On The Road

Today dmbeaster takes us to a lovely spot in the eastern Sierrra Nevada, where snow patches on the granite peaks and sky-blue lakes are a welcome sight for those of us in the grip of mid-summer heat and humidity.

dmbeaster

Someone asked me to post pictures from Little Lakes Valley in the Sierra Nevada, otherwise known as Rock Creek. This is an approach on the east side located between Bishop and Mammoth Lakes, and the road leaves west from Hwy 395 at Toms Place, a small hamlet with a fun restaurant and bar.

I have been going here for years, including staying at the cabins and lodge at Rock Creek, and snowcatting into that lodge in winter to cross-country ski. I have also roamed cross-country all over this valley to visit all of the lakes, and enjoying secret places off trail. This is one of the places where I have also hired packers for dunnage trips (mules and a packer carry your gear into your camp).

The east side of the Sierra is noted for is extreme variation in altitude. Most of the escarpment rises up steeply from Owens Valley at 4,000 feet to a continuous 50 mile jagged ridge that is rarely lower than 12,000 feet, with peaks to 14,000 feet. The Owens Valley basically ends just north of Bishop, and the highway climbs a huge slope up to Mammoth over the debris of the massive Long Valley Caldera eruption (Bishop Tuff). Little Lakes Valley is located at the northern end point of Owens Valley at the top of this climb.

For most locations on the east side, getting into the high country involves a massive vertical gain, and the lower country tends to be hot, dusty and barren except for pretty riparian habitats extending into the near desert. But the road at Little Lakes Valley goes to 10,200 feet giving you immediate and easy access to the scenic high country of the Sierra.

It is special. The hiking is easy. You can walk in four to five miles and only gain 800 feet. You can tour the many scenic small lakes and lovely terrain, while never working hard. You can leave the valley to the west side over 12,000 foot Mono Pass, or as I have done, over cross-country passes to the west side (I hiked to Golden Lake and Pioneer Basin, which has a great view of the Mono Recesses).

I am also including a few pictures of another magical and easy place to visit from the east side — the Ritter Range just west of Devils Postpile.

This is Heart Lake, the third lake in the chain and one of the prettiest. It is a little over a mile to get here and a very modest gain. The stream that flows to the lake is very pretty, as are the reeds and grasses that grow on parts of the lake shore.

On The Road – dmbeaster – Little Lakes Valley, Sierra Nevada and other spotsPost + Comments (17)

Here are some of the wildflowers we saw after we left the Colorado River. Most of these were tiny – less than one-inch in diameter.

Lyman Lake State Park, AZApril 27, 2020

Rose Heath. This picture and the others at Lyman Lake were taken on the short hike to the petroglyph site in the park.

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NEOWISE needs no introduction, so I’ll just say that I never get tired of seeing these, and leave it at that!  ~WaterGirl

🐾BillinGlendaleCA

I made two more trips out to see NEOWISE before it leaves the warmth of the Sun and heads out to the deep freeze and just becomes a icy mass.

The original plan was to head out to Joshua Tree on a Saturday, but the forecast both predicted clouds and wind so I settled on a more local venue, Lockwood Valley near Frazier Park north of LA. I’ve shot up there a number of times and it’s about a dark as Joshua Tree (the LA Astronomical Society has their dark site up there).

I was also planning to shoot some star trails. I shot star trails there a few years ago, but that shot was plagued by not having a fully charged battery and not getting a good foreground in the frame. I set up the NX-500 with my new timer I got for Father’s Day and let it take 1 minute star trail shots for a hour and a half, while I used my NX1 for the comet.

About a hour past sunset the comet became visible to the naked eye and was pretty bright in the northwestern sky. I brought my sky tracker with me for this trip and decided to take the same approach that I’ve used for deep space photos, tracking for a longer exposure and also stacking for noise reduction. I shot an initial wide angle shot and then two tighter shots to get the detail in the comet’s tails.

By Thursday the weather conditions had improved at Joshua Tree, so I fired up the Prius and headed there, meeting with a fellow photographer there. By the time the comet became visible in the sky, it was somewhat dimmer that it had been at Lockwood Valley. This may have been due to the Moon being present as well as some light pollution from Yucca Valley.

I shot a photo of the comet and the Moon as well as photos of just the comet in an area known as the Hall of Horrors. I moved to a familiar location that we’ve seen here at “On The Road”, a view that looks out between two large rocks. I’ve shot the setting sun there before and they framed the comet pretty well. We then headed out to Jumbo Rocks where I made one last capture of the comet before it set.

Lockwood Valley, CAJuly 18, 2020

As twilight turns to night comet NEOWISE becomes visible in the northwestern sky.

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Along with the wildflowers, many cactuses were also blooming as we made our way across the Southwest. Here’s some of the ones we saw.

