On Saturday we drove from Lee Vining down to Lone Pine.  Lone Pine is a small town that is between Mount Whitney, the highest point in the continental US at 14,495 ft, and Death Valley with the lowest point in the continental US at -282 ft.  There’s only about 100 miles between these two extremes!

When we were at Lee Vining we were right next to Mono Lake which had been depleted due to Los Angeles having water rights and using up the lake to supply water to the city.  In the 1990s this was stopped and the lake is slowly getting back up to levels that were common before L.A. started draining it.

Here in Lone Pine we are next to Owens Lake which was completely drained by Los Angeles.  That created huge dust storms and changed the landscape of the area.  Recently Los Angeles was forced to start doing dust mitigation in the lake bed but there’s only a small fraction of the water there used to be.

We’re back in hot country!  It’s dry and dusty and hot here at Lone Pine.  While here we visited Mt. Whitney Portal, a base camp for hikers going to the top of Mt. Whitney.  We also visited fossil falls, a dry falls area (dry because it was fed by Owens Lake which is dry) in an area of lava flows, so what you see is huge black rocks shaped by water flow over a long period of time dropping over 40 ft to the bottom of the falls.  If Owens Lake was still full, there would be a large river dropping over the falls, but since it’s dry you can climb around on the rocks (we didn’t!) and see the shapes made in the lava.  The whole area is very interesting, with volcano cones and lava flows and black rocks all over the place.  There’s a red volcano cone as well, due to different chemicals in the magma that pushed through the surface from that particular volcano right next to other very black cones.

I’m a bit behind in processing the photos that we take but I’ll have some from our day trips from Lone Pine in the next day or two!