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.