Picacho Peak State Park, AZApril 12, 2020

Out of thousands of saguaros, this was the only bloom we saw anywhere, and we only found it because we walked out one evening for a better view of the sunset.

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Today Auntie Anne takes us through another splendid Loire Valley château, the Château of Blois, a massive construction with multiple additions made over many centuries. It was the home of many French kings, queens, and other nobles, but is now a public museum so that the French, and others, can see how royalty lived in centuries past. No formal gardens in this château, but some amazing architecture!

Auntie Anne

The residence of several French kings, Blois is also the place where Joan of Arc went in 1429 to be blessed by the Archbishop of Reims before departing with her army to drive the English from Orléans.

The Château of Blois effectively controlled the town of Blois and comprises several buildings. Construction of these buildings began in the 13th century and ended in the 17th century. You can see three distinct architectural styles in the chateau’s facade from the interior courtyard.

BloisMay 20, 2017

This is the Gothic wing, built by Louis XII (1462-1515).

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I would like to have another OTR First Timers Week in August, only this time we’ll go with Baud’s suggestion and call it On the Road Virgins Week.

If you haven’t taken the plunge and submitted photos to On the Road yet, step right up!

Just be sure that you write out your descriptions in Word (or something) and paste them into the form – it’s only happened twice, but on the off chance that something goes wrong with the form, then you have only lost 5 minutes of your time doing the copy & paste.

When our National Park plans crashed and burned because of COVID closures, we looked for another way to spend the month of April. California, Utah, and New Mexico closed their state parks, but Arizona kept them open and kept the campgrounds open, too. We ended up visiting 7 of the 16 that had camping facilities. It wasn’t the trip we’d planned, but it worked out okay nonetheless. Other than Florida, we’d never spent so much time in a single state and we got to see a lot of the variety, from deserts, to the Colorado River, to mountains.

Arizona doesn’t like such a good destination now (mid-June).

Catalina State Park, AZMarch 26, 2020

View of the Catalina Mountains from our campsite.

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We’ve been to Homer, and now we’re in Denali.  Next week we head to Resurrection Bay, and then after that we’re back home in Flyover Country, though it looks like it won’t be springtime anymore.  In the meantime, I think Albatrossity is pulling our leg with the state bird.  You’d think that as a state bird, someone would have told her she has way overdone the eye makeup. Perhaps they have different sensibilities in Alaska?  ~WaterGirl

P.S.  I want to call your attention to the generous offer from Albatrossity in the blockquote at the end of his introduction.  We are some very lucky jackals!

Albatrossity

Another leg of our 2012 Alaskan solstice adventure was a brief visit to Denali National Park. From Homer we went back to Anchorage and took a train from there to the park. On the way this train passes through some smaller towns, including Wasilla, made famous by Sarah Palin. I can report that when the train stopped briefly at the Wasilla depot, I was not the only passenger to stand up, look around, and declare that I could not see Russia from there. Sad.

Train travel in Alaska is (or at least was in 2012) quite comfy and convenient, as well as educational. There were college-age guides who wandered through the cars and helped spot wildlife (we saw moose and several black bears, as well as a marmot or two). They talked about the scenery and identified the mountain ranges and mountain peaks. Curiously they all referred to Denali (the mountain) as Mt. McKinley, and Denali (the National Park) as Denali. Political correctness? Company policy? Who knows?

We had only one day in the park itself, but it was splendid. In this park you are not allowed to drive a personal vehicle through much of it; you are on a bus with a driver/guide and other folks. It is a hop-on/hop-off arrangement; there are many stops where you can get off and then take the next bus for the tour route you signed up for (designated by bus color). There is an annual lottery where you can win the opportunity to drive your personal vehicle on the normally off-limits routes, however. I have a graduate school buddy who was lucky enough to do that, and his pictures are stunning. These are mine, and don’t include the distant views of brown bears, moose, and wolves that attracted a lot of cell phone cameras to the bus windows. You will have to visit there yourself to see those shots!

Finally, I want to mention again that if any of you jackals would like one of my images as a wallpaper background for your computer monitor, I would be happy to provide one for you. Free of charge. Images that would be generally adequate for that in terms of resolution, etc, can be viewed at my portfolio site. If you see something that you would like to see everyday on your monitor, just let me know the name of the image and the needed size (width in pixels x height in pixels) and I can probably email that to you within a day or so. Contact information can be found on the site.

AlaskaJune 17, 2012

Here’s a shot of the mountain itself, Denali, taken from the train. We did not see the mountain from inside the park, which is pretty typical. According to the guides on the train, a view of the mountain from the train is something they get about once a week. So we felt fortunate, and even though this is a distant view, it does give you the impression that Denali is a massive peak.

On The Road – Albatrossity – DenaliPost + Comments (19)