East side of the Sierras

Greetings from the valley where Los Angeles gets 45% of their water!

We are now about 250 miles from Los Angeles, high up in the mountains.  Each small valley has a river that leads into an aqueduct that is then funneled into the Los Angeles water system.  At one point this was a very fertile valley, but now Los Angeles is taking more water out of the valley than is recreated, leading to long term desertification.

We are in the shadows of the tallest mountain in the contiguous United States, Mount Whitney.

After leaving Death Valley, we headed up the Owens River Valley to find a place to camp and some mountain fun. We started off with a visit to Manzanar, a World War II Japanese Relocation Camp.  It was quite an educational experience to say the least.   Unfortunately none of the original buildings remain (they were taken apart and sold for lumber soon after the war ended), but the foundations are there and recently two barracks and a mess hall were reconstructed and turned into exhibits. There is also a great interpretative center that has lots of information, exhibits, and a movie.

After experiencing the hot sun of Death Valley, we were looking for slightly cooler temperatures.  So we headed to higher elevation and comfort on a dirt Forest Service road that went into the mountains.  As the road petered out and turned into a hiking trail, we found a somewhat level camping spot about 1/2 mile from the snow line.

On our first morning here we headed up into the mountains together.  We started hiking up the trail with the intention of Misa turning around when the snow got deep, while I continued up to do some splitboarding (backcountry snowboarding).  After about one hour of hiking, when Misa started to posthole up to her hip in the deep snow, she turned around to head back to the truck and do some work.  I kept going up with my eye on some steep chutes a few thousand feet up.  It is such a weird feeling for us easterners to experience 60-degree weather, yet be amidst tons of snow!  I headed up for another hour or two, but somehow the chutes I was aiming for never got that much closer, while the effort required to maintain uphill progress got much harder.  The altitude (9,000 ft+) with extremely wet and clumpy snow was taking its toll on me.  The snow was sticking to my skis on both the skin side (skins attach to the bottom of the ski  to allow you to ski uphill, sliding in one direction and gripping in the other) as well as the top of the ski.  I think at one point each ski weighed about 30lbs.  After wallowing for a bit more and trying to force myself to take 100 steps between each rest break, I decided to turn around.  My downhill section of the trip was over way too soon but had one great cliff drop and a few good turns, and soon enough I was back at the snow line.  I hiked back to the truck to find Misa in the back of the truck working on her computer.

We finished out the day with scrambling on some rocks and Misa did some sunset yoga.
Not a bad day at all.