The Adventures of T&A

As they say, the people of California may be like a bowl of granola.  Fruits, nuts, and a few flakes.  In jest of course, that refers to the people of California.  We’ve met a number of exceptions, but we did find it interesting that most folks in California do not care to give you the time of day.  However, if you are into nature, California is a pretty amazing place.  It is home to the lowest place in the western hemisphere (Badwater Basin in Death Valley), but 88 miles away sits Mount Whitney at 14,494 ft, not to mention 11,049ft Telescope Peak which is only 18 miles away AND visible from Badwater Basin!  It is home to the oldest known living organism, a Great Basin Bristlecone Pine by the name of Methusela (see Goin’ to California entry).  As we were about to discover, California is also home to the most voluminous tree too.

But before we could visit the aforementioned tree, we had some business to attend to.  While visiting with the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest, we learned from the Forest Service rangers that an alternative energy fair called Kickin’ Off the Grid was happening in Mammoth Lakes, California.  Teresa and I had very little information about the event, so we ended up arriving fairly late on Saturday.  Unfortunately, we missed the majority of the lectures, but did end up catching a great lecture on solar for heat and electricity by Russ Cartwright from Independent Power Corporation and got a number of questions answered.  We learned about the latest green technology used to heat water, homes, and pools as well as the latest in photovoltaics (solar panels used to produce electricity).

Our next stop was Mono Lake, known for it’s bizarre tufa formations.  Being part of the hydrologic great basin, water only leaves the lake by evaporation.  The lake is far saltier than the ocean, but, as opposed to the Dead Sea, supports a very tight web of life including algae, alkali flies (we saw literally millions scatter out from under our footsteps along the shoreline on our walk), brine shrimp, and birds.  For a period of time, Los Angeles was diverting so much water out of the streams, that Mono Lake began to fall significantly, raising the salinity of the water.  Thankfully, a deal has been reached to bring the lake back up to a reasonable level… high enough to re-balance the salinity of the waters and sustain the delicate web of life.  The tufa forms underwater where an underwater spring rich in calcium meets the salty lake (sodium bicarbonate [baking soda]).  This allows tufa towers to grow up to 30 ft underwater.  Oddly enough, we would not be enjoying the bizarre tufa formations now if LA hadn’t diverted the fresh water streams because they would be underwater.

We were very surprised when the Forest Ranger at the lake recommended we stop at the Tioga Gas Mart for a gourmet meal at gourmet prices (more info here).  So stop we did, and all I can say is… Wow.  The first thing that may tip you off that this isn’t your normal gas mart is that you can’t find parking.  Then you notice a few other things, like the trapeze, or the band getting set up for the evening, or the huge line of people at the Whoa Nellie Deli.  This is a happening’ place!

We were about to head into John Muir’s home country.  I suspect many folks outside of California have no idea who John Muir is.  In summary, the National Park system probably wouldn’t be quite the same without his efforts.  He created the Sierra Club, arguably the world’s most effective grassroots environmental organization.  He also fought hard for the creation of Yosemite National Park and other areas including Kings Canyon and the Giant Sequoia groves.  He knew all the right people in congress and in the media, and would bring them out to see the amazing country he loved so much.  He wrote eloquently on behalf of nature and man’s nature. One of my favorite quotes:

I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.

On to Yosemite National Park, also known to many as paradise.  It is incredibly beautiful.  Imagine coming out of the somewhat lengthy Wawona a mountain tunnel, and spread out before you is a gorgeous wide U shaped glacial valley with nearly 4000 ft granite cliffs, as well as granite monoliths, and three huge free-fall waterfalls pouring off into the basin.  This was my first experience with Yosemite years ago.  Unfortunately we also found the largest crowds AND traffic we had ever run into in our travels thus far.  Let me just say that folks looking for an escape from the cities will NOT find it at Yosemite.  The Yosemite Valley, is, for all practical purposes, a city during the summer, at least with regards to the hoards of people.

We got soaked hiking the Mist Trail which is cut into the rock right next to Vernal Falls, but must have run into at least 400 other people hiking the trail.

We escaped the crowds for a bit by heading over to Hetch Hetchy Valley, a less visited area in the Northwest corner of the park.  Hetch Hetchy represents one of John Muir’s lost battles, for in this beautiful valley, sits a portion of San Francisco’s water.  The battle actually continues to this day.  Regardless, it is still a beautiful area, but one does have to wonder what this looked like back before it was dammed in 1923.  We did a nice, hot hike out to a very powerful waterfall, Wapama Falls along the edge of the reservoir.

It was so hot, I decided to slide down a natural waterslide into in some water which has been warmed on the exposed granite on its way down to the pool.  It’s fun to act like a child every now and then.

Next, it was off to visit some of the biggest trees in the world, the giant sequoias.  Our first grove we visited was the Mariposa Grove in Yosemite National Park  We again ran into large crowds, but still enjoyed looked at the huge trees.  We ended up taking a different trail back to the car, which, oddly enough, no one was on.

