(Woolly?) Mammoth Lakes

After Vegas, we yearned for something a little more wholesome and natural. We set off early* and went North. After some fun (Alexander) and nauseating (Kim) roads over barrenish hills we entered California. A very different California to the one we all know and “love”: rural, untouched and quiet. Seems on the Eastern side of the Sierra Nevada, the landscape resembles neighbouring Nevada much more. We pulled over for lunch in a town called Williams that was really playing its Route 66 card hard. The town was small enough, but charming and bustling. Long before we arrived, we knew our destination via the prescience of the Google to be The Pizza Factory, where we got an awesome pizza made more awesome by anchovies. Kim currently disagrees on that last addition, but one day she will come around – perhaps about the same time she will start appreciating Marmite is my guess.

Our destination that day was the mountain resort of Mammoth Lakes. we had a number of Couchsurf offers in the area, but Dan clinched the deal by offering home-cooked Italian food prepared by his mum who was in town. Hard to pass that up. It was great. He’s got a sweet setup there as a manager of a residential complex – a cosy but geometrically interesting chalet, an attached pool and hot tub, beautiful surroundings and, of course, the aforementioned mum. A very comfortable evening we spent there, tapered, perhaps, by stories of what bears did to the last car parked in our spot. “Sardine Can” seems a suitable descriptor.

In the morning*, we started by going to some hidden local hot springs in the valley. Some industrious chaps had stuck a pipe into one of them and routed it into a rock bowl creating a hot tub continually fed with free hot water in the middle of no where in a valley surrounded by snow-capped mountains. The day was glorious and we just sat in it for an hour until someone else came along and wanted a go.

We wanted to head out to Yosemite, a mere 2 hours away on the other side of the mountain range, with a convenient road through the pass to take us right there. Unfortunately, this road was buried under metres of snow. Which in turn was buried under a foggy blizzard. The State of California kindly informed us that our handy road was closed and that the shortest detour was a convenient 8 hour trip to the North via Carson City. Which we did. Just was well; even the usually-easily-driven highway that was open was the toughest drive yet: snow on the ground, visibility limited to metres, widing roads, lunatic trucks and steep grades. Good place to learn to drive, I reckon; everything since has felt trivial. But we got through and entered a rolling hillscape reminiscent of the Cotswolds (with Americans and big cars instead of thatched cottages, of course). The sunset caught the landscape and lit it a rich golden colour, something it has done a few times out here…

* “Early” and “Morning” are heavily qualified for the duration of this voyage.