Ah, memories…

Bishop, California

NOTE: This post is extra long, my apologies.

This trip has been full of disappointments, surprises and memories; that is the stuff nostalgia trips are made of. I have not visited many of the places on this trip in over forty years, and things change — I knew that. The primary features of the area, the mountains and valleys have changed very little. The views are still spectacular. The air is still very crisp and dry. The humidity has been in the low teens. My skin and nasal passages are in shock! Even the small towns along Highway 395 have changed very little since the last time I was here about seven years ago.

The visit to see my sister was great. Unfortunately, it had to be cut short. I seem to be allergic to cats. After I left home right after I graduated from high school, my sister's and my orbits rarely aligned. I moved around quite a bit during my working life, and even when I lived close (within a three- to four-hour drive) our visits were in hindsight few and far between. Funny, you always think there will be future opportunities. Then at some point there aren't — I am happy we had the short visit we did.

I spent one afternoon and one morning walking around the ghost town of Bodie. The challenge of making images of Bodie in bright sunlight with not a cloud in the sky served to reassure me that my decision not to bring my "real" cameras was the right one. I would not have made any better images with those cameras than I did with my iPhone. I would have been frustrated and disappointed. In fact, the best images I made there were made with the Adobe Indigo app, which has a function that removes reflections from windows and other surfaces. With that app I was able to take photos of the interiors of buildings that would not have been possible with my other gear.

I wrote in my last post that there might be a decent coffee place in Bridgeport, where I was staying while visiting Bodie — no, there was not. The internet remained spotty or non-existent and the food choices limited, poorly prepared and unhealthy. I was anxious to move on.

I used to make the drive up and down Highway 395 four or five times a year when I worked as a sales rep for the Schwinn Bicycle Co. I would travel from my home in Montecito, just south of Santa Barbara, driving through the Los Angeles area stopping at a number of bicycle shops there, then up through the San Fernando valley and jump on 395 north heading to Mammoth Lakes. Those trips were concentrated in the late spring to late autumn time period, just after the snow melted and just before the first snow fell. I remember those drives vividly.

There were occasions when I would spend the night along the way in Ridgecrest. I had a customer there that I had become friends with. Ridgecrest is home to the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake. The base and surrounding area was used for training and evaluation of the planes and weapons used by the US Navy. One morning I headed out very early, and as I drove up the valley an F-18 Hornet flew by me from behind at about 100 feet above the valley floor, close enough that I could see the pilot salute me, then he pulled up and hit the afterburners (pedal to the metal!). The noise was deafening. I could not help but laugh. Based on my service in the Navy, that pilot was operating outside the normal limits for training missions in that area. He was risking a reprimand for flying too low over civilian infrastructure. It was very early, before the sun had risen over the mountains and I was the only vehicle I could see in either direction — my guess, he was bored and needed to stretch his boundaries.

Along with that memory, the other vivid memory I have of those drives is the twisting lines of yellow running down the sides of mountains in the late fall. The quaking aspen trees that grew along the mountain streams running down the eastern slopes of the Sierra Mountains turn a bright yellow in the late fall. The timing of this trip was built around the opportunity to see those colors again. As I drove over the Sierras from my sister's home on the western slope to the eastern slope where I am now, the trees at the higher altitudes have already turned yellow, as the photograph accompanying this post shows. Here on the floor of the Owens Valley and along the eastern slopes the trees are just showing signs of turning. Seeing the color at the higher altitudes was great, but there was a cost — just like in the Northeast, when the leaves start turning, the leaf-peepers turn out, driving up the rates for lodging and filling the restaurants. The lines at the coffee shops in the mornings have been long, long, long!

