Adventure #24 - Day Two -- From Angels Camp, CA to Las Vegas, NV

DAY TWO - From Angels Camp, CA to Las Vegas, NV

Description: Wherein Marty and Heather leave Angels Camp and head for the City of Sin!  (11/7/14)

(Marty's Report):

Morning in Angels Camp, bright n' early since we knew we'd have a long drive in front of us, but both of us looking forward to it.  Me especially, probably, because I hadn't been down the 395 route, down the East side rain shadow of the Sierras for maybe 20 years, although the sense of it has remained fresh and beloved.  That was when I did my motorcycle trip cross-country, in 1995 or 1996. I had returned from India in January of 1995, and being footloose, decided to buy a motorcycle (which turned out to be a Honda 750, a big beast of a bike), and ride across country to volunteer at an economics conference (URPE) that I'd attended a couple years before, which had blown apart my Sacramento life and sent me traveling.  I probably went up through Tahoe, and then down 395, but other than that, it was the same trip we took down to Vegas.

We drove through the Gold Country, after tanking up at Starbucks with chocolate croissant and tea, through the little towns that we've been through several times.  Most were delightful hill towns, but Tuttletown, what the hell happened there?  As soon as we drove around a curve and into the town, something energetic shifted, which we both felt.  Some kind of psychic stink that cleared as soon as we left, which, given the size of the town, was about an eye blink.  My friend Kasha, who knows a scary amount about such things, says that certain lands themselves have psychic entities attached to them.  Anyone else and I'd kind of roll my eyes, but Kasha is not to be trifled with on this stuff, so I give it credence.  Plus, Heather and I both pick up these kind of "stinks" immediately and confirm them with each other, so something is going on, and poor Tuttletown seems to have whatever its version of that something is.

But otherwise, it was a delightful drive through beautiful land that I love deeply.  I'm definitely a California native son.  There's not much of this State that I don't love.  Some more than others--the foothills, covered with oaks, is definitely my Beloved among the ecosystems--but all parts are outpicturings of my soul, or perhaps the other way around:  my soul is the inpicturing of the State.

We'd been checking the Yosemite road conditions, which were tentatively slating Tioga Road (which cuts through the Park, north of Yosemite Valley, through to the other side of the mountains) to open at noon.  It had been snowed in, even though last year it didn't close till much later in the season.  But we couldn't chance it, so chose to cut across the Sierras via Hwy 108, the next road north from the Tioga Road.  We had been up it once before, when we stayed at a B&B in Twaine Hart, and went up to a lake further up the road.  But we continued beyond that, through exquisite high Sierra landscape, including a rather demure Yosemite Valley like area, beautiful but not all full of itself like that preening glacier mauled bit of real estate.  (Just riffing--I actually love Yosemite very deeply, and have a long history with it.)

The Sierras are very special to me as mountains.  Heather described them as all burbling away, energetically, rather than the sleepy, old man quality of the Appalachians that she grew up with.  They are, geologically, younger than those hoary old crags, and maybe it's the growing up around and in and on them that makes me so much more resonant with them than any other mountain range I've been in.  Something in me registers home when I'm among their crevices and peaks.  The dry air, the arid soil, the minimalist pine forests, and the granite.  There's a spaciousness I need to thrive, and I find it in the Sierras.

As we drove along, we burbled away about different topics.  One was my question:  "Why are there not organisms exploiting every source of energy and nutrient in the environment?"  There are the trees and bushes, some grasses, but why are there not creatures that eat rocks, or consume soil directly?  We were both mostly stymied.  Heather came up with the principle of the "nutrient limitation," where everything can be present for plant growth, but if only one nutrient is missing, no plant.  I thought that perhaps it was something about size, that there can be billions of microorganisms, but there was a balance between density of energy in a particular resource (say, rock) and the size of the organism that can survive on that resource.  Or something.  I don't really have an answer.

We also talked about Heather's life plans, and her triumvirate of psychology, ecology, and computers.  She thought of a ecological app, like the game Civilization but including ecological principles of sustainability.  Which would be totally awesome, though quite a project, so she committed to working on a standing idea, "Bath Salt Parrot," a Flappy Bird clone based on the bath salts drug.  (The shit we do to ourselves, and the satire it engenders.)  I suggested you get points when you swoop your insane parrot down to chew off a homeless person's face.  Like that.  She'll contact our new favorite outsourcing site, Fiverr, to find an artist to do the game objects.

