The night was indeed cold and the wind blew quite hard. Prevented me from sleeping part of the night. But we had a good thing coming up: C had promised me a big breakfast at the old restaurant at the entrance of Tioga Pass. We got up and packed. I was almost tempted to stay longer, because we had seen the day before that there was a nice (and probably not very traveled) hike down from Saddlebag Lake through some beautiful, wild country and remote valleys.
It was a beautiful day, and the sky was now clear and the stormy clouds gone. But, breakfast was the order of the day! The
Tioga Pass resort is a charming combined café/restaurant/lodge/store that's been around for almost a hundred years. There's a huge iron stove where you walk in, and I can only imagine how cozy it must be in wintertime, when Tuolomne Meadows are closed to traffic but the road up Tioga Pass is kept open for skiers. We had a heavenly pancake breakfast with eggs and sausages and hashed potatoes. And coffee!
After breakfast we continued our way down the pass with a brief stop at Ellery Lake. Tioga pass is the highest automobile pass in California, at 9945 feet. It's quite dramatic as you plunge down Lee Vining Canyon, on only a few miles you drop 3200 feet. On the way, some good views of the craters up from Mono Lake.
Just by Lee Vining there is Mono Lake. A bizarre place on earth. Mono Lake is at least 700 thousand years old and as such one of the oldest continuously existing lakes in America. It has no outlet and is thus naturally salty. Water has however been diverted from it for the last sixty years to provide the city of Los Angeles, which has cut the lake volume in half. Mono Lake is ringed by volcanoes--new and old. Two of the islands on the lake are volcanic domes, then there's the 700 years old Panum crater and the Mono craters that we saw all the way from Tioga Pass.
But the most intriguing thing about Mono Lake are the "tufa": towers made underwater of calcium carbonate from underground springs. These form limestone which builds up over time around the lake bottom spring openings. Now, as the lake has declined, hundreds of
tufa have been exposed all along the shoreline of the lake, some of which are up to 30 feet high. We stopped for a couple of hours to walk in this maze of strange formations. The only thing I could recall ever having seen that came close to this were the Dimmuborgir, but those are lava formations that happened under magma.
From Mono Lake we drove up to the Mammoth area. They say there's good fishing in Mammoth lakes, but in Mammoth mountains there's apparently excellent skiing. I wonder how the Mammoth resorts compare to Lake Arrowhead and Big Bear. It's certainly more out of the way, but that's probably also a plus, when you compare it with the ski resorts of the L.A. area. There's also good climbing around Mammoth and that's sort of what drew us there. That and the fact that on a relief map at the Mono Lake visitor center we had seen a very deep valley up from Mammoth that intrigued us a bit. On the spur of the moment we decided that would be our place for the night.
We entered this secret valley (whose name is unknown to me) by a steep narrow (one lane) road and drove to the bottom of it to the site of Reds Meadows. The valley is home to
The Devil's Postpile, a wall of basalt columns, and that is probably its biggest attraction. But we passed on that this time. I guess I've seen enough basalt columns in my life ... Our campground however was lovely. From the area's volcanic activity it had inherited some small bath houses with hot showers, provided for by the neighbouring hot springs. The bath houses were quite run down, but the showers were wellcome. After that nice bath we grilled ourselves some nice sausages with black beans. I felt quite like an explorer with that fare! It had been so chilly last night that we boiled hot water and put in containers under our bed covers before we went to sleep.
The night was indeed cold and the wind blew quite hard. Prevented me from sleeping part of the night. But we had a good thing coming up: C had promised me a big breakfast at the old restaurant at the entrance of Tioga Pass. We got up and packed. I was almost tempted to stay longer, because we had seen the day before that there was a nice (and probably not very traveled) hike down from Saddlebag Lake through some beautiful, wild country and remote valleys. 
It was a beautiful day, and the sky was now clear and the stormy clouds gone. But, breakfast was the order of the day! The Tioga Pass resort is a charming combined café/restaurant/lodge/store that's been around for almost a hundred years. There's a huge iron stove where you walk in, and I can only imagine how cozy it must be in wintertime, when Tuolomne Meadows are closed to traffic but the road up Tioga Pass is kept open for skiers. We had a heavenly pancake breakfast with eggs and sausages and hashed potatoes. And coffee! 
After breakfast we continued our way down the pass with a brief stop at Ellery Lake. Tioga pass is the highest automobile pass in California, at 9945 feet. It's quite dramatic as you plunge down Lee Vining Canyon, on only a few miles you drop 3200 feet. On the way, some good views of the craters up from Mono Lake.
Just by Lee Vining there is Mono Lake. A bizarre place on earth. Mono Lake is at least 700 thousand years old and as such one of the oldest continuously existing lakes in America. It has no outlet and is thus naturally salty. Water has however been diverted from it for the last sixty years to provide the city of Los Angeles, which has cut the lake volume in half. Mono Lake is ringed by volcanoes--new and old. Two of the islands on the lake are volcanic domes, then there's the 700 years old Panum crater and the Mono craters that we saw all the way from Tioga Pass. 
But the most intriguing thing about Mono Lake are the "tufa": towers made underwater of calcium carbonate from underground springs. These form limestone which builds up over time around the lake bottom spring openings. Now, as the lake has declined, hundreds of tufa have been exposed all along the shoreline of the lake, some of which are up to 30 feet high. We stopped for a couple of hours to walk in this maze of strange formations. The only thing I could recall ever having seen that came close to this were the Dimmuborgir, but those are lava formations that happened under magma. 
From Mono Lake we drove up to the Mammoth area. They say there's good fishing in Mammoth lakes, but in Mammoth mountains there's apparently excellent skiing. I wonder how the Mammoth resorts compare to Lake Arrowhead and Big Bear. It's certainly more out of the way, but that's probably also a plus, when you compare it with the ski resorts of the L.A. area. There's also good climbing around Mammoth and that's sort of what drew us there. That and the fact that on a relief map at the Mono Lake visitor center we had seen a very deep valley up from Mammoth that intrigued us a bit. On the spur of the moment we decided that would be our place for the night. 
We entered this secret valley (whose name is unknown to me) by a steep narrow (one lane) road and drove to the bottom of it to the site of Reds Meadows. The valley is home to The Devil's Postpile, a wall of basalt columns, and that is probably its biggest attraction. But we passed on that this time. I guess I've seen enough basalt columns in my life ... Our campground however was lovely. From the area's volcanic activity it had inherited some small bath houses with hot showers, provided for by the neighbouring hot springs. The bath houses were quite run down, but the showers were wellcome. After that nice bath we grilled ourselves some nice sausages with black beans. I felt quite like an explorer with that fare! It had been so chilly last night that we boiled hot water and put in containers under our bed covers before we went to sleep.
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