It’s been nearly fifteen months since the end of the Great Australia / New Zealand Adventure, which is far too long to go between vacations. This year’s escape is shorter and less ambitious than trips in the past, with a few stops planned in California over a two week period.
The trip started yesterday with a drive up Highway 395 through the Eastern Sierra. It’s one of my favorite routes in the state, but not one I’ve done many times in summer months. Temperatures were in the high 90s on the way up, but this surprisingly made it easy to find the elusive herds of Tule elk that inhabit the area. Harking back to the days when our parents set up sprinklers during hot weather so that we could cool off, the elk had similar ideas and had apparently found every farm field with irrigation, and were clustered under the spraying water. After spotting one herd, it was almost a certain thing that there would be another a few miles up the road at the next irrigated field.
Today’s adventure was hiking in Devils Postpile National Monument. Despite living in California for nearly thirty years, this monument has eluded my attempts to visit it due to its short open season; with the park road reaching up to 9,000 feet elevation it’s covered in snow most of the year and may only be accessible from late July until early October. Entry for me was by shuttle bus, but the park is in the heart of the Pacific Crest and John Muir trails, so I encountered a fair share of people in the midst of multi-week or multi-month hikes; it’s a humbling experience to feel like a badass for hiking ten miles through the High Sierra only to then meet a half dozen people who are on day 120 of a 200 day journey.
Humble pie aside, the park is a great place to hike. The Devils Postpile is an intriguing series of basalt columns that forms a cliff next to a river, while further downstream the impressive Rainbow Falls tumbles a hundred feet straight down over similar volcanic rocks. I also made a visit to Sotcher Lake, and any time spent at a high mountain lake surrounded by granite domes is time well spent. The day wrapped up with a hamburger at Reds Meadow, an old camp in the mountains used by through-hikers to resupply. I’m told the taste of the burgers improves dramatically depending on how long you’ve been hiking, so while I thoroughly enjoyed mine I can only imagine what the folks who had been trekking for months must have thought.
