Hail, Columbia

After a couple days, it was hard to leave “Rockwood,” our quirky Lake Tahoe cabin. But we had a long day of traveling ahead of us, so we packed up the car and left before ten o’clock. Crossing the Sierra before June is not always easy because many of the roads are either routinely closed for the whole winter or may be closed with little notice if it looks like there may be a storm. Fortunately, the weather was cooperative with us, and we crossed the mountains on highway 88, known in our fourth grade history books as the Kit Carson Pass. Most of the Sierra Nevada has double peaks, that is, there is one set of peaks on the east side, another on the west side, and a small valley in the middle. The Carson Pass is a good example of this, and there is even a lake in the valley between the two peaks.

While it was still winter on the top of the mountains, as we descended into the foothills it turned into Spring. Our first stop was in Jackson, one of the most important towns in this area during the Gold Rush. It’s still a significant settlement and it is the administrative headquarters of Amador County. It has a number of historic buildings in its center, but generally we found it less than charming. We passed one building under construction, and they had painted a mural in front, perhaps to discourage graffiti.

After a short lunch, we continued down Highway 49 toward Columbia. We stopped a few times along the way. Perhaps the most interesting of these stops was in Mokelumne Hill, at one time the biggest town in Calaveras County.

One of the interesting things about this town was that while many of the buildings have been restored, other parts of it are in ruins. It’s almost as if Bodie and Virginia City had been combined, yet with virtually no tourists in sight.

There was an old town hall there which is still occasionally used for films an concerts. John can never resist a box office!

We also went through towns like San Andreas and Angels Camp, but nothing seemed particularly memorable to us there despite any historical significance. The town of Columbia, however, in Tuolumne County, is both historic and picturesque.

This town is a state historic park. There are no cars in the center, and everything has been preserved and reconstructed to show what it was like to live in this area during the 1850’s.

Columbia was the site of a great deal of hydraulic mining. For those who only vaguely remember their fourth grade history, this was the destructive practice of blasting away entire mountainsides with hoses to uncover quartz veins and gold. There are still significant areas of the Gold Rush area where normal vegetation cannot grow because there is still little soil. Some of the equipment used for this is on display.

Our accommodations for the night are at the Columbia Gem Motel. There is nothing special about this place except they take dogs and have peculiar taste is decorating the motel office.

Columbia is the home for the Sierra Repertory Theatre. So, instead of passing the evening watching reruns of 30 Rock, John and I went to see The Rainmaker. I was only vaguely familiar with the play, but John knew it pretty well. Apparently there is a movie version of it from the 1950’s with Katherine Hepburn and Burt Lancaster. It’s all about some family living somewhere on the southern Great Plains during a drought. They have a smart but plain daughter who looks like she will never get married because she is too independent. Then a mysterious stranger comes into town, and, you guessed it, changes the way they look at themselves.

Tomorrow, we head off for home.

Peaceful and Pleasant

Both John and I had some other things to work on in the morning, so we had a late start to our tourist day. Our first sightseeing adventure of the day was a hike to Skunk Harbor. This is a small cove just north of Zephyr Cove on the Nevada side of the lake. It was originally the site of the summer home of George Newhall, a San Francisco auctioneer who “mined the miners” during the Gold Rush. The path down to the water from Highway 28 offers lovely views. We stopped here and ate out picnic lunch.

We found a tennis ball and had fun throwing it to Eli. It landed in the snow once. He did not want to put a snowy ball in his mouth, so he nudged it with his nose to brush the snow off. To his chagrin, that only added more snow. He kept at it until he had rolled something almost large enough for a snowman’s head! Then he couldn’t smell his ball anymore and he became somewhat agitated! We shook off the snow for him and he was happy again.

We continued on to Carson City. This must be one of the smallest state capitals, and generally it is not that memorable. There is a small old downtown which has its charms, but the majority of the city is a sprawl of big box retail and chain restaurants, all with large parking lots. We tried to concentrate only on the older, more attractive part. This is the old state legislature building. There is a newer one in a post-modern style next to it.

