A Day in Yosemite (is not enough!) Part I

Monday, October 24, we put on our woolies, stopped and had breakfast at Nicely's in Lee Vining and got an early start for Highway 120 and Tioga Pass into Yosemite. We hadn't gotten very far onto 120 when we were stopped by a CalTrans worker who told us that the Pass was closed until the snow that had accumulated overnight could be cleared; he predicted a couple hours wait. Well, undeterred, we decided to pull down a side road pointing to Big Bend Campground, part of the Inyo National Forest, 12 miles from the Park entrance. Had a walkabout a mile or so down that road and took a few photos, setting a precedent of clicking at every turn!

East side of Highway 120 starting up. The road was wet and it appeared to be snowing in the peaks ahead. This is just before we came up on the CalTrans crew.

(Just an aside, this is photo #99 - that I edited - for our trip to this point! No wonder this trip is turning into chapters!)

Although it was chilly and the wind was up a bit, we got out and pointed our phone cameras every which way to take in the colorful beauty all around. We spent about an half hour down on this road clicking and foraging and gaping.

Looking west; possibly Tioga Peak.

Looking autumnal (hair blowing up).

The quaking aspen and cottonwood still had gorgeous yellow leaves clinging, making for a wonderful foreground to the dark evergreen and snow-capped peaks in the distance.

Looking southwest; possibly Mount Dana

The Ponderosa pines are loaded this year, evidence of a good water year.

Clare retrieving souvenirs.

Just one more photo from the Big Bend Campground road.

It was beginning to clear to the west.

We drove back up to the highway and saw that the CalTrans trucks were gone and the traffic cones set to the side of the road; we made the assumption that it was clear over the Pass and started up. I had a hard time keeping quiet and not making Clare stop the car for a photo opportunity every five minutes . . . here are a few shots taken from the window.

Again, possibly Tioga Peak (the snow-covered peak).

The wind drifting the snow on these high, rocky peaks. 

Sheer granite cliff right off the roadside.

We did stop at a turnout near Ellery Lake, a manmade lake just a little ways from the Yosemite Park Entrance in the Inyo National Forest. 

Ellery Lake looking east; possibly back side of Tioga Peak.

We had started our journey at 8:30 a.m. and reached the Tioga Pass Entrance (east side of Yosemite National Park) at about 9:30. With our Senior Pass (there are benefits to being blue-hairs!), we collected our map and Yosemite Guide, October 5, 2016 to December 6, 2016 edition and passed through to the greatness that makes this this most-visited park in the United States.

The roadway as it looked just west of the entrance.

It took about an hour and a half to go over the Pass, with just a couple stops for photos, before reaching the junction of Tioga Road with Big Oak Flat Road which would take us into Yosemite Valley. One stop we made was in Tuolumne Meadows, a beautiful open valley where the Tuolumne River and its tributaries meander through; it is ringed all 'round by amazing peaks such as Lembert Dome, Mammoth Peak, Unicorn Peak, Cathedral Peak, Fairview and Medicroft Domes, and Pothole Dome. It is difficult to know which peaks/domes we saw as we turned 360 degrees; it was all spectacular.

Possibly Lembert Dome.

The Meadows.

Rango getting a drink from one of the tributaries.

A fabulous place to contemplate.

Possibly Ragged Peak way in the background.

The amazing immensity of it all.

We would stop at Tenaya Lake on the way back. We stopped at Olmstead Point (named after landscape architects Frederick Law Olmstead and Frederick Law Olmstead, Jr. - a very interesting story) and I was able to capture a couple photos of the north side of Half Dome and Cloud's Rest. The wind made it a struggle to hold the phone still and so we decided that, if on the way back it was less windy, we'd stop there again.

Zoomed in to show Half Dome.

Half Dome in the center and Cloud's Rest to the left.

