Whitney Saline Mammoth Yosemite Trip
October 19-21, 2001
We may have looked like the modern equivalent of the Three Musketeers, but instead of riding in on horses we rode into town in my Toyota 4Runner, and when we located our targets, we shot them with our digital cameras instead of muskets or swords. Watch out though, get in front of our cameras and you're likely to get shot repeatedly, we mean business. Or at least we pretend to - we call ourselves Revolution Multimedia and intend on selling our Virtual Reality photos some day, but we are still anxiously awaiting that day. Until then we are gathering content with such vigor anyone would think we were getting paid.
Last weekend we decided to head for the Eastern Sierra region for 3 days to shoot photos. None of us currently has a job so we were limited more by budget than time. The other 2 perpetrators were Dan and Jason, already introduced in other Trip Report pages. If you haven't read those pages, just keep in mind that Dan is the Evil One, also known as Dan Ger, or DanGer. Jason is the one we constantly drag into adventures over his head fully expecting him to keel over dead one of these days. Not that we dislike the guy, we just enjoy trying to kill him with raw adventure. It's a hobby. Plus, no one makes him do it, he comes along by choice.
That said let's get on with the adventure here. It began slow, I had to pick these two slackers up on Thursday afternoon because Jason's car is broke and Dan's was repoed. Unfortunately they live in opposite directions from me, so I spent the afternoon gathering them. We were finally on the road out of Oakland by about 7:30 in the evening, and there was remarkably little traffic, at least compared to the usual Friday afternoon departure. We drove until about 1:00 Friday morning when we arrived at Keough Hot Ditch, where we soaked and camped. We picked up our day passes for the Whitney Trail about 11:00 the next morning, and got going up the trail no earlier than noon. This slacker schedule does not lend towards summiting, but we were there to sight see and do the biggest day hike we could - which got us about half way up elevation-wise and just under half way in on the 11 mile trail. Except for Jason, who fell behind and I'm not sure how far he made it. Dan fished in Mirror Lake while I shot a couple panos from the ridge above the lake.

