There’s so much to see there.
Category Archives: eastern sierra
It seems like a lot but you should see what I left out.
Before we went to Malheur NWR, the girls and I spent a week in the California desert, next to the mighty Sierra Mountains, at the foot of Mount Whitney. The weather was often unsettled, presenting beautiful clouds and distant rain.
Heavy wet snow mixed with rain is falling as I write this. Not the kind of fluffy stuff that brings joy but cold and very wet and sure to melt soon. November.
My last campground in California was aptly named Aspen. We were past the peak of fall colors but it was still quite beautiful. A creek ran by our campsite (Willow was ecstatic) and then along the edge of a big meadow. At sunset, the girls and I took a long walk along the creek and I managed to capture a few images.
Before we left on our October road trip, Mary learned about the rare foxtail pine trees that are found in the southern Sierra mountains. They can live for over 2000 years! There is another subspecies that lives in the Klamath range in northern California. She found a location not far from where we were camping and made a GPS route on her phone for us to follow to find these unusual trees. We drove up a long (paved) road high in the mountains and once again we were around 10,000 feet! From there we had to drop down a steep road bank and then cross a meadow with a lovely meandering stream and then climb the steep ridge on the other side. The ridge was made up of pumice-like ground up granite and boulders. Not great walking, for sure. As we started up it, we commented on the lodgepole pines – so different from the lodgepoles in the Cascades and Rockies. Instead of being skinny trees growing in dense forests, these were open grown and large and had some character to them. I turned around and I saw a tree with much different bark! There it was! The elusive foxtail pine! We had barely climbed the ridge at all! As we looked some more, we could see they were everywhere! We continued to walk higher and higher, seeing more foxtails and fewer lodgepoles. After we’d had our fill, we returned to the meadow and then back up to the road where we found there were foxtails everywhere! We had been so determined to get to our starting point that we had not even looked around! It was a great adventure.
My Everyday Photos 