Tuesday, April 01, 2008
Mammoth Ski Trip
This year's spring trip to Mammoth was great. There's nowhere so peaceful or soothing to spend a week, especially when it offers the complete sort of solitude it can in winter. While we would see others if we were skiing down on the trails below the cabin, we never saw a single other soul at the cabin. Nestled in the woods and snow, we had a refuge from everything. No TV, internet or running water - just books and family.
Dad got us all ski passes for the Tamarack Lodge's groomed tracks. That was fun, and very helpful since the snow was crummy. Libby learned a lot about how to snow plow, and I tried to learn a bit about stopping. We covered a lot of miles around Lake Mary, Mamie, and Horseshoe, and took some other trails we'd never been on before. We went up Coldwater Creek campground's trail to the very end, took the Pine Creek trail, and some others.
Conditions were, as I mentioned above, far less than ideal. It was about 60 when we started skiing on Monday afternoon. So, of course, it froze overnight, and the next morning saw everything covered in thick ice. Fortunately, it was warm again, and thawed pretty quickly. But Wednesday and Thursday were colder, and it never thawed in the shadows. We got a dusting of snow on Tuesday night, but it didn't accumulate - all the storm brought was intense wind for Wednesday. In some places it was windy enough to push you right along on your skis without any work. That's sort of fun if its behind you, but less fun when it's a headwind.
Another bummer was that Dad came down with a cold part way through the trip. That's especially a bummer for me because I apparently caught it from him. Libby caught it from him or me, too, but I seem to have gotten it the worst. Not that I'm complaining (sorry, yes, I am complaining).
On the way home we stopped at Fossil Falls (above) as we left Mammoth pretty early because of the icy conditions - there just wasn't much of a point to sticking around. That turned out to be a neat place; Libby and I hadn't stopped there before. It's just south of Coso Junction on HWY 395. Once upon a time, back during the last major glacial period, Owen's River actually came out of Owen's Lake and flowed down through the desert below Owen's Valley. There it flowed over an earthquake fault - a bit of an uplift that created a ridge of basaltic cliffs - creating a waterfall. This shaped the basalt into fantastic whorled shapes. When the glacial period ended, Owen's Lake became a salt lake without an outlet (like Mono Lake), and you can take the opportunity to walk around a waterfall's bed. Anyway, it was a neat stop, and there were some neat wildflowers and birds, as well as the neat rock formations. We were also treated to a flyover from an F-16. I've included pictures from there in our Flicker photo-album for the whole trip:
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