Exploring the Eastern Sierra by Tom Butt, August 2010
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Exploring the Eastern Sierra by Tom Butt, August 2010 The City Council is out of session in August, which makes it my usual vacation time. No long trips this year, but exploring a bit of the eastern Sierra was motivated by our ultimate destination, Mammoth Lakes for Bluesapalozza, a beer and music festival sponsored by Mammoth Brewing Company, owned by former Point Richmond residents Sean and Joyce Turner. This was three days of music supported by the products of 65 microbreweries from all over the United States. Andrew and Kim with their family also attended. I’ve never been to Mammoth Lakes, although Shirley broke her ankle skiing there before I knew her. The eastern Sierra was mostly a mystery to me before this trip. We took along Mélanie Tiberghien, a 20‐year old French girl who is staying with us for part of the summer. She is the granddaughter of a man Shirley worked with in Geneva in the 1960s, and our families have stayed close over the years with three generations visiting back and forth. We used to be big backpackers, but those packs seem to get heavier year by year. The High Sierra Camps were our first experience in the back country without full packs, and it seemed like something worth exploiting. Then we found we could camp at a trailhead and get in a five to ten mile day hike and return to a camp with a large tent, foam mattress, a bottle of wine and a dinner from fresh ingredients. The backpacks are still in the garage, but they haven’t seen much use lately. We wanted Melanie to see Yosemite Valley, and we were lucky to score the last reserved campsite just a few days before leaving. Even though it was the last one, turned out the be the Ahwahnee of campsites, located right on Tenaya Creek in North Pines with a great sunset view of a golden Half Dome. Overnight accommodations were only $10, so we took our savings and walked over to the Ahwahnee for a brunch at considerably greater cost than our evening accommodations. We found a local bear on our trail, which generated a little excitement. After a leisurely morning, we moved further up toward Tioga Pass, taking an obscure five‐mile back road to the Yosemite Creek Campground. This is on the same creek that forms Yosemite falls as it dumps into the valley. Half Dome at Sunset from North Pine Campground in Yosemite Valley This turned out to be the best fly fishing of the trip. In the wildlife category, this was also exciting, with the campground visited regularly by a bear during the night. Just after dark, we heard a cacophony of honking horns and banging pots and pans and found out later a bear had snatched a family’s dinner right off their table. Brunch at the Ahwahnee Sharing the trail with the bear On Friday, we had to get to Mammoth Lakes by 5:00 PM for the first of the music, but we stopped first for a hike off the Tioga Road just east of the National Park boundary to the ghost town of Bennettville, a played out 19th Century mining town that sucked in more money than it produced. The only thing substantial that arose from all this drilling was the Great Sierra Wagon Road. Maintenance of the road stopped with the work on the mines, but was resurrected with the coming of the automobile. The National Park Service embraced the auto as a way for citizens and tourists from abroad alike to enjoy America's national wonders, and in 1915 Stephen T. Mather, later director of the National Park Service, purchased the Great Sierra Wagon Road in behalf of Yosemite National Park, and it became what is now the Tioga Road (Highway 120) through Yosemite, passing through Tuolumne Meadows. Our last stop Left: Melanie discovers the corn lily. Right: the old Bennettville Mine. before Mammoth Lakes was the landmark Whoa Nellie Deli in Lee Vining for lunch. Friday, Saturday and Sunday were pretty much music festival days, winding up early afternoon on Sunday with the “Sunday Morning Hangover Party.” Saturday afternoon was a real crowd pleaser with samples of all the beer you could drink from 65 microbreweries. After selling out the annual Mammoth Festival of Beers and Bluesapalooza event last weekend with 5,000 tickets, Mammoth Brewing Company, owned by Sean and Joyce Turner, is gearing up for another weekend of great music. Our one side trip from Mammoth was an excursion up and over Mammoth Mountain into Devil’s Postpile National Monument near the headwaters of the Middle Fork of the San Joaquin River. The road is so narrow and perilous; you have to go in and