Spring, has you can see, was in full flower in Carson City. Still, cherry blossom time in Nevada is not the same experience as it is in Japan. But, hey, where in Kyoto would you find a casino right across the street from the offices of the legislature?

We walked past a parking lot where they were having some kind of sale or auction of old casino items such as the slot machines you see below. They also had a pile of telephones with wires. Weird. Can you believe that back then they didn’t lose the signal halfway through a call?

From Carson City, we headed up the hill to Virginia City. This was the site of the Comstock Lode silver mine. At its height, Virginia City had a population of over 25,000 people and was the largest and most important settlement in between Chicago and San Francisco. There was a six-story hotel with the only elevator west of the Windy City and 20 theaters or opera houses. There were over 110 saloons in town and several opium dens. Women and children were not as scarce during the silver rush as they had been in the gold rush, so they had to build schools for them. This is the only one preserved, the Fourth Ward School.

There were several churches, too. We went inside the largest of them, the Roman Catholic church, and had chat with the lady who ran the gift shop inside. Next to it was the less impressive Episcopal church. It was, alas, locked.

Virginia City’s population fell rapidly after the silver ore was exhausted, and by the 1930’s only about 500 people were left. It was well on its way to becoming a ghost town, but in 1959 NBC premiered Bonanza, perhaps the most popular television western of all time. In that series the Cartwright family lived only a sprawling ranch near Virginia City, and forays into town were frequent parts of the story line. As a result, Virginia City experienced a rebirth as a tourist destination. The shops on the main street were converted into the usual places to buy tee shirts and souvenirs, but the exteriors were largely left untouched. John and I found nothing interesting to buy (except for some fudge, of course), but we could not resist some of the picture-taking opportunities.

The cemetery on the edge of town, however, gives a solemn reminder of the people who lived and died here. The Comstock mine was extraordinarily dangerous, and many of the headstone show men dying at very young ages.

We returned to our cottage in time for sunset. We took a short walk down the path to the beach and watched the sun drift down into the clouds above the Sierra Nevada mountains on the west shore of the lake.

It was a peaceful end to a pleasant day.

Tufa and Tahoe

This morning was distinctly cooler, but still quite clear. Since we had a long way to go, we cleaned up the cottage, packed up the car, and started our way north reasonably early. Our destination for the day was Lake Tahoe.

Our only real stop along the way was at Mono Lake. I have many memories of Mono Lake over the years. My first time to see the lake was perhaps twenty years ago when John and I were at Yosemite. We were driving down the Tioga Pass when the brakes on the car gave out. John somehow managed to get us down the hill to the town of Lee Vining but we had to spend three days there while the local garage ordered the parts to fix the brakes. I still cringe at that memory. Fortunately, most of the other times I have spent by the shore of Mono Lake have been just lovely. Today was no exception.

If you are a seagull, the attraction of this great inland salt lake is the abundant food – brine shrimp and flies. For humans, the attractions are the great tufa towers. These strange rock formations are actually a kind of very porous limestone formed by underwater springs. Since the lake has become significantly smaller than it once was  because of water diversions by the LA Department of Water and Power, many of these tufa stands are now on land.

In fourth grade, students study California history and geography. We have a unit of study in the Science book on brine shrimp and Mono Lake. So, when I found a plastic water bottle which some less environmentally sensitive person had just left on the ground, I filled it up with water from Mono Lake to take back to the class. That’s what I’m holding in my right hand in the picture below.

Mostly we wandered around and just looked at the scenery. The place was almost completely deserted.

The landscape surrounding the lake is almost as amazing as the lake itself. There are always huge clouds moving over the landscape, particularly clinging to the Sierras on the east side.

