide, flat ridge. It is certainly covered in glacial material,
but why wasn’t it carved up?) Behind
Felice are the Minarets, Mt. Ritter, and Banner Peak:
We went pretty high up on the crest, but we didn’t make
it all the way to the top – there were storm clouds
forming over the Minarets, and the crest would be a bad place in a
thunderstorm. Before heading back, we
posed (carefully) on the edge of the cliff:
This is the
storm that had us worried – eventually, it started to drift away from us, but discretion is the better part of not getting hit by lightning:
Halfway down,
we took a detour to Crystal Lake. I am
pointing at the place up on the ridge where we stopped for lunch:
That night, we
took yet another Milky Way shot, right from the campsite. We very briefly “painted” the aspens with an
old-fashioned incandescent flashlight, which gives a much more natural light
than an LED:
Sept. 30: We hitched up and headed south to Onion
Valley Campground. After shoe-horning
ourselves into a very small and un-level campsite, we went for a walk and
stopped off along Independence Creek:
Oct. 1: I took the last of our “door shots” at
sunrise:
Up at the pass
(11,800 feet), we spent quite a bit of time enjoying the view of the interior
of the Sierras and the Great Western Divide, which we usually see from the
other side of the mountains:
This is a
close-up of the jagged granite “fingers” atop the headwall on the south side of
the lake:
We stopped off
for a while at a cascade about halfway down the trail:
We drove home the next day -- most of the day was spent listening to Vin Scully call his last game.
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