The trailhead at Olmstead Point is at 8,300 feet elevation, down from the 9,945 foot elevation at the Tioga Pass Entrance. All along the rest of the Tioga Road were roadside falls, towering pines, granite cliffs, and glimpses of Snow Creek, Yosemite Creek, Siesta Lake, and the South Fork of the Tuolumne River. Once we got to the junction of Big Oak Flat Road into Yosemite Valley, the temperature had increased to a pleasant 50-ish degrees, the skies were clearing to a bright sapphire blue, and the winds had calmed. The elevation at the junction, Crane Flat, is 6,200 feet, which explains why more moderate conditions were present. Down at this elevation, the quaking aspen and dogwood were in full autumn color and now we began seeing groves of the magnificent Sequoia redwood trees too. 

We traversed Yosemite Valley for about two hours stopping many times up to the visitor center and back. This part of our day, I think, deserves yet another post in order to do it justice! 

Stay tuned . . . 

Continuing . . . Journey to Lee Vining and Yosemite National Park

November already! I've decided to join in on another Instagram photo challenge, not that I need an excuse to take photos but it does provide a bit more direction. India Ross of @ofearthandstars has posted this list for #navigatingthroughnovember and today's prompt is "crisp." To me that is a lot of different things such as crispy, crunchy leaves underfoot, crisp, brisk sweater sort of feel outside, but, because I made this last night, Apple Crisp made with fresh, snappy apples (albeit from the market, not picked fresh from a tree), brown sugar and oats. Heavenly with a dab of whipped cream. See my Instagram feed for this deliciousness.

Yesterday, both of us went to the County Courthouse and cast our early votes for the Presidential election . . . so want this to be over with so we can move on! Blah, blah, blah!

Without further adieu I will get back to our road trip October 18 through 25 to Northern California. Day Six, October 23 saw us leaving Dayton, Nevada and driving Highway 50 to Carson City then onto Highway 395 along the southeast side of the Sierras and up into them at Topaz Lake. We stopped at Wa She Shu Casino & Travel Center just outside Gardnerville to fuel up. It was lucky for us that this place is brand new as of May 2016; built on reservation land by the Washoe Tribe in cooperation with the Poarch Creek Indians of Alabama, the name means "The People's Place." Lucky for us because we were hard pressed to find a fuel station that would accommodate our long rig and also have propane as we had used over a half tank and didn't want to not have adequate to run the furnace and fridge for the rest of our trip. Gardnerville and Minden are pretty towns and the surrounding country is rich farm and ranch land.

Rango waiting patiently to get on the road from Dayton.

The only photo I took in Dayton indicating a bit of its history.

Here are a couple photos taken along the highway outside Gardnerville, through Indian Hills and on to Topaz Lake and the California border.

The Sierras towering above the pretty farmland outside Gardnerville.

Approaching the pass to Topaz Lake.

Topaz Lake, a reservoir on the Nevada-California border. It was calm and reflective when we drove through at about 1:00 pm (PDT). Right around this bend was the Inspection Station on the border.

I caught the stateline sign on the fly again! There are very few places to pull over and get a proper photo but that's okay as we've seen a border sign before!

You can see that the shoulder is close; I was leaning way out of the window!

Once in California we were to stay in Mono County until leaving for home on the 25th when we would cross again into Nevada and the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest.

Highway 395 took us through Coleville and Walker and over the Devil's Gate Summit (elevation 7,519 feet) into Bridgeport. Back in the late 1950's our family vacationed in Bridgeport at a little resort that had cabins for rent - I confirmed this memory with Dad and he recalled it too - the owners had a pet deer that we remembered too. At any rate, I tried to spot the place but things are changed quite a bit, as well as I was younger, shorter, and much less observant of my surroundings as a child. Just outside Bridgeport is the ghost town of Bodie which I also remember visiting back in the day too. We thought that we might be able to go there on our way back home but by the time we set out Tuesday morning, the winds were very strong over the Conway Summit on Highway 395 so we took an alternate route easterly to Hawthorne, Nevada. 

Twenty-one miles from Bridgeport lay our destination of Lee Vining where we'd set up residence for two nights at the Mono Vista RV Park. Right before the town, though, spread the brilliant blue saline soda Mono Lake and I snapped a few photos as we drove. This one really captures the vastness of the country I thought.

Such an amazing sight from the higher elevation of the highway.

