nawl

To start off, we drove up 80 towards Tahoe and crossed the mountains, dipped through a corner of Nevada (which I'd never been in), then back into California to follow the eastern side of the Sierras south to Bishop. While we were driving through Tahoe it began snowing, but none of the passes were chain-controlling... yet. The day after, highway signs in Bishop warned that chains were required to drive north. What luck.

We stopped for pizza in south Lake Tahoe, and that was about the most interesting thing that happened on the drive. I took a lot of nice and slightly blurry pictures of snowy countryside from the road.

There's not much to do around Bishop. We got a cheap motel room at Big Pine (pop. 1500) at the Bristlecone Motel, had dinner at a taqueria in Bishop, then wandered along dirt roads through miles of sagebrush looking for the Keough hot springs. A couple links here and here about the hot springs.

There's actually a resort built on the hotsprings themselves, but the runoff creek that rambles through the desert forms several pools. We soaked in one that was rather wide and shallow and looked at the patches of clear sky with stars showing through the clouds. It was there that I saw for the first time the full arc of stars that form Orion's bow.

The next morning Hunter wanted to run a few errands in Bishop, including stopping at the optician because he swears it's the only place unfashionable enough to have glasses he'll like, and a swing by the DMV purely to show me a DMV office with no lines in it. Then we made the drive to Deep Springs. It was about a 45 minute drive across a mountain range from almost the middle of nowhere to truly the middle of nowhere. At the top of the pass there was a turnoff to the bristlecone pine forest, but the road was snowed over and impassable until spring. We got out and played in the snow a bit, and I took some pictures of the snowy desert.

Deep Springs is all by itself in its valley. The two-lane highway from Big Pine continues on from there into Nevada. I now know what driving over a cattle guard in the road sounds like. It's all kind of a blur, but on the first day I read a lot of Deep Springs propaganda, met the dairy cows and a new calf named Persephone, and got the general tour.

The calf thought Hunter's hand was an udder to suck on:

A panoramic of the valley and college (picture links to bigger image); the main college buildings are in the lower right.

Friday night while all the students were having their weekly meeting, Hunter and I drove a little into Nevada to visit the Fish Lake hot springs, a mossy rectangular pool in the desert. It was nicely built, and the water was a good temperature.

The next day, a crowd of people left on an all-day trip to lead the cattle to new pastures. We tagged along on part of the (animal) feed run back at the farm with a friend of Hunter's. The farm truck is this ancient blue Ford whose passenger door doesn't open from the inside and whose seatbelts haven't been used in ages, with a flat bed for carrying around hay bales. I was pretty clueless, but I did get to collect chicken eggs (this was exciting for me, but the kind of thing I got laughed at for being excited about). They had one chicken that lays pastel green eggs.

Then we helped cook dinner for a few hours. The kitchen was, well, industrial style like Ridge House, only everything was nicer and better maintained. I made a huge vat of pasta salad and a dessert custard (Julia Child style, no less) with fresh farm eggs and milk. Probably the first time in my life that I've had unpasteurized whole milk. I also learned that there are special kinds of cows for producing cream. The students were planning to make ice cream in a few days with the vats of fresh cream they had stored up.

After cooking, Hunter and I drove to Eureka Valley to visit the sand dunes. Apparently the boys of Deep Springs have built up an elaborate fantasy (joke) about a mythical Eureka Valley Girls' School in tunnels in the mountains separating the Deep Springs and Eureka Valleys. For reference, Eureka Valley is part of the Death Valley National Park, and there is no water at all in the entire valley. The drive is a long and twisty trek from Deep Springs to Owens to Eureka Valley on a road that twists and winds past rocky cliffs that threaten to fall on you, through the Joshua tree forsts, and finally shrivels into a lonely rippled dirt highway stretching absolutely straight into the distance as far as the eye can see. Unfortunately, the ripples in the dirt were rather severe, and after only a couple of miles of this when the dunes were in view off in the distance, Hunter wanted to turn back so as to not destroy the rental car. Next time we're getting a truck.

