Mammoth Lakes - Convict Lake and Inyo National Forest

At the hot springs, we had been camping in the parking area near the springs, and driving into town or where ever each day.  This is the parking area by the Hilltop spring, the mountains in the background are up beyond the town, directly behind the camper is Mammoth mountain.


   After a few straight days of soaking in the hot springs morning and evening, and dragging the house around all day, we looked for a place to camp where we could leave the trailer and bike or drive into town.

   On the way toward town, sort of spur of the moment I turned up the road to Convict Lake, south of Mammoth.  (no I stayed out of the gore, and made a nice safe turn).   The lake was formed by a glacier, with mountains on three sides, and the glacial moraine at the bottom.  The name comes from a group of convicts who escaped and met their end here, and several mountains are named for the several posse members who were killed.  The campground is closed still for the winter, but we availed ourselves of the dump which was still accessible.

    There is a nice level 3 mile hike around the lake.  We walked all the way around, but the kids went way up a snow covered to slope for a snowball fight.  We could hear them from across the lake.

      

this the snowball fight route, about 300 feet up we estimate.

After hiking and playing at the lake, we drove up through Mammoth and out Sawmill Cutoff road.  There are nice forest service campgrounds right in town, but they are still closed for the winter.  The private rv resort in town is pricey and mostly just a parking lot.  So further out of town, 3-4 miles, there is forest service land where dispersed camping is available, just stay on an existing roads and pulloff spots.

After we got set up, I was getting ready for a campfire outside, and Elliot & Annie were making some sort of baked goods inside (for heat from the oven...), and they heard on the radio that it was free cone day!   So we went back into town for ice cream.  One day a year they have free cones with a donation for a local organization, in this case the search and rescue volunteers.

 And after we came home, Alice's snowgirl had a campfire.  She (the snowgirl) watched from afar, until after we were done with marshmallows.  Then she (the snowgirl) jumped on the fire to help put it out.

The next couple days, we rode our bikes down to town in the morning, and then took a drive in the afternoon.

 Yesterday in the afternoon, we drove to the Village area, an outdoor shopping mall area at the base of the ski areas.  There's a gondola that goes part way up to other lodges and lifts, and we took that up just for sightseeing.  (and it's free..)  The real views are much better than a phone camera shows, I wouldn't put in this picture, but see that Ford truck in the picture?   That's foreshadowing...

So on the way back we wanted to check out Earthquake Fault.  Sometime in the last millennium, the earth split open here and it's still accessible.   The granite crack is about 10 feet wide and goes way down.  Snow and ice at the bottom usually last through the summers, and early settlers used it for food storage.

The short 1/4 mile road to it is paved, but not plowed and there were some snowdrifts across in places, each bigger than the last.  Ok that one was ok, seems to be pretty firm packed.  Keep momentum and the tires stay mostly on top and we sail over.  Oooh, this one looks big, I think we can, I think we can....   Ooop, here we are, slowed down and wheels dropped into it, and the bottom of the truck is sitting up on the drift.

Better start digging...  Oooh, seems the shovel is back at the campfire.....  Remember that lesson about the tire plugs in the truck?   Make that shovel, tire plugs, tire pump, and tow strap,  all stored in the truck.

So we dug for a couple minutes with a tiny garden trowel (from Crater of Diamonds) and a board,  and I realized this is not going to work.  I'd better take my tow strap back out to the road and beg a 4x4 truck for help.  There's plenty of traffic going to & from the ski areas.

Kind of jingle the towstrap in the air and wave your hand.  The first truck I waved at turned around and came to help.  A new Ford....

There was clear blacktop behind our truck, and pulling it out was no problem.  Getting us both back out was another issue.  The other guy started getting stuck in the next drift out, and ended up slid off to the side of the road in the drift.  And backing up he could do, but only downhill toward a couple trees.   So then we pulled him back out and up onto the road.  And then we both were able to make it back out.

Good clean fun.   Sorry no pictures, too much fun for pictures....