I wish that we had taken some time to go into the Mono Lake Tufa State Natural Preserve to get a better view of the natural limestone spires (tufa), wetlands and bird habitats. It was interesting to see, though, even at a distance, the spires and knobs formed by the interaction of freshwater springs and alkaline lake water (because there is no outlet, the lake is very alkali). We were able to get views of the lake on its northeast side when we drove home Tuesday via Cal SR167.

Once we got to the RV park in Lee Vining, we set up house, took Rango for a walk, and settled in for the evening, planning our jaunt the next day, Monday, into Yosemite.

Shoes off and ready for a nap.

The pretty cottonwood leaves and our RVing neighbors through the door.

 I'm thinking that I will begin a new post tomorrow documenting our trip Monday over Tioga Pass and into Yosemite National Park. It will be photo-heavy as between the two of us we couldn't stop snapping - forewarned!

Bye for today. Happy November 2016!

A Day in Virginia City

We arrived home last night at just a bit after 10:00 p.m. We drove (I should say, Clare drove, I rode shotgun!) all the way from Lee Vining, California, where we had spent Sunday and Monday nights at the Mono Vista RV Park. Having driven from Dayton, Nevada, on Sunday down U.S. 395 and experienced some rather harrowing curves AND high winds, Clare decided that we'd take a less stressful (but not as scenic) route home through Hawthorne, Nevada, over to Fallon and then onto I-80 east. It turned out that it was not only less stressful but shorter by about 1/2 hour which, when one is traveling across Nevada, shorter is better!

But, this post is about our day in Virginia City, Nevada, the "legendary Nevada mining town, at the heart of the Comstock Lode." Years ago (back in the late 50's) our family vacationed in the Eastern Sierras at Silver Lake for two weeks each summer and we had occasion to visit Virginia City (and Carson City). Well, the main street, "C" Street buildings look very much the same as I remember but the shoulder-to-shoulder tourists is something I don't remember! That aside, it was fun to meander down the boardwalks and snapping photos of, most notably, the saloons, that I remembered from those visits nearly 60 years ago.

Tread by many feet since the 1860's.

We had come into the city from the southeast, again over Geiger Grade (not the truck route we had taken Friday but the route through Gold Hill and Silver City) in the car this time . . . we thanked our lucky stars that we hadn't driven the motor home this way as it has a 15% grade and is very curvy and narrow. I mention this because the first thing we visited was the prominent Fourth Ward School House at the south end of town, the lovingly restored last-one-standing schoolhouse museum in Virginia City. It is bigger than the courthouse (Virginia City being the seat of Storey County, Nevada) and is interesting in that it tells the story of the real West in its interpretive center, " A Comstock Lesson." Here are a few photos we took on our "field trip:"

This is a view of the south side of this imposing four-story schoolhouse. From where I was standing, it was difficult to get it all in!

The "Comstock Lesson" interpretive center is housed in the first floor front left classroom and was truly interesting; it took us most of the time to look at all the "lessons" here which described the history and development of the great Comstock silver mining operations that made this area so rich. 

Of course, I had to take a photo of the seamstress's display. It was quite interesting that one of the seamstresses of the time wrote that the women of Virginia City were very fashion-conscious and took opulence to the extreme in some cases.  Not only were the upper classes dressed to the hilt but middle class women dressed their families in unusual finery.

The changing gallery on the first floor houses examples of mining the Comstock Lode as well as the various ores found there. It also had pictures of Virginia City and surrounding country then and now; interestingly, nature has reclaimed many of the abandoned mines to the extent that there are barely any clues to their existence. The first floor also had the Alumni Room, displaying class photos, histories, and family trees of Fourth Ward School students from when it opened in 1876 to the last senior class graduated in 1936. Here is a photo of the Historic Classroom Exhibit, also on the first floor:

These are original desks and they do show the wear of many students over the years. There has been meticulous attention paid to every detail of what the classrooms looked like during the years the school was in operation.

This was a fun riddle . . . can you name the birds?

Write the answer in the comments section at the end of my post, if you want!

We went on up to the second floor and took in the Printing and Mark Twain Exhibit (of course, Mark Twain was famous as a reporter for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise from 1861 to 1864 and his book, Roughing It contains vivid antidotes of his time there. The school had its own printing operation and the "Senior Dynamo" was published and printed monthly by the Virginia City High School which was in the Fourth Ward School. We liked this little ditty in a souvenir copy of the paper:                      

FORGET IT, by Harriett Gladding, Class of 1922

Forget the troubles of this life;

Forget the struggle and the strife,

Forget the scandal you have heard,

Forget the spoken unkind word.

