September 23
All you skiers out there should at some point in time travel to Mammoth Lakes. This is a true ski town. When the Red Meadows Road was finally opened on July 22, so late due to the historic 300% snowpack from the past winter, there were still 7 ski lifts (out of 19) working in the city. That was two months ago. Today tourists were just walking around the shops and restaurants, getting ready for hiking and backpacking. The NPS closed the road to Devils Postpile this past Monday, the 18th, for road reconstruction work through the fall. The road will be closed for MON through FRI until snow makes work impossible. A ranger had told me there would be blasting and dangerous conditions. I did not know what to expect, except that if visitors are allowed to drive the road on weekends, it has to be considered safe. That turned out to be correct. The road was almost perfectly fine, only a couple spots needed to be avoided. A guess is that the road crews just have too much of the road blocked while they work which is the reason for the restrictions; not due to the road condition. Many large stumps along the side of the road were missing their top parts. That may have been the first step since both crews and visitors cannot use the road if large tree trunks block the way. My recollection from 20 years ago was the road was dirt. My memory may be fading. But today the road is asphalt. Anyway, in what seemed only a few minutes, I was at the historic Ranger Station. Then it was a 0.4-mile hike to the 60-foot basalt columns which are the highlight of this park. The trail is “accessible”. Signs ask people to not climb on the piles of broken columns at the base of the cliff. Cooling lava from 100,000 years ago created the basalt, and glaciers from the last ice age exposed the rock over time.
As I was leaving the parking lot, a trio of backpackers from Dallas were looking for a ride up to Mammoth Lakes. It is a distance of 13 miles. I welcomed them into the car and we headed back up from the canyon floor. They are hiking the longer trails in the Sierra Nevada mountains and were going next to Yosemite. I believe they said they had been in the backcountry for 20 days. There sure are plenty of people who love the outdoors; that is great.
The drive up to Grants Pass, OR, was uneventful, though beautiful. Mount Shasta is one of the views. And CA 44 makes you think you are in the Ponderosa television show with the Cartwrights. When I approached the CA-OR border on I-5 I wondered why I was seeing and smelling so much smoke. I checked the Oregon State wildfire map. There are various fires in NW California and SW Oregon making heavy density smoke plumes which are dispersing across Oregon. Grants Pass is in the heaviest section.