O California!

By Patty Wilber

It is one long drive from here to Eastern California (1900 miles round trip),

in the Jeep, with the windows down.

In 5 days.  

“No pain, no fun”, being the family motto.

We did make good use of the time and read a book about an African Explorer in the 1850’s–Paul Du Chaillu–aloud as we drove.

So now I am deaf from the wind and hoarse from shouting over it!

Also, despite the AC, and creating our own breeze by driving, (cuz the windows were down)  113F in Needles, is still sweat-to-your-seat kind of hot.  Hey that’s better College Station TX (1980’s), where I just swam places in my truck-seat sweat as I had no AC.

I grew up on the other side of the Sierras…well, that is true, but misleading.  I grew up on the other side of the state–in the San Francisco Bay Area, and never spent much time on the east side, so this was new for me!

On this trip, we drove Sunday pm and Monday am (gas is reasonably priced at the Alien Brothel in No Where Ville Nevada just beside Area 51), and we hit a local history museum in Laws, California on Monday afternoon.

They had horse stuff!

Monday night we camped at Big Pine Campground at about 9000 ft. It was marvelously cool and I cannot remember the last time I saw the sky so clotted with stars.  The Perseid Meteor Showers ran Aug 11-17 th but I hit the sleeping mat and that was that.

Kid 2 and Jeep owning spouse. View from the Big Pine campground!

Mr. Long Distance Swimmer and Mr. I Spent a Month in the Back Country of the Eastern Sierra this Summer were stoked for an 18 mile hike to a glacier.  (See the snow in the back ground–yep–the glacier is up there somewhere.)  Excuse me, but I seriously doubt I could make that hike (not to mention the 4000 feet of elevation gain followed by 4000 feet back down.) They agreed we could hike to three glacial lakes and just see…

Note the turquoise milky blue of the lake–that is glacial run off. Mark: “Look Mom!  The glacier is only 1/2 an inch away on this map!”

As we hiked up and up, of course we had to observe the trail conditon.  Much of the stone work looked like something the CCC might have done during the Depression, before the Wilderness designation which prohibits machinery.

Look at that retaining wall! That would take weeks!

And the size of the stones in the steps impressed me!

A pack string operates in this area, so I was hoping to do some packing stalking if they came by.

They did,  but only with saddled horses.

I am sure this guy is scoffing at us tourists with the camera. Little did he know I was critiquing his reinsmanship!

Our man in the saddle was  ponying a string of two and only when I looked at the pictures did I realize how they were tagged together.

That rope around this horse’s neck is the lead rope for the horse behind.  (You can see the shadow of horse 2’s head).

Hmm.  That is interesting.

I ponied a string of six, once.  I had no clue what I was doing, but figured it couldn’t be that hard (I was 18).

I saddled them all and then tied them head to right stirrup.

Two problems:

1. This makes your string sort of fan out to the right. Fortunately, I was riding down a dirt road. Unfortunately, I was alone, it was getting dark and there was an escaped rapist loose in the area (not kidding), but it’s ok.  I was 18. (They caught the guy and drove him by my pack string experiment, so I guess it was a closer call than I’d supposed.)

2. If you have a sluggard that pulls back, the stirrup leathers break. This tends to annoy the owner of the saddle.

I learned a better way would have been to tag to the tail.

Random picture off the Internet. I don’t know these animals personally.

In Back Country Horsemen, we tend to tag to the pack saddle. I might have to try the tail tag on my next multi-horse string…or convince my friends to try it in my stead.

When we reached the third glacial lake, it was clear to me that a loop to two non-glacial lakes and back to the campground was doable but the glacier was definitely not.

Not even with dark chocolate M&Ms!

Which melted anyway. Sadness.

That loop came to only 14 miles and only 3000 feet up and 3000 feet down. Turns out that riding a lot of horses is not completely worthless, fitness-wise. (But not that great, either. I was sore.)

One of the non-glacial run off lakes–the water was clear and as you can see the lake looks green.

Back at our campground (it was a long hike down it seemed) we split a bottle of wine, ate dinner and again fell asleep before we saw any shooting stars!

The next day we hit the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest (Pinus longaeva) up at 10,000 feet in the White Mountains (but on the other side of the valley from the Big Pine Campground which is in the Sierra Nevada). One of those bristlecones is the Oldest Living (non-clonal) Organism on Earth.

On the way, we saw this sign.

Tllde over the n or “ny” or… both? So now, shouldn’t this be pronounced “pin-yon-yon”. But that is kind of like stuttering.

We did a four and a half mile nature hike through the Bristlecones  (plenty long enough after the lake viewing trip–No pain no fun!)

The adverse growing conditions cause massive natural pruning on the trees, Often only a small portion will remain alive–for 5000 years.

There were 500 year old mountain mahogany there too. Amazing.

Then we camped at a natural hot springs in the valley!

AHHH!

And on Thursday we drove home.  Benton Hot Springs, CA to Tijeras, NM in just 14 hours. Or 16? It is all a blur.

On Saturday, we headed to the Pecos and hauled dirt by pack animal.  Ok Road base. Pure gravel or maybe crusherfine would have made more sense for the job we were doing: filling in a raised bog bypass.

Look! I caught a 55 lb bag of dirt! I mean, road base!
It is heavy, so though we hauled about 600 lbs of the stuff, the volume was not massive. I am getting this pannier ready to load.

No tail tagging, but we did see some Rocky Mountain bristlecone pines (Pinus aristata)!  I had always wondered what kind of tree they were!  They are not as old as the group in California, but there were distinctly bristlecones–now that we knew what to look  for.

The bristlecones are in the back of the picture (really!) Jim on Cometa, ponying Lacey

Whirlwind week, but loads (roads?) of fun!