Thursday, August 13, 2015

Leaving Lone Pine in the dust


August 13, 2015

 

My paternal human grooms himself every morning by putting some stuff on his face with his paws and then wiping it off.  While he does this, I cut across him to drink some water.  It is his water, so he thinks, but I drink it.  And I take my sweet time in doing it.

 

For my morning walk, I 'froggered' myself across hwy  395, crossing over cattle grates, and headed up the road that would take me to Horseshoe Meadows.  It is about a 45 mile ride up the mountain, and I do mean UP the mountain.    There are a series of switchbacks far more vicious than those leading up to the Whitney Portal, and I am sure there are not a whole lot of guardrails.  The climb takes you to 10,000 feet! 

 

The road starts with desert scrub, then riparian signs of a creek emerge.  Off with the IPOD so I can hear the sounds of the creek and the birds.  The air is fragrant with desert sage.  There are reeds and canyon sunflowers and lots of monarch butterflies.  On, I climb listening to my feet hitting the pavement.  When my time was up, I turned around and it was then I realized how far I had walked.  I had winded through hills and was quite high.  I decided to jog back.  It was soooo downhill.

 

Yesterday, I had talked about the backpacks the Whitney hikers were carrying...  We kind of laughed at the size of some of their gear, but my very own spouse insists that our backpacks contain all materials necessary to combat a zombie apocalypse.   We have enough water to hydrate a herd of cattle, and all sorts of emergency supplies.  All this would be good if you are going on a real hike, but for the rinky dink hike we did yesterday, it was comical.  I shall now refer to them as ZABs (zombie apocalypse backpacks).

 

We readied Hannah for departure.  Then before hooking her up, we went to one of my favorite places ever for breakfast, the Alabama Hills Cafe.  It is a tiny place on a side street.  They are only open for breakfast and lunch, and they have a bakery with killer baked goods.  Breakfast comes with the best freshly made sourdough bread.  MMMMM!  After eating breakfast there, there would be no need for lunch.

 

Then we headed north.  We were not sure where we would be staying.  I had mentioned a couple of places to Spouse and he was disinterested... that is until we passed the turnoff to them.  Really????  It was very striking that there was absolutely NO snow on any of the mountains.  Having been in the area during many a summer, there was always some snow in some crevice even in the hottest summers.  But not a drop was visible.  It looked strangely desert like passing Mammoth Mountain.

 

We stopped through our old mobile home park in Bridgeport.  One of the residents recognized Spouse.  We sold that park 19 years ago!  It is for sale right now too.  We stopped along the Walker River to try and catch a fish.   Spouse is missing a lot of stuff from his tackle box.  Spouse, did you think to check this out before we left?  No...  Argh...  We only spent about 20 minutes and got skunked.  As we headed north, the river got smaller.  We wanted to fish more, but it just is too low.

 

We settled for the night in Walker (aka Coleville).  Nice KOA with a beautiful rock formation behind it..

 

Still cannot do pictures.  Did all the security steps and all and I am stuck.  Exploring other options tho...  I hate this tech crap!

 

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