All right, all right. Sheesh.

Now pop the popcorn, and put your jammies on, and settle down, and I’ll tell you the rest…well, some more…of the story of when I drove all the way to Reno, Nevada from Los Angeles in The Little White Rent-a-Car That Could, and back again.

And for those who came in late, you can read the first installment here. Please do so before delving into the next adventure, so you’re not bothering the others and holding up proceedings with pointless questions.

As I was saying, I was climbing the road north out of Bishop, up into the cool pines, in the snow. I was approaching the Mammoth Lakes region, which is known to most Californians primarily as a ski area, but it’s better known to amateur geology buffs, like your Transterrestrial Muser, as ground zero for some really spectacular volcanic activity.

For those fellow amateur geologists in the audience, there’s a good description, along with a Shuttle photo, here. Basically, the deal is that this is a region that’s just never satisfied with its topography for very long. Periodically (and much more often than condo owners in Mammoth would appreciate if they were really aware of it), it decides to completely renovate itself, upending mountains, spewing gouts of magma, thrusting up new volcanic peaks that quickly erode to cinder cones, purchasing new furniture, and then covering the whole with a layer of volcanic ash to protect it when the guests come over with their kids.

It makes for some pretty spectacular scenery, but it’s hell on property values if you happen to be around and have a time share, or a full-time apres ski apartment, when it occurs. The current inhabitants may be living on borrowed time, judging by the earthquake clusters that seem to be occuring with increasing frequency up there.

But I wasn’t particularly concerned about it–I was just passing through, and I’d already cheated death once in my crossing of St. Andy’s fault a few hours earlier–I was on a hot streak. I was just enjoying the mountain scenery, cinder cones and all, and, being from a beach city in southern California, the snow.

As I passed the June Lake region between Mammoth Lakes and Yosemite, that gem of the desert, Mono Lake, came into view.

Mono is another lake, like Owens, that suffers from Los Angeles thirst. However, it wasn’t emptied completely–it just had its level reduced. It’s the largest natural lake entirely in California. Tahoe is bigger, but it’s shared with Nevada.

There are several lakes like Mono in the Great Basin desert. They are the last destination for many eastward-flowing rivers in the Sierra. There is no escape for water from the Great Basin, except the ignominious whimper of evaporation. Some rivers empty into lakes like Mono, others simply trickle into nothingness, defeated by the sun and lack of humidity. Because there is no outlet for such lakes, and the only way of maintaining the level is by evaporation, the salts and minerals concentrate in them, because they’re abandoned by the evaporating water that brought them to the dance. The Great Salt Lake is the most notable example, being several times the salinity of the ocean, but lakes like Mono are even more concentrated.

Now that I’m into the country in which Samuel Clemens first honed his writing skills, I’ll let him describe it.

Mono Lake lies in a lifeless, treeless, hideous desert, eight thousand feet above the level of the sea, and is guarded by mountains two thousand feet higher, whose summits are always clothed in clouds. This solemn, silent, sailless sea — this lonely tenant of the loneliest spot on earth — is little graced with the picturesque. It is an unpretending expanse of grayish water, about a hundred miles in circumference, with two islands in its center, mere upheavals of rent and scorched and blistered lava, snowed over with gray banks and drifts of pumice-stone and ashes, the winding-sheet of the dead volcano, whose vast crater the lake has seized upon and occupied.

The lake is two hundred feet deep, and its sluggish waters are so strong with alkali that if you only dip the most hopelessly soiled garment into them once or twice, and wring it out, it will be found as clean as if it had been through the ablest of washer-women’s hands. While we camped there our laundry work was easy. We tied the week’s washing astern of our boat, and sailed a quarter of a mile, and the job was complete, all to the wringing out. If we threw the water on our heads and gave them a rub or so, the white lather would pile up three inches high. This water is not good for bruised places and abrasions of the skin.

(I mainly wanted to throw that in for those who were deluded into thinking that I was a great writer–note the contrast…).

The lake is no longer two hundred feet deep, but it’s getting back up there. LA is no longer taking as much water from the streams that feed it, and the level is rising again. And while there are no fish in it, it’s not entirely lifeless. It does harbor a species of brine shrimp that have evolved to adapt in such a saline environment, and these in turn provide roadside snacks for birds that use the lake as a migratory pitstop.

As I come down the hill toward Mono, I approach the town of Lee Vining, eastern gateway to Yosemite. I’ve always thought that this is the most spectacular way to enter the park.

Highway 120 climbs steeply up from the town, switching back and forth, from desert sagebrush, through a zone of aspens, up through pines, to above the tree line, toward Tioga Pass, in the highest of the high Sierra. From there, surrounded by monoliths and megaliths of ancient granite, you descend into the beautiful Tuolumne Meadows, on the way down to the natural cathedral of Yosemite Valley.

But even if I had the time and inclination to go into Yosemite today, I can’t. Not without a snowmobile, or a sled and reindeer (not available for rent). At over 11,000 feet, Tioga Pass gets hundreds of inches of snow in the winter, and is too much trouble to keep open. It closes in the fall, and doesn’t reopen until mid spring.

So I continue north through Lee Vining, along the west shore of Mono Lake, and climb the grade back up into the mountains.

And it’s getting late, and I have to get up in the morning for the drive back to LA. So…to be continued…