Mammoth Lakes Hot Springs

Before heading into the area around Mammoth Lakes, we had a good idea of where the hot springs are. For the first night, we headed over to Wild Willies, a lot of the ones around here are free, including that one.  We parked, and walked down. It’s a clay pool, with a gravel bottom, and a stream flowing into it. The closer you go to the stream, and the spring, the hotter it gets. We don’t know how hot the water is, but it’s probably around 100-105 degrees F.

Now, it’s important that you remember that it’s kind of cold up here, we’re at around 6000 feet above sea level. It’s really very pretty, with the hot spring in a field, in the middle of a valley, with steam coming up off the water, and the mountain on both sides. It’s hard to explain so I’ll let you see for yourself.

 The mountains reflecting in the pond on the way down to the springs.

 The actual springs, as you can tell, we're in a pretty good mood at this point.

 Another picture of the hot springs, with the stream leading into it. (Can we just ignore my face here?)

 Another really cool shot of the mountains.

And yes, another cool picture of the mountains.

Alabama Hills - More Rocks!

After Fossil Falls, we drove north again to Lone Pine and the Alabama Hills.  The hills take their name from the confederate battleship Alabama, after prospectors sympathetic to the confederacy named all named their claims alone those lines.

The rocks are similar to the City of Rocks in NM; weathered volcanic granite tuff with vertical cracks from cooling.   In other words, the best kind of rocks to be climbing on.  The area is BLM land, and it has also been used for shooting many movies and tv shows.  

We spent a little time walking around when we got there, and found a nice spot to tuck the camper into.  Plenty of room once up there, but pretty tight and a little steep to get through.

 We stayed up in the hills for three nights.  We climbed around the rocks of course, and rode bikes over to a couple of hiking trails to the Mobius Arch and the Eye of the Alabama.

Mobius Arch

Sierras in the Mobius Arch

Eye of the Alabama

Eye of the Alabama

After the fourth day in the hills, we went down into town for a night.   Lone Pine is a cute little town, it has a film museum, and even a Tesla charging station.

We were able to camp by a public park, and get connected to the internet.  (I got my traffic school done.  Kids, don't text while driving, and don't drive on that gore either, just take the next exit please...)   

I parked close to a tree, making a mental note about needing to pull out carefully the next day.   Not sure where that note got filed, but the next day we pulled right out and made a little boo-boo on the back of the trailer.   It's not so bad, but I was kicking myself and my mental filing system... 

Believe it or not, it started raining as soon as there was a hole in the camper.   So at the next stop (Manzanar), I got the ladder out, put the trim back in place and sealed 'er up.  The awning will be a little more of a scavenger hunt for the right part.

doa!

not pretty, but still dry inside...

Trona and Beyond

We spent a day or two hanging out in Death Valley, then we were off to the Trona Pinnacles, which we had heard about online.  The Pinnacles are a bunch of tufa formations on a dry lake bed.  The lake used to be full of water, and certain concentrations of minerals allowed these neat rock formations to grow.

We stayed there for a night, parked right among the pinnacles, and then we decided to head on to Ridgecrest.  We ran some errands, got some Internet, and decided to go a little bit up Hwy 395 to a BLM campground called Fossil Falls.

Fossil Falls was really cool!  There was a bunch of volcanic activity a long time ago, and so there's all these neat, volcanic-looking, black rocks scattered all around.  There are also some dry falls that you can hike to.  There's a bunch of rocks in the riverbed where the falls used to be, and the water polished them so they're REALLY smooth.  We had a lot of fun climbing around there, it was really cool!

The next morning, after some biking and some math, we headed back up 395, planning to stay at the Alabama Hills Recreation Area, which is a bunch of BLM land outside of Lone Pine.  But first, there was something that we had to do...

A while ago, I read this article online about a guy who was obsessed with finding the spot where U2 took one of the pictures for The Joshua Tree.  The picture has the band standing in front of a Joshua tree, looking angry and unhappy.  The guy did manage to find it, and he left a big plaque there to commemorate the spot.  The Joshua tree in question died a while ago, (maybe from everyone walking around it?) but it was still an important stop for us.  The article gave GPS coordinates, so I saved them for when we were nearby.  (I think we were in Texas when I found the article.)