That's what we talked about as we drove down the magnificent East side of the Sierras, the rain shadow that shows up suddenly as an almost immediate change in plant composition and density, coming down out of the main Sierras.  Open and grassy, sandy and desert-like further down the slope.  We stopped in Bridgeport for a burger (veggie for me) and wondered how much methamphetamine was being produced locally.  (I just checked a map, and apparently those counties that 395 go through are fairly meth free, as measured by the number of labs seized.  Largest in the state was San Bernadino county, i.e., the county where Joshua Tree is located.  See later entries.  But when you're there, it kinda makes sense.  It looks a lot like where Trevor, the lovable-scary meth kingpin makes his home in Grand Theft Auto V.)

Then we hit Bishop, which is lodged in my memory as the place where I mailed my climbing shoes years ago, to get the soles resoled.  A cute-ish desert-ish town, that advertised a museum for Galen Rowell, who I know as a climbing and Yosemite photographer.  We went to his Mountain Light gallery, and found out that he had died with his wife in a small plan crash in 2002.  I think my parents had a copy of his Mountain Light book, which is why the excitement about seeing his work seemed so old and hard to pin down with specific memories.  I think it's more about what he represented, holding a kind of rugged and adventurous position in my psyche;  his photos themselves were beautiful, but pre-digital and pre-HD, so the resolution was relatively poor and pre-modern, and the subjects were a little, um, emotionally thin and also kinda, um, emotionally pre-post-modern.  Well, that's a whole long subject in itself, so I'm going to keep going.

We headed down to Owens Valley, and before that, stopped at Manzanar National Historic Site, nee, Manzanar Internment Camp.  It was where the Japanese (citizens and non-citizens) on the West Coast states were "relocated," in addition to 9 others through California and the Pacific Northwest, in 1942.  There were 120,000 people taken from their homes, and about 10,000 went to Manzanar.  I remember being so affected by stopping there on my motorcycle trip, when it was only an empty piece of desert and a entry guard station (with a pagoda-like roof, natch).  Now they have built a huge information center, and several reconstructions of the barracks.  We drove the road around the site, past the markers for the dozens of barracks, the gardens, the graveyard with it's iconic marker and four remaining graves.  It's an open, beautiful and clean area, looking up onto the backside of the Sierras, apparently very windy, but still when were there.  That's where people who were never (none of them) convicted of any crime were interned for years.  A sad place, but remarkable that we are willing (with much prodding) to save the proof of our grand fuck ups, and apologize and make amends in public (Reagan signed a reparation bill for living internees of $20,000 was signed in 1988.)  I went into the info center while Heather waited in the car, thereby not crying, and watched a twenty minute film on the history of the place, and then poked around the exhibits till it got too much, and we took off.

The sun was down past the mountains, but there was still a lot of evening light bouncing around as we drove off towards Death Valley, above what seemed like a near-empty Owens Lake.  (It still amazes me how LA controls water resources so far from, uh, LA.)  The desert has a strange quality here, of stretching out forever, while providing crisp views of the land, such that it feels like you're driving in slow motion through an ocher-washed landscape.

Last time I was here, I think the only time I've been here, I seem to remember it being bigger and flatter.  Perhaps because I crossed it in daylight last time, as the desert tends to shrink and become spaceless in the dark.  We stopped in Panamint Springs for dinner, sitting for a while by the guy who told his buddies about the surprisingly intelligent women in Vegas.  They left after a blessedly short time and we finished our diner food.  Before leaving, we got to hear the beleaguered waitress try to give directions to the probably-French guys, to get them on the scenic route.  "The other one will get you there, but it's just a long highway."  Somehow that was hard to understand.  She held her frustration in a very professional way.

We drove through the rest of the way to Nevada, playing a couple rounds of 20 questions, a surprisingly hard game.  I guessed "ladder," and she, with a hint, guessed "car tire."

