The Eastern Sierras

So, I mentioned in my last post that we got Elvis’s ashes back. Here’s what we carry with us:

This lovely oak box is completely sealed and has Elvis’s name on the bottom. Pretty cool, huh? Although – it’s actually been a little tough to find a spot for Elvis. I don’t want him to end up on the bottom of a pile and forgotten about, you know? The cab is packed pretty tight. Not a lot of open space. For right now we put the box on top of the center divider. Which is great, until one of us needs to get into the center divider. We’ll get it worked out. I’m glad we have Elvis with us, silly as it sounds. He’s still on the adventure.

Moving on: I’ll say one thing for eastern California: it’s hot. I mean, I was expecting it to be hot across the San Joaquin valley (trip number 6 across that valley, I believe). But I expected Keyesville Recreation Area to be a little cooler.

Wrong. Still, it was nice to be sitting outside at 9 o’clock at night in shorts and a t-shirt. I wasn’t cold while making the coffee the next morning.

Surely the area along Highway 395 would be better, I thought. It’s at a higher elevation.

Wrong again.

Alabama Hills Recreation Area sits just outside of the town of Lone Pine, California. A bank in Lone Pine said the temperature was 94^o when we passed through. Ouch. And while we gained a tiny bit of elevation heading west from town, Alabama Hills was pretty damn hot.

It was gorgeous, though. The rock formations reminded me of Arches National Park, except that these rocks were granite, not sandstone.

When we finally picked a campsite at 2:30, the first thing I did was set up the tent… just so I could have some shade.

After 6pm the heat of the day finally abated, and Michael and Bailey and I took a little walk.

Those are the Inyo Mountains in the background. Believe me, that name has been the source of many, many jokes.

We also walked over to a nearby climbing area to check it out. The area is called The Corridors, a series of narrow and parallel rock formations, each with what could be described as an alley inbetween. The alley looked like it would be shady for all but an hour of every day.

We messed around in the shade for a while, before returning back to camp. That night it was so warm that I hung out in a tank top and shorts. When I had to leave the tent to go to the bathroom at 1am, I didn’t even need a jacket.

Tuesday morning I got up early (6:30am) to go for a run before the heat of the day set in. I’m not sure it worked. Maybe it was the heat, maybe it was the elevation. But the only fun part of my run was that Bailey came with.

Okay, well, the views were pretty spectacular.

That’s 14,505-foot Mount Whitney in the background. The trail to the peak starts at the Whitney Portal trailhead and is 22 miles round-trip, with an elevation gain of over 6,100 feet.

After breakfast, as I was cleaning up, I heard this funny sound and looked up to see a drone waaaay up in the sky. It hung out for a while, so I can tell you that the sound a drone makes is plenty irritating.

Well, apparently we were pretty interesting or something, because this drone proceeded to drop down to about 10 feet off the ground. I’d guess it was somewhere about 100 feet away? Close enough to see the camera attached underneath. And it hovered there for several long minutes. It was like being watched. Stared at.

I’ve never wished for a rifle so badly in my life. I mean, the sound was bad enough. But knowing there was a camera on that thing? I flipped it off. Michael finally mooned it and then it went away.

I guess the point of that story is… that now I’m going to search YouTube for clips with titles like “Full Moon at Alabama Hills.” Hehe!

We did eventually escape the heat, although not exactly how we thought we would. We have a friend that lives in LA, named Travis. We met him and his girlfriend, Chelsea, back around the Tetons in Wyoming (I wrote a blog post about it!). We ended up sharing a campsite. Travis has a Toyota 4Runner, and he and Michael talked Toyota for hours. We follow Travis on Instagram and he’s been putting up some awesome pictures lately. Over Memorial Day weekend, he went off-roading with a group of people in the Eastern Sierras.

Michael sent him a text and Travis replied with an entire map (complete with GPS points) of their trip on the Coyote Trail, which they took from Bishop down south to Big Pine.

We stopped in Lone Pine’s outdoor shop, Elevation, for information and maps. They even let us fill one of our water containers there. Sweet! We stopped at Big Pine for a topoff of groceries and gas, then decided to follow Travis’s route from Bishop.

I was driving, and when the first mile of the Coyote Trail was paved. Then it became a sandy road with lots of washboard marks. Then the climbing began. I did not want to drive anymore. The road was steep and narrow and off-cambre and it pretty much scared the shit out of me. But there was no place wide enough to stop and change drivers. I had to keep going.

When we finally did reach a big, wide turn, I pulled to one side immediately. Michael seemed a little surprised when I told him I was terrified and didn’t want to drive anymore. He said ok. I looked down at the dashboard as I was about to get out of the truck, and saw an idiot light (I think they’re actually called Warning Lights these days) that I’d never seen before: A/T Oil Temp

Michael hadn’t seen that one before either. I reached for the owner’s manual. He reached for the phone. Believe it or not, we had 2 bars of 4G LTE service out there. Good thing there’s a website called TacomaWorld.com. Michael found our question on one of the forums. Basically the automatic transmission is cooled by the radiator, and if the coolant is hot and the transmission is under a heavy load it can overheat the fluid.

Well, it was hot. We were going up a steep, rocky hill. And we were fully loaded – full tank of gas, full water containers, full cooler and pantry. That transmission was under a heavy load.

Apparently one way to accelerate the cool-down is to put the truck in neutral and rev the engine. (Here’s the link as to why.) I’m not quite sure the reason makes sense, but Michael tried it. We also sat for about 10 minutes to try and let things cool down even more before continuing.

With Michael driving. Yep, I was done. The Tacoma is actually a pretty big truck for someone who’s barely over five feet tall. It’s like driving a tank. I keep trying but driving Taco Negro off-road never seems to get more comfortable for me.

The road leveled out for a bit as well, which was nice. There were some other steep sections, but nothing like what I drove, and that warning light never came back on.

Crisis averted.

Our next obstacle came when the Coyote Trail came to an abrupt halt. A snowfield had buried the road. We checked Travis’s map and there was another way around. Supposedly. We don’t have GPS and simply couldn’t follow his trail.

We finally turned around – knowing that we’d passed three campsites on our way in, and that we just had to pick one.

I’d say we did pretty well.