How The West Was Won

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I arrived in San Fransisco only two hours after leaving Vancouver. On the same plane was one of my colleagues, and I didn't know she had booked a flight on the same plane. She sat many rows behind me, and we didn't get a chance to chat. The flight was simple but moving onto Sacramento was not. I took the BART train to the other side of the bay to Oakland, where I transfered to another BART train heading north. I got off at Richmond, a town north of Berkeley, then got onto an Amtrak train heading north east to Sacramento. I rolled into Sacramento 9 hours after I left the airport hotel in Vancouver, quite a long day considering how short a trip compared to other trips I've taken. And the change in temperature was a bit of a shock, like standing in front of a blast furnace. I wore a sweater in the morning, and waiting in the afternoon to be picked up it was 37 degrees Celsius. Quite nice actually after the delayed summer in Vancouver. My friend, Kris, picked me up from the Amtrak Station in Sacramento and took me back to her house, my home base for the next nine weeks.

Kris has a friend who owns a house and some property at a tiny town called Chinese Camp, a little bit outside of Yosemite National Park, and this was our desination this first week-end of my summer. We headed south to the busy farming city of Lodi, where we had lunch. We are in the Sacramento valley, where most of North America's crops are grown. You name it, it's grown here. As you drive, you can see patchwork mono-cultures of crops each headed for a table somewhere in North America tomorrow. We ate at the Dancing Fox, a restaurant that served delicious gourmet food, and hopefully locally grown.

South again we drove to Stockton on Highway 99, and then we turned east and headed for Chinese Camp. We had a few different roads to find, and we passed through some flat lands that started to grow, and become a little dryer due to less irrigation I reckon. The landscape around Chinese Camp is more savanna like, plenty of brown dirt exposed, but still with plenty of vegetation on short scrubby trees. Taller trees are next to the rivers and lakes, which haven't dried out yet. The house sits on hundreds of acres, and was built nearly 100 years ago. We have all the modern conveniences we need - a fridge, stove, barbeque, laundry and modern toilets. It's a colonial style house with a veranda that goes all around the house on each floor. We paddled in the lake that first afternoon, a lazy end to an easy day.

The next morning we headed to Jamestown to see the old steam trains. Railtown 1897 State Historic Park has two steam trains in good working order, a couple of carriages, an old platform, a working roundhouse and a works yard where volunteers are busy restoring another steam engines, carriages and other machines 100 years old associated with the railroad. More volunteers parade around in period dress; I met Mark Twain, Clint Eastwood and Harpo Marx. Harpo? What was he doing there, except making hoots and whistles, just like the trains. A grey haired old man with a grizzly beard sat down at the out of tune honky tonk piano and played The Star Spangled Banner and other American tunes - this is the 4th of July long week-end. The Jamestown railroad is the most filmed old railtown and train in the world. It's the star of The Virginian, Petticoat Junction, Back to the Future III, The Apple Dumpling Gang and High Noon.

Then we drove onto Yosemite National Park. We had to ascend thousands of feet to the entrance, then descend some to the valley floor. We followed a long line of cars into the valley, and the scenery just kept getting more and more spectacular. The trees tall and thick, green and verdant. Everyone knows a good thing when they see it, and everyone was here today it. Yosemite gets three million visitors each year, and it seemed as if everyone in America had decided to come on the 4th of July long week-end to see their grand park. Yosemite now has shuttle buses and these were often full and slowed by the line up of cars. We parked in the valley and decided to walk around for a while. I took many photos, and we walked exploring Yosemite Village and Awhanhee Lodge. Later in the day we drove to Glacier Point, just a stone's throw to the valley, three thousand feet high above the valley floor. We listened to a Ranger talk about the conservation of the park and watched the sun set on Half Dome. We ate dinner in the park at the Awhanhee Lodge and we were extremely late returning to Chinese Camp that night.

The Sierra Mountains are granite, and about 10 million years ago were uplifted creating the exposed mountains, and simultaneously caused a lot of erosion as rivers began to flow faster. Half Dome and El Capitan are two examples of rock particularly resitant to weathering. The ice age came 2 million years ago and created the wide valleys we all seek today. The entire park was created in 1890 and it's 3000 square kilometers, about the same size as Rhode Island, the same size as Metro Vancouver from Langley to West Vancouver down to the border, and the same size as a typical English county. The settlers came looking for gold but found none; we came looking for spectacular scenery and found plenty.

The second day in the park we drove across the park along the Tioga Road. This road bisects the park, leaving the northern half as wilderness seen by very few tourists, only the most hardy backcountry explorers. On this road, the traffic was far less than in the valley just a little south. It was peaceful and equally beautiful. At Olmsted Point you can look down the Tenaya Creek valley to see Half Dome from the other side. This drive was our highest in altitide yet. At Tuolumne Meadows and the eastern park entrance, we reached 9945 feet. I highly recommend seeing this side of the park, but not too many of you, we want to keep the Tioga Road a quiet place.

We descended from that lofty height quickly into the dry rain shadow side of the Sierra Mountains. Imagine the setting of High Plains Drifter, this is where it was filmed; a desert, surrounded by mountains in every direction. We headed for Mono Lake, a lake about the same area as the city of Vancouver. A salty and alkaline lake with no natural outlet. It's three times saltier than the ocean and very alkaline, a pH of 10. The county of Los Angeles started pumping water from some of the rivers that feed Mono Lake and the lake quickly started to drain. Tufa spires made from limestone were exposed. These natural features are quite a sight - white, a little fragile with a bubbly texture about 3 meters tall. An agreement was reached such that LA would have some water, but a lake level that is sustainable would be achieved. We wandered around the shore line disturbing the millions of sand flies and watching the sea gulls - it's not a dead sea at all. Brine shrimp are in the lake, but no fish.

We stayed the night in Lee Vining, a small town next to the lake on Highway 395. We drove back to Sacramento the next day north along the designated scenic highway of 395. Then up over the Sierra Mountains again at Monitor Pass a little south of Lake Tahoe. We followed the holiday makers returning after the long week-end.

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Photos

Mark Twain
The rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

Tenaya River valley
Half Dome from the other side

Mono Lake
Tufa one and tufa all