out via shuttle bus. Devils Postpile is an easy 0.4 mile one way from the trailhead, and we proceeded another 2.5 miles to Rainbow Falls. Another 1.3 miles makes a loop back to a different shuttle bus stop for the ride back to Mammoth Mountain. Exploration of the eastern Sierra began on Sunday by driving up Rock Creek Canyon about 15 miles south of Mammoth Lakes on Highway 395. This is the highest of all gateways into the Sierra backcountry, and we found a campground on Rock Creek Lake just above the 10,000 ft. elevation. I fly fished Rock Creek in the late afternoon with minimal luck, but it was a beautiful stream. Devil’s Postpile The night temperature dropped below freezing, and we awoke to ice on our tents and picnic table. After thawing out, we powered up on the famous fresh “Pie in the Sky” from the nearby Rock Creek Lakes Resort and hiked up to Chickenfoot Lake at nearly 11,000 feet. The lakes, streams and wildflowers were as good as it gets, but the fishing was disappointing. Like most of the eastern Sierra Above: Freezing at Rock Creek Lake Below: A “Pie in the Canyons, the Sky” break trails were originally late 19th or early 20th Century mining roads built by overoptimistic speculators seeking fortunes in metals such as tungsten and molybdenum or entrepreneurs harvesting timber Chickenfoot Lake in Rock Creek Canyon for mining towns. It was late afternoon when we got back to the Rock Creek trailhead, and we needed to head north. We camped for the night at June Lake, only a few miles south of Lee Vining. Being much warmer than the previous night, we were able to get an early start. Heading north, we picked up a picnic lunch at the Whoa Nellie Deli in Lee Vining, stopped briefly to walk down to Mono Lake, and headed for Bodie, about 13 miles east of Highway 395 where the turnoff is seven miles south of Bridgeport. Bodie is a ghost town, now Bodie State Historic Park is a genuine California gold‐mining ghost town. Visitors can walk down the deserted streets of a town that once had a population of nearly 10,000 people. The town is named for Waterman S. Body (William Bodey), who had discovered small amounts of gold in hills north of Mono Lake. In 1875, a mine cave‐in revealed pay dirt, which led to purchase of the mine by the June lake Campground Standard Company in 1877. People flocked to Bodie and transformed it from a town of a few dozen to a boomtown. Sketch of old Methodist Church in Bodie Only a small part of the town survives, preserved in a state of "arrested decay." Interiors remain as they were left and stocked with goods. Designated as a National Historic Site and a State Historic Park in 1962, the remains of Bodie are being preserved in a state of "arrested decay". Today this once thriving mining camp is visited by tourists, howling winds and an occasional ghost. I sketched the former Methodist Church, which despite decades of abandonment, still has all its pews. You could clean it up and hold a service there next Sunday. Apparently Bodie is prominently featured in French travel guides, and Melanie wasn’t the only French person in Bodie that day. There has always been a European fascination with the American Old West, and dozens of French families, some even from places near where Melanie lives, may have outnumbered American visitors. Our final destination was Buckeye Canyon, east of Highway 395 a few miles north of Bridgeport. We Nature’s hot tub at Buckeye hot Springs Above: Melanie and Shirley at Sonora Pass. Right: wildflowers on the Sonora Pass road. stopped in Bridgeport for breakfast and visited the museum. Bridgeport is in a huge valley, once known as “big Meadows,” which was still green in mid‐August and grazed by thousands of cows. It was once the staging area for gold and silver mines in western Nevada and eastern California. The dirt road into Buckeye Canyon has almost no traffic and provides a magnificent panorama of the “Big Meadow.” For the first time, we found an abundance of campsites and chose one near Buckeye Creek. After yet another disappointing fishing foray in beautiful Buckeye Creek, we ate dinner and headed for nearby Buckeye Hot Springs, located down a steep slope off the road about a half mile from camp. The hot water originates above Buckeye Creek, and shallow pools have been created by piling rocks along the creek so that the hot and cold water mix at just the right temperature. The night was cold and clear with stars like you never see them in the city. It was hard to get out, but we reluctantly climbed up the steep hill at about 9:00 PM and headed back to camp.