The low sierras

I was not completely sure where I was when I woke up at the HotSprings state park. I knew I was amongst some great big trees somewhere just south of Lake Tahoe, but was I in the mountains? Was I still in the valley?

The tent was still cold and dark, but It seemed that I was going to get a nice sunrise. The trees were huge! The pine cones, though miniature compared to the 'widowmakers' of the ranges further west and south, were giants. One pile of them, near the edge of the meadow behind the picnic area that I was occupying, was frosted over with the surrounding debris. A tree near the car could have been more than four feet in diameter; its bark appeared a light purple during the peak of a very colourful sunrise. I had a pack of oatmeal- my first meal for the trip.

I still was not hungry, and the stuff was not too tasty, but I could feel that my body needed it.

The stove WAS warm!

I walked over to the Hot Springs- it was a swimming pool and it was closed for the day-

I drove the six miles into Markleeville and spotted a post office. The woman inside was very friendly! she tore apart one of the offices boxes to accommodate the fragile things I wanted to send home. There were two other buildings on the towns main strip, too! A restaurant and a general store.

I asked the post office people about a Library- the memory cards were getting very full... She pointed down the road which I had used to the Hot Springs and told me to go towards the big white house and it would be on the left at the fork in the road. That it was... and it was closed.

Monday, Wednesday and Friday 10-5 and it was Tuesday! I accepted the closed building- if Markleeville had a library, I was sure to find another soon!

The drive from this point was beautiful, not that Markleeville was not. High mountains to low plains- it was all something from paradise!
I passed the Walker Country Store where gas was still exceeded four dollars a gallon. The Walker General Store sold no gas and it was a long while of open highway and the bright foothills before I stopped for a needy pedestrian near bridgeport.

The middle-aged man, Matt, seemed like a gentle fellow. He told me that he'd been waiting where I found him for more than two hours. He'd just been released from the local jail for an alcohol-related offense and needed to get to mammoth lakes in only an hour. He accepted the ride and then offered me a sum of money that paid for more than 400miles of my trip!
We drove down hwy 395 and over some of the most beautiful country Ive ever found. Matt narrated my tour through the mountains and got to his van in time. I turned around to drive back towards Mono Lake.
Mono Lake, only eleven miles from the Nevada border and less than ten miles from the sierra's crest, has a ph of 10 and is about three times as salty as the Pacific Ocean. The lake sits at about 6382 ft and covers over 45100 acres. Salinity of the water is far too high for fish to survive, but healthy populations of Brine shrimp and alkali flies along with algaes are able to host great numbers of many different kinds of waterfowl and shorebirds. Th world's second largest breeding colony of California gulls (about 50,000 birds!) and 11% of the states Snowy plovers rely on Mono lake as well as over 80 species of migratory "waterbirds."
The Sierra Nevada has a dramatic "shadow" effect; an average of over 45 inches of precipitation falls at the Sierra crest, less than ten miles from the lake, and less than 5 inches at the east shore of Mono Lake.
The basin in which Mono lake sits is a tectonic one, based on faulting and downwarping of the earth's crust. The basin could be as old as three million years, but the twenty-four volcanic rhyolite domes, known as the Mono Craters, date back only 40,000 years (and as recently as 350 years). The domes make up North America's newest Volcanic chain. I fooled around in Lee Vining, a small town on the west side of the lake. The town is very small and I noticed surprisingly few tourist operations. the road to Yosemite is just south of the town- the gas station, the school and the four other buildings.
I spent only two or three hours walking and driving around the south side of the lake, but not because it wasn't very cool.
The Tufa towers that are seen concentrated in groups around the edge lake, deep below the surface and high above it all formed underwater. Before the water diversions that began in 1941, the lake was much higher than it is now, and many of the exposed tufa was still active. Tufa is a calcium carbonate formed mostly by precipitation from calcium-rich water. The deposits grow quickly and much of Mono's bottom is a hard calcium shell. Trees, dead things, pop cans- it is all coated and made into instant fossils at the bottom of such lakes. The water in mono is fed from a series of steady, mineral-saturated hot springs.. Tufa is also formed through biogenesis, the biological activity of organisms like the alkali fly. When an adult fly emerges from an underwater pupae case it leaves behind a minute deposit of calcium carbonate, a waste product from its earlier life stage beneath the salty, alkaline lake.
The shore of mono is a carpet of the shed casings of the fly's larvae. Its pretty nasty! The alkali flies flush when you get to close. A zillion flies can get pretty loud!
The sun set while I was on the road. The sky's soft pink glow grew pinker without growing brighter. I needed gas; Bishop was only a few miles away and the fact that I had seen a sign for the town made me hopeful for a gas station. The high shadowed crest of the sierras had sat to my right since I left Mono and a new, lit range was to my left.
And THERE WAS THE MOON!
The perfect, light orange globe rested just above the lowest peak on that smaller, pink range. Pinks of the sunset reflected off of the pointed, snowy peaks so that they were just a bit duller than the very FULL moon. It seemed to have an extra dimension or brilliance somehow that made it so much more attractive than these beautiful mountains. I rolled the window down and let the crisp blow in. The sunset became boring and a moonrise thought to be stationary was in fact an exciting, stirring event. It went higher and higher and overcame all of the rugged, dying mountains.
Perhaps it was the moon that sparked the sudden realizaion in me that there was nowhere I knew of that I would rather have been this fine evening; Maybe it was those pink mountains. A magical moment.

The moon was no longer exciting by the time I stopped at a Shell station in Bishop for gas. It was full and beautiful, but that extra somethin' had been left at about 18 degrees off the eastern horizon.
It is said that the moon appears larger when it is closer to the horizon because we have something to compare it to. And it is big.
Ive read that the intense colours that meet the eye when the moon is so close to the horizon are the effect of the white moonlight passing through a greater amount of dirty atmosphere than when the moon is directly above us. Cool!

What a wonderful day. I found nothing there, on the Eastern slope of the Sierras, that I did not find a great deal of enjoyment in. The few people are nice and the land is gorgeous; there is certainly a culture here that differs from the one that I am most familiar with.
The Sierra Nevada is truly more than anyone could expect to find here in the United States!