As I finished the photos, a day hiker was coming down the trail, walking rather stiffly. I asked her how far she went - "all the way". Wow, Whitney as a day hike is quite an accomplishment, 22 miles, 6000' up, and 6000' down. She and her friends left at 4:30 in the morning, after driving in from Truckee the night before. They left in the dark and it was getting pretty dark by the time any of them made it down. I want to summit Whitney too, but I think camping half way and summitting as a day hike is really the way to go. Anyway I can't get up at 4:30 in the morning.
By the time we were ready to get back on the road it was dark. The plan was to go to Saline Valley Hot Springs, but the plan didn't include finding the place in the dark. None of us had been there before, and all we had was a GPS reading we got off the web and my memory of driving through the Saline Valley last spring. At the time I didn't realize there was a hot spring in the valley, and I could find no redeeming feature for this valley whatsoever. It was hot, dusty, and the road into the valley from the Racetrack Playa was absolutely the worst road that I'd ever gone down. I couldn't wait to get off the chunky rock area, until I got to the hardpack washboard (and sometimes washed out) section, where I decided the chunky rocks weren't so bad after all. After 40-50 miles of that I was happy to get back to civilization, where almost immediately someone said "You were in the Saline Valley? That's my favorite hot spring anywhere!" Hot spring? Doh! So part of the current mission was to locate and soak in the rumoured hot spring. From Lone Pine, near Whitney, we decided to drive south and try to take a low road into the Saline Valley. This still involved crossing a mountain pass or two, but we eventually found ourselves on an incredibly long descent into a desert valley. The GPS confirmed it was the right one. At some point we joined the road I took last spring, the sandy areas and flash flood washouts looked familiar. This was the easy part - I'd been here before. The hard part was finding the turnout that went up to the springs. Some of the washes crossing Saline Valley Road looked like roads themselves, and some of them even were. Finally we found one that seemed to continue for a ways, and carefully followed it out. It was marginal at best, sometimes fading into the desert to the point where we'd have to stop debate which of the faint tracks was actually the road.
We came across a metal sculpture that I'd seen in a picture of the springs, and I thought we were close. We took a turn at the sculpture and ended up in just another wash that someone had driven through, and ended up back on the road. The GPS said we were still a few miles from the desired destination, but we couldn't figure out how to program in the coordinates for the destination so the thing would just point at it. Just as well, that's cheating. So instead we just carefully followed this road, or path up through the desert, having to stop every so often to figure out where it was going - it was faint, and to check the GPS.
At one point we drove a mile or two and the gps didn't register that we'd gone anywhere at all - don't depend on technology. Dan was getting concerned that we weren't going to find it in the dark, and seemed to want to do something like stop and camp or turn around. I decided to drive a little farther up the road, figuring if it ended then we'd turn around. Almost immediately we came across an old BLM sign letting us know we'd arrived at Saline Valley Hot Springs, which is now technically part of Death Valley National Park and no longer administered by the BLM (unfortunately). We were rewarded for our perseverance with a nice soak in the nicest hot tub anyone has ever built over a hot spring. We camped near Palm Hot Springs, 3/4 of a mile up the 'road'.
It was a nice warm night and I slept well out there. The sun in the morning was hot, but the springs were hotter, so in the end I felt cooler in the sun after soaking. Dan shot panos of the area, and someone told him about another spring 2 miles up the road. We decided to go explore. This road was the ultimate in bad. Most of it wasn't road but just track going through desert washes with walls 2-4' high on either side. At one point we picked up what was clearly the road, but got only 200' before coming to a washout 4-5' deep, no passing this one.
We backed up to the wash that lead us to the road, and tried to continue up. We only made it a couple hundred feet before this wash split, the left fork got narrow and deep and full of rocks the shapes and sizes of footballs and basketballs, the right fork went through some humps where it looked like someone might have got stuck, and emerged on top of untracked desert. At this point Dan mentioned something about the road being closed, gee wonder why. When not washed out, this path continues for many miles, passing the Eureka Dunes, home of the highest dune in the area, before emerging on Rt 168. Maybe a dirt bike could make it, but I don't think even the highest clearance Jeep CJ could make it right now. It was fun trying though, I was amazed at some of the stuff the truck clawed through in just that first mile.
By about 4 in the afternoon we decided to head out the normal way to the northwest via a road out of the springs to the south, and by sunset came over the last pass to be greeted by an amazingly vivid sunset over the Sierra Nevada. We camped that night by one of the hot springs in the Long Valley Caldera, where we met Chelsea, the rock climber's daughter. Mmmm Chelsea.
The next morning we took photos of the foliage along Sherwin Creek in Mammoth, where everything was just lit up in these amazing shades of yellow and orange. There were none of the fiery reds typical of sugar maples in New England, but the yellows and oranges looked all the more vivid against the preternaturally blue sky and the earth tone backdrops of the Sierra, an area that usually is possessed of a more sublime beauty.
After this we headed to Yosemite, where we climbed Lambert Dome. Need I even mention Jason didn't make it to the top? The view from Lambert Dome was amazing. I spied a glacier to the southeast that now has me completely intrigued. It was so big I'm lead to believe it may be the Palisades Glacier, the largest in the Sierra, but I'm not sure - it seemed too close. There were also amazing views of Cathedral Peak and down the Yosemite Valley to Half Dome.
After a brief pano-shooting mission at Omsted Point (SP?) we headed home, which of course took me a long time since I had to drop off Dan in Oakland and Jason in Watsonville. Think I got home at about 1 am, another late one. At least I didn't have to go to work on Monday morning. Not to say I didn't work, the attached photo gallery took all day to create on one computer while the other computer stitched together my panos, also attached. Enjoy!
 
   

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