We had hoped to stop at the ghost town of Bodie, but the road to this state park is closed for both weather and for the dismal state budget.  So we drove on through Bridgeport. There’s not much to really see or do in Bridgeport, but it is the scene of one of my favorite film noir movies, Out of the Past.  We drove through some extraordinary mountain scenery by Walker Creek and Topaz Lake. We came came through the Gardnerville, probably the greenest corner of Nevada, and then climbed the steep and winding road up the mountain and down to Lake Tahoe. John found us a reasonably priced cottage just on the other side of the road from the Lake. It is so cute it almost induces insulin shock.

The dogs were ready to stretch their legs a little, so we first took them over to the lake. They liked the fresh water here a little better than the salt water at Mono Lake.

We drove a little down the South Shore to explore. We went past State Line and through South Lake Tahoe. This is more of a ski destination than I remembered from years ago, though I think this is the first time I have been here during ski season. Traffic was not as slow as Los Angeles, but it took us a while to find Fallen Leaf Lake. I had a nice hike planned here, but just after I took this picture the weather turned awful and we were pelted with hail. So we beat a hasty retreat back to the car.

When the hail had at least stopped, we made another short hike, this one through the Tallac Historical Site on the lake. This was the site of the summer home of the Baldwin family. Elias “Lucky” Baldwin made his first fortune as the principal owner of the Comstock Mine in Nevada, and then took those earning and made a second fortune in Southern California real estate. This was his daughter’s summer place.

In the evening, we did some exploration of South Lake Tahoe. We looked without much success for some extra woolen socks, and we had a pretty unimpressive buffet meal at Harrah’s, supposedly the best buffet in town. The dogs were glad to get back to the cottage.

Convicts and Calderas

In 1871, twenty nine prisoners escaped from the Nevada State Prison in Carson City. Six of them crossed the mountains and tried to hide in this part of Mono County. A posse of men from the towns of Benton and Aurora tried to apprehend them. A fierce gun battle followed, and Robert Morrison, one of the deputies, was killed. The felons escaped to nearby Long Valley where three of them were caught and hanged. The tallest peak in the area was named Mount Morrison in honor of the slain deputy, and the lake became known ever since that time as Convict Lake.

This small lake, fed by melting snow from the mountains in the nearby John Muir Wilderness, has always been good for fishing. A fishing camp with rustic cabins was established here in the 1920’s, and now, under the control of the National Forest Service, it is known as the Convict Lake Resort. In its early days I am sure it was the scene of many of what my sister refers to as “ATF” weekends –- that’s short for “Alcohol, Tobacco, and Fishing.” Now with a fancy restaurant on the premises and some more civilized accommodations, it attracts couples and families year-round. This was the cabin next to ours. I could not find an angle which showed the mountain quite so well for our cabin, but it looked just about the same.

We took the dogs for a stroll around the lake in the morning. The weather was clear and beautiful, and the pups had a great time.

Edie loves lake water, and she did not mind a bit that it was as cold as could be.

Eli, who always loves to chase tennis balls, discovered that pine cones were a reasonably good substitute. In fact, his enthusiasm for pine cones almost matched a first grade teacher armed with a can of gold spray paint!

John and I were content to watch them from the shore. We weren’t getting into that freezing water!

We did get them to pose for a group portrait, though you have no idea how many times we had to shoot this picture.

When the snow has melted, it is pretty easy to hike all the way around the lake. But the snow was still pretty deep on the steep western side of the lake, so we returned the way we came. We had lunch on our porch, and, since it is vacation, promptly took a nap.

In the afternoon, we set out to explore Long Valley and maybe to find an empty hot spring. Like Yellowstone National Park, the southern part of Mono County is one enormous volcano caldera. About 700,000 years ago geologists believe that enormous eruptions from this super volcano created the current landscape.

There is still a pool of magma just below the surface here, and combined with the snow melt from the nearby mountains, it creates hot springs around the valley. A few of these springs, like this one, are dangerously hot with temperatures twice that of boiling water!

When we were here before, we chanced upon one of the cooler hot springs and spent a pleasant afternoon in the sulfurous waters. We were not that lucky this time as all the springs seemed occupied by others. So, being dedicated teachers, we went back to the cabin to grade papers and work on lesson plans. Maybe another time….

