Road Trip!

This past weekend my friend Mark and I rented a Nissan 350 Z and hit the road with an open-ended itinerary. We left at 4 am Saturday and headed North through Yosemite. I've been in Yosemite Valley but I'd never been in the Tuolomne Meadows area of the park. It was beautiful of course.

Here's Mark in his favorite T-shirt (Reagan) and the Z on the way down from Tioga Pass, connecting the east and west sides of the Sierra.

Near Mammoth Lakes, CA, on the eastern side.

In Devils Postpile National Monument. We took a couple hours to do a five mile hike to see the monument and falls.

This is the Devil's Postpile itself. Very uncommon lava columns, apparently. They're quite symmetrical, as you can see better in the talus field in the picture below.

Rainbow Falls, also in the National Monument. If I recall correctly this cataract is about 110 feet.

Hwy 395 South, near Mammoth Lakes, CA. There's some windshield glare in this pic, but the air quality on this side of the mountains is always better than in the Central Valley.

A few hours later we were in Death Valley National Park. Note the temperature in the shade is almost 110 degrees (and this was after six in the evening!)

The salt flats in Badwater Basin, Death Valley, CA. There was a big sign halfway up the cliff behind where we were standing saying "Sea Level" I took some pictures but it's almost too far away to read!

These naturally colored rocks are called the Artist's Palette. This one's for you Mom =)

There are some pretty cool roads in Death Valley. Long and straight, with visibility for miles in all directions. Perfect for testing the top speed of a 300 hp V6 rental car, which incidentally, happens to be 147 mph.

Saturday evening we decided we still had half the weekend ahead of us and continued west to Vegas. We rode the monorail and saw the sites on the strip. There were so many bright flashing lights everywhere I was continually thinking we were getting pulled over. We walked into the MGM Grand hotel and casino. Definitely not my cup of tea, although we did see some interesting things (caged lions- you know when the lion roars sometimes at the beginning of a movie? Well this is them- MGM films). A lot of these hotels have wedding chapels too. I saw one real bride wandering around (by herself) and another girl wearing a white frilly top with "Bride" in silver lettering on it. You couldn't pay me to get married there. Overall I feel I did all right in Vegas though. For $4.50 I got a slice of pizza, and the monorail ticket was $9, so I'm pretty sure I blew a lot less than the geniuses yanking the handles of the slot machines. Somehow they couldn't seem to comprehend a basic point- these things never give out as much money as you put in, or as they say, "the house always wins."

We kept driving west and around midnight found a dumpy little motel to crash at for a few hours. Sunday morning we figured we were so close to AZ, why not? We hit the road again and before long we were at the Hoover Dam and the Arizona border.

The Colorado River at the Hoover Dam (upstream side).

Downstream side. For security reasons they're building a new bridge for the interstate downstream from the dam. You can see the massive concrete pillars going up in this pic (four on the west bank (right side) and one on the east/left side. I have absolutely no idea how they plan on completing the rest of it. It looks to be like a quarter mile drop down to the water from between those bridge pillars. That's either an insane amount of concrete, or they're going to do some sort of suspension bridge.

View of the dam from the east bank. Incredible to think that this was built without most of the machinery and technology that we have today.

A few hundred miles further east we were in Arizona at the Grand Canyon. I can certainly see what all the fuss is about. It was spectacular. What I can't see is how Evel Knievel could have jumped a motorcycle across it. Okay, so I just Googled it and found this interesting article about the Knievel's exploits. http://www.geocities.com/shioshya/knievel.html

I like the contrast between foreground and background. Even so, it's still hard to grasp the vastness of the canyon. I was also was fascinated by how straight and level the canyon rims were (The North rim is at the horizon in these pics. We were at the South rim) despite the varied and jagged topography they contain.

This was a pretty cool spot we found right off one of the hiking trails.

One of the trails that winds down into the canyon. In the middle right of the pic you can see where it tunnels through the rock.

About 2:00 it was time to turn around and head home. We wanted to make it to a mountain pass I had heard about while there was still some daylight left. We got there just at dusk.

This is not just a pretty sunset. It's smoke from a forest fire that started earlier that day. When we stopped the car to get gas a few miles further on, we were blasted by hot smoky wind. The sign still said the Sherman Pass road was open though, so off we went! We didn't end up seeing the fire and it cleared up once we got closer to the other side. (The road is a snowmobile trail in winter, and goes over 9200'!). I read later that about 2500 acres had burned but that it was mostly contained.

Here's our trip by the numbers: 2 days, 1500 miles, 3 states, 3 national parks (not even counting the two closest to home), several national monuments and conservation areas, and
a boatload of fun. (Oh, and 1 black bear in the mountains and 2 coyotes in the desert!) I'd never seen Death Valley, the Hoover Dam, or the Grand Canyon before. I definitely feel like I got a taste of the Southwest, and though I'm becoming more familiar with the Sierras, this was my first trip to the Eastern side of the range.