Business took priority over the next few days.  We resupplied in Fresno (including a stop at Trader Joe’s for some 2BC and went off to find a hotel.  We needed the hotel so we could have an address to receive documents from the closing company for our land purchase.  We first tried out the Rose Motel in Sanger, only to find out that our closing company had closed for the day and we could not provide them an address.  To make matters worse, we got to our room and found 2-3 bullet holes in the window and a disconnected smoke detector.  Yikes!

We decided to bite the bullet (so to speak) and pay a more per night.  We made a reservation at the Squaw Valley Motel, a bit closer to Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Park.  The motel was very well kept and you can tell someone put a lot of effort into this place.  We also met some nice visitors staying at the motel, including a couple from Paris, France.  (We got our closing papers too.)

We did a day-trip into the Kings Canyon and hiked along the river and a meadow.  We pretty much had the trail to ourselves until we got the waterfall.  It was a very nice hike, and a pretty nice canyon… a much better bet if you are looking to escape the city-like atmosphere of Yosemite Valley.

After leaving the motel, we spent a few days in some of the other Sequoia groves, including the Grant Grove and Giant Grove, which included General Sherman, the worlds most voluminous tree.

We hit these areas during a heat wave.  Daytime temperatures we in the high 90’s or above… Even the being in the shade at nearly 8000 ft wasn’t terribly comfortable.  Teresa and I decided it was time to head North to Napa.

Napa is one of the world’s premiere wine growing regions, and there are some outstanding vintners in the valley.  I shot off an e-mail to my cousin-in-law, Ricardo from Long Beach (outside Los Angeles).  He sent me back about 2 pages of suggestions!  Well, we wouldn’t have time to check out all the wineries he recommended, but we did check out a number of them.  Our favorite was Anderson Conn Valley.  We had a very personalized tour of their vineyards and wine caves, and enjoyed their outstanding wine.

We also stopped at Beringer (had to do a big one), Frank Family Vineyards, and Chateu Montelena, which had some of the most beautiful winery grounds I’d ever seen, including a little private lake called Jade Lake.  We also stopped for lunch at Taylors Refresher in St. Helena before heading out of the valley.

We drove through the bucolic country side of Northern California.  Our last California stop was Mt. Shasta, an incredibly beautiful volcanic mountain in Northern California that juts up out of nowhere to 14,162 ft.

We made use of the public library in the cute town of Mt. Shasta to update our website.  The folks in Mt. Shasta were incredibly nice.  Hmmm… No sign of the aforementioned fruits, nuts, and flakes.  Well, except for the place that had an incredible cool “aura” camera.

Tumbleweed say:  “California otay.”  See ya in Oregon!

After resting up for a month at Villa Koransky, Teresa and I were ready to hit the road July 1st for our Alaska adventure.  I do have to admit, it felt strange leaving Colorado, where we had just placed a contract on land.  In addition, we were getting a little bit travel weary.  (In my experience, and in talking with others, I’ve noticed travel-weariness can easily set in after 3-4 months of continuous travel).  Teresa and I had a long discussion about whether or not we wanted to continue to travel, or stop in Colorado and start building, hitting the road again in a few years.  This may sound strange, but our dog was the number one reason we decided to continue to travel.  We try to be responsible dog owners, and it just wouldn’t be fair to Simon to be moved to Colorado for a year or two while we build, only to be left with someone else for a few months while we travel up to Alaska.  So with some trepidation, we headed off towards California… for Simon’s sake.  He is, after all, our only son!

We did our usual route… the gorgeous drive through Glenwood Canyon on I-70.

We stopped in Grand Junction at Colorado National Monument.  While just a few minutes off I-70, I had never stopped there before.  The canyons and views were nice, as were the “monuments,” which are basically rocks spires which have resisted erosion over the years.  But it was a fairly small park and didn’t really capture our imagination… especially after seeing so much similar scenery just a month ago.  We were also back in the desert, and getting pretty tired of the heat… remember, now it is July!

But… even with the brutal heat, we weren’t done with the desert yet!  We still had to travel through much of the desert Southwest to get to California, and there were a few things we missed on our earlier jaunt (February – June).  We just had to stop at my favorite desert park, Capitol Reef National Park (after a quick bathroom stop at the Hollow Mountain Gas and Grocery in Hanksville).  The “you-pick” orchards in Fruita historic district (old Mormon settlement) were producing apricots, and we picked 3 pounds of apricots while camped in their campground.

We also did a great hike up Grand Wash, where the valley gets choked down to an area no wider than 10 ft.  Not quite a slot, but impressive nonetheless.

In addition to the stunning scenery of the waterpocket fold, along the Burr Trail in the South side of the park, there is another very remote area known as Cathedral Valley that we wanted to check out.  The roads were miserable, but worth it!  Absolutely stunning…

After checking out an old ranching cabin, we raced out of Cathedral Valley ahead of a thunderstorm.  The clay earth had the potential to turn to mud, and while Big Red can handle most horrific roads, without a limited-slip differential, Big Red is skeered of mud and ice.  🙂  So we drove quite quickly out of the valley, snapping a few shots along the way.  We did manage to visit all the major sites, including a gypsum sinkhole, glass mountain (gypsum mound), and the Temple of the Sun and the Temple of the Moon rocks.

