Escape to Mammoth!
7 - 14 August, 2000
For years now we've vacationed in Mammoth. It's a beatiful and interesting place to be. We hike, picnic by lakes, visit geologically interesting spots, observe the wildlife, enjoy stars so close you can reach up and pick them (they're especially tasty with milk and honey over Grape Nuts), and visit historical spots. Once I got a bit carried away with the historical visits--we stopped for every single historical marker on US 395. Karen no longer permits me to stop for markers. So click a photo below to read a chapter of our journey this year.
- One final paragraph of advice: Do not burn yourself out. Be as I am—a reluctant
enthusiast, a part time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of
yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the
land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it is still there. So
get out there and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the
forests, encounter the grizz, climb the mountains. Run the rivers, breathe deep of that
yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness,
that lovely, mysterious and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head
and your head firmly attached to your body, the body active and alive, and I promise you
this much: I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those deskbound
people with their hearts in a safe deposit box and their eyes hypnotized by desk
calculators. I promise you this: you will outlive the bastards.
— Edward Abbey
Hiking pictures from our walks to
Rainbow Falls and McCloud lake.
Stargazing photos,
taken from atop Lookout Mountain, the premeire West Coast dark sky site. Is it really the
best? I suspect it may be. It's only a few miles of maintained dirt road off 395. It is
separated by mountains from cities of any significant size. It's located over 8,000 in
altitude in a dry climate, so the seeing is good, and, it's located in
the middle of a large caldera, so the mountains do not obstruct more than 5 degrees of sky
in any direction.
Directions to Lookout Mountain: The turn-off lies on US 395, about 5 miles north of the Mammoth Lakes exit and about 2 miles south of the rest area. At the intersection with the Mammoth Scenic Loop Road (which ventures west from 395), go east along the dirt road (3S06) and follow the signs to Lookout Mountain. Lookout Mountain is made of high-quality obsidian, so you may want to grab a sample!
After we got up at 2:30 AM to watch meteors, we didn't have the sense that
the Goddess gave a snail. Instead of returning to our beds at sunrise, we ventured north
to the ghost town of Bodie to take pictures while the light was good.