So, we took a little detour!  It was a little bit out of our way, but it was a pretty great stop.  It was in the middle of nowhere, on some BLM OHV area, about a quarter mile off the road.  (36°19’51.00″N, 117°44’42.88″W)  We hiked out to it, and there it was!  There's the dead Joshua tree, the plaque, a few guitars, and a suitcase filled with U2-related stuff.  We took some pictures too...

After our pilgrimage, we hopped back in the truck and drove a little further to the Alabama Hills.  We had read about it online, but it was a bit cooler than we expected!  There are these huge piles of rocks, kinda like at Joshua Tree National Park, and you can just pull in and park among them!  It's really awesome!  We're definitely gonna be here for a few days...

Joshua Tree

After a long day in the truck, we pulled into Joshua Tree National Park late in the afternoon.  We stopped at the Visitor's Center, and discovered that all the campgrounds were full.  There was BLM land just outside the park that we could stay at though.

Before we backtracked to the BLM land, we decided to do a nearby hike.  Alice stayed in the trailer, and the rest of us did a 2.5ish mile loop around the hills.  There was a little detour that we took, where you climbed up a big pile of rocks called Mastodon Peak.  From the top, you could see the Salton Sea in the distance!  It's very pretty around here, we're definitely In God's Country.

Another attraction on the trail was a really old abandoned mine.  There was a mineshaft that was still open, but you had to squeeze through some bars to get to it.  There's a bunch of mines around here, it seems like, there was probably a Red Hill Mining Town or two around here.

After the hike, we drove back south out of the park to the BLM land, where we stayed the night.  We put up the antenna, but we couldn't connect to any Internet.  (I've been pretty Internet-less recently, I've been looking and looking, but I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For!)

The BLM land was nice, not too crowded.  One thing you see a lot of on public lands like these are shotgun shells.  (A lot of them too, like someone was trying to Bullet the Blue Sky!) There's
 also a bunch of broken glass around too, apparently people will use bottles for target practice.

We drove back into the park the next morning, after doing some spring cleaning.  On the way through, we talked to a couple of bikers.  They're newlyweds who are biking across the country for their honeymoon!  (That's a cool idea, I'll have to remember it...)  Their blog is honeycycle.blogspot.com .

All the roads are pretty aptly named around here, it's not like some other places we've been, when it feels like we're Where The Streets Have No Name.

We stopped for lunch at a "cactus garden," and talked to some other full-timers who noticed that we have solar panels.  It's always fun talking to other people on the road.  My dad showed the guy our solar system, and they talked about how best to "Trip Through Your Wires.") You can definitely tell that it's Spring Break, this is the most people we've seen in a while.

As we drove farther north, we started to see Joshua trees, and these HUGE piles of rocks!  We pulled over by a bunch of rocks so Alice and I could get out and climb around.  There was one time where Alice almost got her foot stuck, and she couldn't move -- it was like she was Running to Stand Still!  She got herself out pretty quickly though, thankfully.  (I told her that I was gonna keep going "With or Without You!")

I really enjoyed looking at the Joshua trees, I think they look really cool.  There's a TON of them in the north end of the park, not so much in the south end, or outside the park.  In the north end though, there's a bunch of them.  (There's no "One Tree Hill" around here, the trees are all over the place, hill or no hill!  They're kinda like the saguaro cactus that way -- they're all over their ideal environment, but not so much outside of it.)

As we were driving, we saw a sign for the "Hall of Horrors," so of course we had to go check it out.  It turned out to be a big pile of rocks with some little tunnels in it.  The "horrors" were a couple of rock climbing spots with names like "The Exorcist" on the other side of the pile.  It was fun climbing around the easier side though.

