Hey, happy almost Thanksgiving guys. We avoided the crazy Buffalo snow, mostly by not actually living in Buffalo, and the couple inches we did get are now gone, and it looks like fall again. But 2014 isn’t so interesting, and herein let me jump to writing about 2011….
After crashing my car in Mammoth, I ended up having a day to spend there, so I went and checked out Devil’s Postpile. All in all, it was pretty awesome, and I would highly recommend people to spend some time down there. After that, I flew home, which was a short but gorgeous flight back to LA.
Minaret Falls from the base looks awesome
Since the flight the next day wasn’t until the evening, I did take the opportunity while I was there to take the shuttle into Devil’s Postpile, which I had wanted to go visit for quite some time, but which is only open in the good season. I was apparently there on the last or second to last day of the shuttle service, so, good on that timing I guess, especially if I wasn’t going to have my car with me. I took the regular Mammoth bus up to meet the shuttle bus, which gets you up to the main ski lift area. It’s really rather pretty in the summer! There I got the bus to take me down into the Monument. That goes does this crazy steep not super fun looking road, honestly. You get some really great views on the way down, notably of a formation called “the Minarets”, which was apparently used in the movie Wizard of Oz as the witch’s hideout. Once they say that, it’s definitely something I feel like we’ve seen before.
The minarets. You’ll have to imagine the flying monkeys.
There are a bunch of national forest areas surrounding the area, and the shuttle has various stops in those areas until it gets to the main stop for the postpile. So, I got off there, and…realized I hadn’t bought a water bottle. Eit. So I stopped in and got a water bottle, got my patch, and then started down the main little tourist trail to the postpile. It goes past a nice little meadow, and is mostly flat until you get to the foot of the postpile. This is, quite honestly, a really cool looking formation. It’s giant basalt columns, that are cooled lava columns, that crack in the regular hexagonal patterns we see here. I am told it’s similar to the Giants Causeway in Ireland. Either way, it’s pretty cool. There is a trail on the side going up to the top, and I went up to there too. It was pretty awesome to be able to see the tops of the columns…and even up there, there was glacial polish to be seen. Awesome!
Standard postpile photo! Still awesome.
Falling off is not considered wise
I looped around from the top of the postpile , and went back to the bottom. After heading back to the bus area, I took a sidetrip over to Minaret Falls, which I had been told were pretty awesome. This involved, of course, walking a little bit on the PCT/JMT, but quickly diverged from there, and was honestly walking through some pretty hot, not well-labelled trail on the way over. I was rewarded , however, when I finally got to the wooded, rocky area at the base of the falls. You couldn’t see too much from the “normal” viewing area back in the trees, but since it was a low water year, you could rock-hop over much closer to the base of the falls, to an area that would apparently be dangerous/inaccessible in a heavier flow season. That said – the view from the base was pretty spectacular. Water tumbling down several rock faces, first as cascades, and then down a broad rock face, white and beautiful. I just stared for a while. It was awesome to be that close. From there I walked back to the meadows where that small trail started, I then took the shuttle over to Reds Meadow, because I wanted to see it.
The tile patterns are really delightful
Soda Springs Meadow is in fact gorgeous
It’s a pack station, and had some bathrooms, and the store, and I generally hung out for a few minutes, but there wasn’t really that much to do there. So I waited around for the shuttle to come back. As I was on the bus, it waited for a couple of minutes, and someone walked up and asked if it was the bus into town. It was a guy who had been on the JMT, and he was, well…he was done. He had taken a day off, and then started continuing down the trail…and then turned back and came back to Reds Meadows, and decided he was simply done, and was going to go home. Guess it can happen!
Mammoth Mountain needs to have a mammoth somewhere, I suppose. Posing with bird.
I then took the shuttle back up to Mammoth – getting some nice views of the statue of the Mammoth up at the ski lifts 🙂 I went back down to the hotel, and picked up my stuff where I had left it, and waited for the taxi pickup to the airport. Being a small town, the taxi operator had scheduled a few more pickups, so we got to drive around a little to go get some other people before heading out to the airport. The airport has many buildings, most of which are hangars for private planes I guess, because the one commercial “terminal” is one tiny small area. We went in, and went through, you know security. There were something like 7 agents around…for the one whole flight that was leaving that day. My flight. I asked them if they only had to go in for an hour or two, and they told me that no, they did in fact have to come in regularly. They said they did a lot of training. I see.
Propellors!
Many layers of the world below
Eventually I got onto the flight, and we took the trip home, and…oh my was it lovely. The plane went right through sunset, and everything was just lit about as beautifully as I could have ever hoped. That was honestly a great flight. Made it home to deal, you know, with car issues and life going forward.
Propelled forwards
Crowley Lake below. Range of light, indeed
For some hiking stats, the Ten Lakes Trip was ~12.6 miles RT and a mile or two of walking around the postpile. My running count shows that this is the trip where I hit 750 recorded hiking miles. Cool!