On the subject of the sand dunes, later on a student told a story in my presence about overhearing another student who'd giving an interview with Rolling Stone Magazine about the Deep Springs Experience. When he walked into the room, the guy giving the interview was describing the best part about going to the sand dunes as the boys' naked buttocks glistening in the moonlight as they slid down the mountain and the low humming sound of the sand when you slide, and judging from the quote that the magazine published, the interviewer didn't really understand.

I enjoyed my visit to Deep Springs, but I was glad that it lasted only two days. People did not address themselves to me, only to Hunter, and if they needed to refer to me, I was "Hunter's girlfriend". I spent significant amounts of time remaining silent in the company of people who never looked at me, even through extended conversations with everyone else around me, Hunter included. It was not a cold environment, and certainly several people did talk to me, but after a while I started to realize the weirdness was grating on my nerves.

On Sunday morning we got up while it was still dark outside to get an early start. A good number of the boys were already awake by then, and there really was something to seeing one make long strides in the pre-dawn light across the lawn to the boarding house where the cooks were already at work on brunch. We left just as the sun was rising against the hills.

The descent over the mountains was one of those "oh my god" moments the first time I saw it, with the snow-covered Sierras just appearing. I can't describe it. It was overcast the first day we drove through the Owens valley, so nothing prepared me for the view that presented itself once the clouds lifted. Pictures do not do it justice.

Later I took a panoramic (links to larger picture):

We drove through the desert to the south, dropping in altitude until we reached Mojave.

Then we turned towards Bakersfield, and the environment got quite a bit greener and more friendly. We drove through some pleasant grassy hills, and then as we descended into the valley, a thick black cloud of smog swallowed us up. I've never seen air pollution this defined.

Luckily, the worst of the it disappeared as we exited the string of towns around Bakersfield into serious farmland. Here's a view of the smog looking back once we'd left it (that would be the thick dark band at the horizon):

We passed some amazing vinyards that stretched on for miles (and a few signs advertising rather un-prestigious wine brands), and orchards of oranges and almonds. Then we neared the coast (it was only early afternoon by this point) and it grew overcast and very green. For a while we were going through these gorgeous rippling green hills where streams and rivers had cut deep paths through what looked like sandstone.

We hit highway 1 just below San Simeon and Hearst Castle, actually, and saw it on the hill as we drove by, but didn't want to stop because we wanted to get as far up the coast as we could before nightfall.

The coastline is just amazing. Hunter remarked on how curious it was that someone had bothered to build a road there at all. But what a drive.

In a curious bit of serendipity, on a beach not too far from Cambria, I believe, we saw a beach parking lot that was full of cars and dozens of people looking out into the water, so we decided to stop and see what everyone was looking at. It turned out to be hundreds upon hundreds of elephant seals who had come ashore to this one beach, apparently one of a select few beaches that they frequent, for a month in the winter to have babies and mate. We did indeed see some black seal pups, and we stood for a few minutes watching the seals sleeping there on the sand, whacking sand onto themselves and snoring, entirely oblivious to the crowds of humans watching them.

We spent the night in Santa Cruz, where Douglas was nice enough to put us up at the Wood Duck Inn (which is no longer a bed and breakfast but is still as charming as ever). The hot tub is in a fairy circle of redwoods, and all night we heard the babble of water in the creek just outside.

The next morning we toured around Santa Cruz a bit, through the UCSC campus, up through Bonny Doon (where the mist in the redwoods was beautiful)...

...and then down back along the coast, stopping at Natural Bridges to watch the ocean...

... and then stopping at the empty Boardwalk (which I swear is way different from when I was a kid, fixed up since then I believe)...

...and then in the downtown area for lunch.

The rest of the drive was uneventful, and a rather interesting re-introduction to densely populated areas. Highlights included a very Oakland pho dinner and Hunter rocking out to Bruce Springsteen.

The bay bridge experience:

It's good to be home.