I cooked dinner, and we watched Working Girl on one of the satellite movie channels. I hadn’t seen this film since it came out in 1988, and although it is amusing to look at the big hair and big shoulder pads of the period, it is not a cinematic masterpiece.

Tomorrow, on to Lake Tahoe.

Snow

Even though we had had plenty to eat last night, we still had to have a full breakfast this morning. It’s vacation, isn’t it? The diet starts when we get home. The rationalizations are just endless….

Anyhow, breakfast at the Alabama Hills Café is highly recommended if you are in this part of the  world. Besides the fluffy biscuits and the outstanding omelets, one of the charms of this place is the mural on the wall with the local interpretation of some of the rocks.

Perhaps inspired by the mural, we decided to go back to the Alabama Hills to see how the rocks photographed in the morning light.

Now I confess to being a little vague about all the details here, but as I recall my geologic history of California, the Alabama Hills were formed at about the same time by the same forces which created Mount Whitney just to the west.

So what’s rather strange about the Alabama Hills is that even though they are geological oddities, they seem oddly familiar. That’s why they have been used in so many movies to represent so many different places. These particular pictures were taken at the spot where the tent city stood in Gunga Din.

The irregular shapes of the rocks, like clouds on a summer day, seem to invite you to make them into something else. I see a beagle’s head in the rock below.

I saw another one which looked to me exactly like the eagle sitting on the cactus on the Mexican flag. And, uh, to be honest, some of the rocks can create vaguely, uh, Freudian associations….

 

Since this was a wet winter, the wildflowers were just amazing everywhere we looked.

After spending an hour or so in the hills, we took a long dirt road out towards highway 395. The clouds cast the most amazing shadows on the empty landscape. I thought about trying to photograph those shadows, but I think Ansel Adams knew best that only silver nitrate prints really work right to capture that magic.

We passed by Manzanar. We stopped here a couple years ago when we had last been in this part of the state, and though it was an amazing experience, neither of us felt like we needed to do it again. We continued a little past the Japanese detention camp to the town of Independence. This was once the largest settlement in the Owens Valley, and for this reason it is the county seat.

But now it is barely more than a hamlet with a few charming homes and this hotel to suggest its more prominent past.

We stopped off briefly in Bishop, the largest, and without question, the ugliest, settlement in the Owens Valley. We bought some bread at Erik Schat’s Bakery. We were quite taken with this shop when we found it the first time years ago, but now it seemed to both of us like the quintessential tourist trap. But the Shepherder bread is quite good anyhow.

In Bishop we also stopped at the offices of the Forest Service to see if there were any places nearby which would be good for hiking. The ranger seemed annoyed by the question, perhaps because he had been asked it a hundred times earlier that day, and he curtly said that all of the trails were closed for the winter. John asked if there was any place where we could find some snow for the dogs. He thought for a moment and suggested that we go about twenty miles further north and then turn in on Rock Creek Road.

It was a great suggestion. The altimeter on the GPS slowly recorded our rise from 5,000 feet to 8,000. Here we began to notice some snow on the ground. By the time we reached the end of the plowed road, near 10,000 feet, there was abundant snow and even an almost frozen lake.

Edie was absolutely in heaven – except when the snow was a bit deeper than expected.

John, ever the Southern California native, thought that 38 degrees was cold.

I, of hardier New England stock, knew it was Spring weather.

We went on to Mammoth Lakes to pick up some groceries. I find Mammoth Lakes singularly lacking in charm. It seems like a little bit of Orange County, minus the palm trees, set down in the middle of a gorgeous mountain setting. Maybe if the surrounding mountains were not so majestic the sprawl of mini-malls and condos would not seem quite as ugly.

Fortunately, we are not staying there. We are staying at Convict Lake a couple miles to the south. We have a lovely cabin here run by the Forest Service.

More on Convict Lake tomorrow.