Catching the Trade Winds: ROCK HUNTING AND A GHOST TOWN NEAR LEE VINING

Carol writes: As we pulled into our new “home” at a rustic campground well above Mono Lake on the outskirts of Lee Vining, memories of our 1989 stay with our kids in this very same campground came flooding back through the gray cells. The main difference was that all the trees appeared much taller than we had remembered… and were much more flashy on this brilliant fall day.

Fond 1989 memories of obsidian rock-hunting exploits, along with a cherished visit to our favorite ghost town of Bodie, California, had been carefully preserved for almost three decades. We planned a replay of some of these prized adventures over a few days with Al’s cousin Rick, a passionate rock hound, and his wife, Roseanne.

When we visited Lee Vining

in 1989, the city of Los Angeles had pushed Mono Lake to the edge of ecological collapse as a result of excessive diversion of water from four Mono Lake tributaries. Change needed to happen fast or the entire lake would become a dry lakebed!

Fast-forward almost three decades… For us, it was gratifying to see that the Save-Mono-Lake campaign appeared to have been successful.

On this day in 2018, the size of the lake was no longer receding and instead was steadily moving toward the goal of the 1994 mandated lake level. The fascinating calcium carbonate tufa formations along the lake shore once again seemed as one with Nature.

The grasslands around the older tufa formations sitting high and dry along the south shore exhibited a healthy and vibrant plant community.

Thankfully, to our inexpert eye, the millions of visitors who have hiked the dirt trails winding through the tufa formations have respected the rules that forbid climbing on these fragile works of Nature.

The fall migratory bird population of grebes appeared to be thriving as they devoured the brine shrimp in Mono Lake’s salty waters.

For our first evening with Rick and Roseanne, dinner consisted of a yummy homemade lasagna that had been hiding out in our motorhome freezer for a few months. The next day,

the four of us set out for a look around Panum Crater,

and then Obsidian Crater, where we discovered that years and years of public rock-hunting had picked over any choice pieces of obsidian.

Since Roseanne had never been to Yosemite, we decided on a sightseeing drive up spectacular Tioga Pass

into Yosemite at Tuolumne Meadows

for a picnic lunch and short hike on that awesome white granite base of Lembert Dome.

As far as we were concerned, the main attraction in the Lee Vining area was the West’s best-preserved ghost town at Bodie State Historic Park. In my memory, this marked our fourth visit to Bodie, each visit about 15 years apart…

At 8375 feet of elevation at the eastern edge of the Sierra Nevada mountains, Bodie was once notorious as the wildest town in the West. During its heyday from 1877 to the late 1880s, Bodie was a raucous gold and silver mining community with a population that once swelled to about 10,000.

For well over a hundred years, the dry high-desert climate of Bodie has been remarkably efficient at preserving the mining complex

and wooden town structures in a phenomenal state of “arrested decay.”

With a blue backdrop of clear and radiant skies, awesome picture-taking was effortless in Bodie. The Methodist Church, Bodie’s most famous landmark, continued to slumber in perfect arrested decay on one of Bodie’s now-silent streets.

The Bodie Hotel lobby looked like a pool game had just broken up last week.

The schoolhouse windows

offered a tantalizing peek

into a schoolroom that resembled those from our generation’s elementary years.

This leaning beauty was still slanted just like it was when Al and I visited as a newly married couple in 1978.

The chaotic coffin display in the mortuary windows was a sober reminder of how frequently such services were needed throughout Bodie’s boom times.

The tombstones in the town cemetery

reflected the fact that numerous former residents of Bodie had a first-generation European heritage, and many died young.

In my mind, Bodie’s most fascinating feature was the scene of frontier daily life that was so perfectly illustrated through the windows of its buildings.

Houses and retail shops looked like the inhabitants just rode away one day and never looked back… and that was essentially the way it happened when mining operations suddenly played out at the turn of the 20th century.

At lunchtime

framed western shots among the ruins were irresistible.

Wow! That was another all-round perfect visit to the Wild West’s most perfect ghost town of Bodie…

After our visit with Rick and Roseanne, we had another week left to explore a little more around Lee Vining. Ever since that walk with Rick on the granite slopes of Lembert Dome, we foolishly thought a short climb to the top would be a snap,

until we came to the part

where steepness and serious safety concerns forced us to reconsider going all the way to the top. We had a spectacular view of the mountains surrounding Tuolumne Meadows that we had been searching for,