The Eastern Sierra's

On Tuesday October 7th a few of us met in Lee Vining, CA for a photo tour of the area. We were hoping to find autumn colors, warm days and no breeze. Instead we found that the area can have some extreme weather.

On Wednesday, 10-8-08, the day started out calm and cool. We visited Mono Lake for "sunrise", I was a bit late, but that was okay because the Nikonian's had pretty well found all the best tripod holes. They came well prepared with muck boots, trash bags for their tripod legs and 3 large vans full of photographers.

After Mono Lake, we drove back to the June Lake Loop campground, Oh! Ridge, for some of Leon's fine Bishop Bakery Cinnamon rolls and hot coffee. We spent the rest of the morning in the June Lake area. There was little color other than green and the wind started to pick up. But we kept ourselves occupied with what we found.

We went only as far south as Mammoth Mountain and the Devil's Postpile National Monument We had expected to see some of the media there covering the Steve Fossett plane crash discovery in that area, but found the park was pretty empty.

That night the winds really picked up, we had planned to spend the next day exploring Bodie State Historical Park so the wind was more of an inconvenience than a stopper to a day of photography. The park was full of photographers too.

We stopped at Lundy Canyon on the way back to Lee Vining to look for more autumn colors, we were lucky and found some, but with the wind it made them better to enjoy in person than photograph.

By Friday 10-10-08, the winds at Oh! Ridge had me wondering how anything stood up and the cold had the windshield wiper fluid frozen solid in my car. We left and took Tioga Pass just before the weather got really bad.

Photos of the trip are here: Eastern Sierra Fall Color, Mono Lake, Devil's Postpile and Bodie.

Next, the road to Yosemite