Forget the fights and blackened eyes,

Forget the gossips, truths and lies,

Forget the bills you have to pay,

Forget the things the papers say,

Forget the first and only kiss,

Forgetting brings you untold bliss,

Forget most things that have gone by,

But DON'T forget Virginia High.

It seems appropriate for this election year!

The stairway up to the Second Floor. The treads are certainly worn down!

Reading Roughing It in the Printing and Mark Twain Exhibit classroom. Each of the desks here had a copy of one of Mark Twain's books. The back of the classroom (behind me) has the printing set up including many vintage typewriters.

Since the school had grades K through 12, the desks were full size and I fit in them comfortably!

The third and fourth floors are off limits to the public but at least the third floor has been restored for offices and archives work rooms. The fourth floor contained only one finished room where gym-type equipment was found. Since the school stood abandoned from 1936 to 1983, there was extensive damage to the unfinished walls, ceiling, and floors of the fourth floor. We left the Fourth Ward School Museum after ringing the bell (with the assistance of the docent) and drove north on C Street to find a parking spot so we could join the other tourists walking up and down.

Here are photos of the Red Dog Saloon, the Delta Saloon, the Tahoe House Hotel, and the Bucket of Blood Saloon (stood out in my mind from those childhood visits!):

Red Dog Saloon and view of C Street. Yes, the day before we drove the motor home down this!

My mom's name was Delta - no relation to the saloon!

We didn't go inside any of the saloons or stores - even to see the Suicide Table - because we had Rango with us and we didn't want someone to mistake him for the Sheriff (his full name, don't you know, is Sheriff Rango, after the chameleon in the 2011 computer-animated Western action comedy).

We were getting a bit hungry so we stopped in at an outside BBQ stand where there were tables set up and had a wheat beer and a pulled pork sandwich with potato salad on the side.

Yum!

There are three churches in town that have been restored and are in use still. The Catholic church, St. Mary's in the Mountains, is quite beautiful and I took one too many photos of it. Here a just two:

The steeple showing to the left is the St Paul's Episcopal Church one street down.

A bird (not sure if it was a pigeon, a hawk, or a crow) was perched up on the steeple's cross the entire time we were there.

Here are a few more photos taken on our walk back down to where we'd parked the car:

I don't know anything about this except that I liked the rustic-ness of it.

Oh yes, this is Bernadette, mentioned in Part IV. 

Here's the story on the donkey. Unfortunately, her owner was standing away from her when I took this photo - quite the character. At any rate, we stopped to chat with him and pet the donkey (and donate a couple $$) and the old guy told us that he'd adopted this donkey from the BLM Wild Horse and Donkey program four years ago ("You know what the BLM is, don't you ma'am?"). One thing he and the donkey had in common was she had not been trained and he had not ever trained a donkey. Seems that things worked out, although he noticed that she was getting rather fat soon after he adopted her. Not fat, pregnant; she birthed a little jack on the fourth of July that year. The old guy named him Independence but does not bring him along to C Street to entertain the tourists as he's still a bit wild. He calls this donkey Bernadette after his late wife - "Every time I look at her I think of my wife. I'm a romantic kind of guy."

Speaking of donkeys - a rusty bit tucked between buildings.

We finished out our visit by driving away from C Street to take a look at the rest of the town's buildings and where its 855 residents (as of the 2010 Census) live and work.

A beautifully restored mansion on B Street.

View looking out over the Comstock mining area towards Reno.

Looking east towards the train depot (Truckee-Virginia Railroad). We didn't go there because there was a huge group, including tour buses, there and we wanted to avoid that.

Just a cool shot from the Fourth Ward School view area.

We had spent about four hours here and were ready to head back to Dayton, pick up a few groceries, and get ready to leave Sunday morning for Lee Vining and our Yosemite adventure. Now we can say that we've been to Virginia City!

Watch for the next installment of our Northern California (and Nevada!) Road Trip Adventure.

Ta!