We came out in Pahrump, a town totally unknown to either of us, but fairly large, and just over a hill from Las Vegas.  We stopped for gas on the outskirts of Pahrump, and I got directions from the clerk that the bathroom was out by the saloon.  I walked over, and not finding it, did not brave going into the saloon itself.  It looked a little wide-brimmed to me.

So we got into Vegas around 10pm or so, and found the AirBnB that Heather had arranged for us and four other Systema folk (Dante nee Anthony, Jenny and Nathan, and Alex).  They helped us pack in our carload of stuff, and we got the master bedroom, Jenny and Nathan (the new couple) in the second bedroom, and Dante and Alex had the couch and the blow up bed.  (We had brought an inflatable mattress, but I destroyed the motor when I left it untended.)  The apartment/condo, in a standard apartment complex, was friendly, clean, and fairly sterile, although the owners' sports affiliations were apparent.  It was a little odd at first, but then became pretty normal, a more homey hotel room, with a kitchen.  And much cheaper.  We paid about $100 each for the whole weekend of three days.

We hung out with the crew and watched some Americas Ninja Warriors, an absurd bit of cultural filler in which buffed and simple-minded men run along a padded obstacle course and don't kill anyone with swords.  Then we hit the sack.

(Heather's Report):

Tioga Pass was not open in the morning.  We called the numbers for road status and looked online.  They stated 120 might open around 12pm but that was way too late for us so we decided on heading through Stanislaus Forest, northwest of Yosemite and then down 395 on the other side.  Having done the American thing of filling up both our car with gas and our selves with caffeine at a Starbucks, natch, we headed out of Angels Camp to start our long trip towards Las Vegas, Nevada.  

On our way, chattering all along, we made several stops, of course.  And we went through quite a few different ecosystems all the way up and over and down the mountains.  On our way out, we crossed over a reservoir.  And were both stunned.  You see those photos online about the drought and those are pretty shocking.  But you can see the old water lines and yes, it's completely shocking.  We need some major rain!!!  But we braved on through the area, talking about drought and the end of the world.  Well, not so much the end, but some major changes if we are missing real resources.

Through the Gold Country and then up into the hills.  We stopped to examine the “city” sign of Dardanelle, population…. well, on the sign it was marked out and a sloppy “1” written over it.  I guess Dardanelle is pretty lonely.  And it didn't even seem open when we drive by.  Some lonely cabin like area with closed gas.  And we both had to pee so we went looking for places to pee off to the side at some closed down park.  There was snow and ice and all that and it was crisp but not really cold.  And then on our way again, heading up and up and more up.  Up into the mountains.  These weren't Yosemite Pass mountains but still holy shit.

And did I say mountains?!  We kept going up and up, 9000 feet!  There was a little bit of snow, but nothing that I imagine would shut down the pass through Yosemite.  The Sierra are beautiful.  But young and sort of chattery, unlike the slow, old, deep quietness of the Appalachian mountains, what I call “sleepy old man quality”.  But that’s usual considering the Appalachians are the oldest chain in the world.  And the Sierras are newer.  The air was crisp, cool and thin.  John (our car) was not as peppy as he usually is.  Marty said this had something to do with the thin air and fuel mixing.  Well, you learn something new every day.  He got us up and over though, sometimes slowly, but he went.  And, it was crazy gorgeous up there.

We began our descent to the flats, down into the rain shadow (the dry, desert-y type areas on the other side of mountains that get little rain) and stopped in a “out in the middle of nowhere” town called Bridgeport and ate at a little local burger place.  They had a strange map of local areas and, well, I guess what those areas are known for.  Bridgeport has a marina.  In the middle of the desert.  Apparently there is a lake large enough to boat on.  Okay.  At first we thought there was a spot on the map that had witches but upon closer inspection, the sign says above the witches “Hogwarts, 2000 miles” on a road heading off the map.  Okay.

Marty and I are always talking.  We like to.

Then we hit the road again before another stop at Mono Lake.  I’d learned about Mono Lake in ecology class so I was looking forwards to seeing it, with its bird life and weird mineral pinnacles.  Due to the salty nature of the lake, there is an abundance of brine shrimp which make it a perfect place for birds to stop and rest or breed.  Apparently about 80% of the country’s seagull population is born at Mono Lake.  To learn more about Mono Lake, click here!