One of the other planned highlights of the trip was a visit to the Laws Railroad Museum. The museum's featured display was the narrow-gauge locomotive and cars from the Southern Pacific route from Keeler to Laws along the Owens Valley from 1900 to 1960. That little short-line narrow-gauge train was my father's favorite. I had visited the museum back in 2017 on one of the cross-country trips Therese and I made in that time frame. I did not take any photographs there, or I deleted them all, as I am prone to do if I am unsatisfied. I did take photographs from our walk in the Bristlecone Pine Forest on the same trip, so I am pretty sure I deleted what images I did make.

So, I was looking forward to spending whatever time it took to make some images of the train and specifically the #9 engine. So, you can imagine my disappointment when I learned that after being on display outdoors for sixty-six years, the museum decided that the engine needed to be restored before it deteriorated any more. The engine was in the engine house undergoing a major restoration and not available for viewing except at a distance. I was able to convince the staff with a mention of my father's fondness for the train and my having traveled from Rhode Island to let me in the engine house. The engine was largely disassembled, the light was poor, and while it was kind of the staff to let me see the engine, I came away with no photographs.

So, with most of the day ahead of me, I decided to drive up to the Bristlecone National Forest at the top of the White Mountains on the east side of the valley. The drive takes about an hour and a half covering 45 miles and an altitude gain of seven thousand feet. In hindsight, I should have probably waited until later in the day, when the temperatures would have eased and the light would have been better, but true to my impulsive nature I just headed up and arrived at noon, paid the entry fee, put on my hiking boots and took off on a four-mile hike in the Patriarch Grove along the Methuselah Trail — got to love those names.

Even at ten thousand feet of elevation, it was a warm day — ninety in Bishop near the museum and probably somewhere in the mid- to high seventies where I was hiking. I had a pint of water and an energy bar. The trail was more difficult than I remembered. I could have used a set of hiking poles and more water. The distance is not that much farther than some of the hikes we do back in Rhode Island, but the altitude, the temperature, the low humidity, the challenging trail and bright sunlight in a bald sky were more challenging than I anticipated — maybe an 8.5 to 9 range of difficulty. I was wrecked when I finished! I drove down to Bishop, checked into my hotel, had an early dinner (Chinese, poor choice!), and slept for almost eleven hours!

This morning, once I had a coffee in the hotel room (tasteless swill) and a Starbucks latte, I was off. And yes, Bishop is large enough to have a Starbucks, in fact two of them. I had tried to get a latte at the local shop, Loony Bean (love that name), but it was packed. I had planned to stop at the Manzanar National Monument, one of the internment camps where American citizens of Japanese descent were held in confinement during the Second World War. A reminder of the legacy this country has in how it treats immigrants and people of color, and today we are adding to that legacy.

There were clouds in the sky so I made the decision to skip Manzanar and head on to the Alabama Hills and the road to the Mt. Whitney Portal. The Alabama Hills are a unique geological formation as you can see in the photos in the gallery linked here, I walked around some and attempted to take advantage of the first clouds I have seen while here in California. After that I drove up to the Mt. Whitney Portal. The portal is at the end of a road that travels from the town of Lone Pine on the valley floor winding up to the Portal, a change of 4600 feet of elevation over thirteen miles.

That road up to the Portal is deeply etched in my memory. Twice when I was younger, in a what seems like another life, I did a bicycle race called the Death Valley to Mt. Whitney Portal race. It was a two day race from Stovepipe Wells in Death Valley at sea level, up and over Towne Pass (about 4,950 ft) within a few miles of the start, a long grind of roughly 13 miles on Highway 19 to Lone Pine on day one, and then from Lone Pine up to the Portal on day two!

The Portal has a small store, a large campground and is the trailhead for the climb up Mt. Whitney and connects to the John Muir and Pacific Crest trails. There was a viewpoint where I made a video, but otherwise pretty meh! The clouds turned into a grey overcast that while a relief from the sunny skies of the previous days, it made for poor light for making images — tomorrow is another day, and the length of this post is probably trying even my most devoted readers (thanks to the very few!) so I will sign off. Next stop — Death Valley.

Link to photos and videos - Click Here