We kept going, until we came to a trail that we had talked about doing.  As we were getting ready to go for the (short) hike, I was looking at the rocks and thinking that it might be more fun to scramble around for a bit.  I convinced Alice to come, and we went for a little adventure while the parents took a walk/hike.

We scrambled up/around/under up the pile, until we came to this big, dark crack in the mountain that we couldn't find a way past. Right about then, some other people squeezed out of the rock from the other side of the mountain.  They told us that you couldn't come through from the side we had come up, you had to go up the other side, squeeze through this tiny chute into the crack we were in, and go down the other side.  Oh well...  We turned around, and made it to the ground right about the same time the parents got back.  (The trail was only a one mile loop, but they got a little lost...  I thought they would've been back ages ago, and my mom would be wondering where we were, like one of the Mothers of the Disappeared.)  I kinda wanted to stay and go up the other side, but everyone else was tired, and it was getting late...  So we packed up and made our Exit from the national park, and over to some BLM land east of (the town of) Joshua Tree for the night.

Lucky rock

This morning we headed into Death Valley from Pahrump, NV, near Las Vegas.

On the way is Ash Meadows National wildlife refuge, and Devil's Hole. The area is home of the famously endangered pupfish, at least one talkative old codger, and this lucky rock.


The direction we were coming from involved a few miles of gravel road. A little way in, a guy in a pickup with two big German shepherds flagged us down. The bigger dog jumped out and came about halfway into my open window. Not exactly friendly, but I'm not bleeding so that's fortunate.

The guy yelled at his dog and pulled him away. He said I'm lucky I don't have a beard, he doesn't like men with beards. He looks a little closer and says 'oh you do have a little (stubble) there, maybe that's why he jumped out.'

He goes on to explain that the road is bad washboardy all the way, we should turn around and go the other way. (Other way is 30 miles extra on paved, and 2 miles gravel). He seemed grumpy about the road not getting graded often, and said to turn around there at the welcome sign to the refuge. I half felt I'd better turn around or he'd pull a gun.

So he drove on out without incident, that's fortunate too. We went up to the welcome sign, and watched him tie the big dog up in the bed and head on. And of course we kept on going, we need to go see this pupfish, we're not giving up now. Gravel roads are usually washboardy, we'll just go slow.

About another mile on, I came across my lucky rock. I didn't see it at first, I only noticed when there was a sudden hissing. Uh huh, I think I know what that is. Open the door and I could see the rear tire blowing away the road dust each time around.

I put a jack under it and Elliot got the plug kit out of the camper. (Note to Mr Lucky: store the plug kit in the truck not the camper.....). We started plugging the hole, reamed it out and let all the air out. Wait... There's still hissing... What is that? Wow! It's the front tire too!


So put some blocks under that one too. At this point I went back about 50 feet and found my lucky rock. Still sitting there ready for more. It's good the trailer tires are offset from the truck, otherwise we'd have been fixing 4 tires...

So I finished plugging the rear tire, and hooked up the air compressor.

Probably I should get one of those no-complaint models that runs on 12 volts. Seriously, the kids had a good time pumping, a really long good time, and no complaints at all. Annie & I pumped a bit too.

About the time the front tire was plugged, the guy in the truck showed up again. I thought I was really in for it now, so I smiled and profusely admitted that he told me. We spent more time talking than it took to fix and pump up the tires.

He turned out to be a nice guy. He lives just a mile or two off the road within the refuge, so that's why he was complaining about the lack of road grading. He drove back to his house and got an air tank to finish inflating the tires.

We decided it would be best to turn around, what with all the advice and only two more tire plugs left. As we were turning around, our friend waved us over again. About 20 yards ahead, there was a puddle in the road where it crosses a wash. There were two pupfish in it.

The rest of the day, we drove on into Death Valley. There are a lot of wildflowers blooming, like a yellow haze on the desert in some areas. We checked out the opera house and hotel in Amargosa / Death Valley Junction, stopped for a couple short hikes or overlooks, and camped at Stovepipe Well. (The original water hole here was marked with a piece of old tin stove pipe.)