After hitting blessed pavement, we continued West into the Great Basin Desert.  We had already hit all other major American desert ecosystems, including the Chihuahan (indicator plant: lechugilla), Mojave (Joshua tree), and Sonoran (saguaro).  But we hadn’t really checked out the Great Basin yet.  And we were headed to Great Basin National Park.  I had no idea what to expect in Great Basin…  What we found was far beyond our expectations.

First, it is in the middle of nowhere.  Didn’t we mention that the coolest places sometimes are in the middle of nowhere?  It takes the hardy souls who live there at least 2 hours to get to a town with any decent shopping, including a reasonable grocery store.  (According to rangers, Ely, NV is farther from any major city, but at least Ely has a grocery store!)  We may have been abducted by aliens, but if so, they did a pretty good job of erasing our memory.  And check out the desolate roads that brought us to the National Park!

Outside of Baker, there was some pretty funky art along the road into Great Basin National Park…

Second, Great Basin National Park has a highly decorated cavern.  Third, it has a gorgeous alpine high country.  Fourth, the USA’s most southernmost glacier sits in that alpine high country.  And Fifth, it was once home to the oldest tree in the world.  And this is desert??

Well, not exactly.  The Great Basin National Park is perhaps representative of one of the North-South ranges of high mountains that permeate the great basin desert, but the thing that makes the Great Basin Desert a basin (or multiple basins as the case may be), is the fact that no water leaves the great basin.  We didn’t know it, but we were in the “hydrologic” great basin in Death Valley.  The watersheds empty out into desert areas where the water either evaporates, or forms temporary lakes / playas.

We first enjoyed the caverns, which, for a commercial cavern, was quite small and narrow.  It was, however, highly decorated with beautiful cavern formations.

We also did some hiking into the alpine country up to within a few hundred feet of the country’s most southernmost glacier.

And we also hiked through an ancient Great Basin Bristlecone Pine forest.  Grand Canyon makes you feel insignificant in the three measurable dimensions of length, width, and height that we are all familiar with, but the Great Basin Bristlecone Pines make you feel insignificant in the 4th dimension: time.  As far as any human knows, these trees are the oldest living things on the planet.  The oldest tree, Prometheus, was cut down inside Great Basin National Park in 1964 by someone studying the tree.  (This event, not surprisingly, ended up promoting support for the bristlecones’ protection!)  The tree was likely over 4,862 years old.  Many of these trees were older than Christianity (or the birth of Christ)… some are even older than the great pyramids.  In short, these are miraculous trees.

As we hiked out of the bristlecones, the clouds started to build again.  During our desert journey, we have been rained on a few times.  It was nice to get rained on while in the desert.  The fragrance of the desert after a rain is remarkably pungent.  Although no pavement is in sight, it smells like very dry pavement after a short cloudburst of rain, but far more natural and enjoyable.  It is as if the desert is saying “thank you” to the Great Spirit for the moisture and releasing a odiferous offering.  In sagebrush country, rains bring out the intense intoxicating smell of sage.  It started to rain, and the landscape released its magnificent odor as we hiked past some beautiful alpine lakes, including Teresa Lake.  (They spelled it right!)

The oldest known living tree sits in an unpublicized location in our next stop, the Methusela Grove of Great Basin Bristlecones in the White Mountains of California (part of the Inyo National Forest).  We learned a great deal about the Bristlecone while reading through the interpretive brochure on our early morning hike.  Some people like to say “if it doesn’t kill you, it makes you stronger.”  Well, the oldest trees grow in the most inhospitable of climates, right at tree line, which basically destroys any competitive species or pests.  The majority of the tree can completely die off, with only a narrow strip of living bark supporting the growing portion of the tree.  They produce very narrow growth rings which are hard to see with the naked eye.  When they die, they do not decompose.  Instead, they take thousands of years to “erode.”  Because dead trees can lie on the ground for centuries, it is possible to get a nearly continuous tree-ring record of the growing conditions, and sometimes, climate changes that affected the world (IE large volcanic eruption) back nearly 10,000 years.

The Great Basin Bristlecone Pines have rewritten history by allowing scientists and archeologists to “calibrate” the whole carbon dating process.  This is because each bristlecone pine growth ring provides an accurate sample of wood produced during a specific year.  With the new carbon dating process, they have quite literally changed the prehistoric timeline.  For example, it was originally thought that our civilization originated in Mesopotamia and spread from there.  Thanks to the bristlecones, which have that reliable carbon record and growth rings to separate the years, “calibrated” carbon dating turned that theory on its head.  It is now thought that civilization progressed in many areas at the same time.  These trees really have rewritten history.  Who knows what else we might discover about the bristlecones as time progresses?  They truly are miraculous trees and deserve protection.

Teresa and I have discovered that the Rocky Mountain Bristlecone Pine species, which doesn’t grow nearly as old, lives in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and may be near our new home.  This requires more research!  But for now, we move further into California.

PS Look out for this police officer in Torrey, UT…