Mammoth Birthday Trip!!

So for the second year in a row, I decided to take C on a combination camping / fishing trip to the Eastern Sierra. The basic agenda looked something like this:

Friday : Drive to Lone Pine Campground, Go stream fishing, camp, cook food, and make smores
Saturday: Drive to Mammoth, Fish at Lake George, Check into condo at Snowcreek
Sunday: Putz around in Mammoth
Monday: Breakfast at the Stove, drive home.

Friday:

So Friday started off well. Got the car packed up and we were out of Orange County by 11:30. Stopped at In N Out in Victorville and got up to Lone Pine by about 4:30. We quickly made camp, bought some firewood, where the campground host warned us that the current was stronger this year. He was right! Took us forever to find a place with some deep pools with trout, but after some scrambling, we found a good place. I was mostly using C's little fishing rod, b/c it was easier to manuveur. Had to hand-cast the thing and loop it over a twig to slow down the salmon egg, but after a while, I got a fish to bite, hooked it, and handed it to C, who reeled it in. Cool.

After fishing, we headed back to camp - which is when the nightmare started. As we were walking into camp, I asked C if he wanted to get something out of the car, checked my pockets, only to find that my keys were totally AWOL... nowhere to be found on me. Immediately, two locations lept to mind - the trunk (b/c I have to have my keys to lock the car), or somewhere around the creek. I was convinced it was the latter, so I dragged C back down to the stream and led him back through all the scrambling we had done earlier - no luck. Ok, now it gets even more fun, to make matters worse, the campground is 7 miles west of Lone Pine - which means NO CELL PHONE coverage... so I'm a little freaked out now. No phone. No transportation. What do you do?

We started walking up to the entrance of the campground. I was hoping that there would be one of those extinct pay phone thingees, but no dice. I did find the campground host and explained my predicament to him. Happily, he didn't dismiss me as some crazed city boy. He said this happens all the time, and offered to drive me into town to see if we could find the local locksmith. C and I piled in the van and off we went.

When we got to town, the local locksmith was in his trailer. He was pretty friendly, but explained that I was SOL b/c I had one of those VW Passat things with the super fawncy key. He said he could try and come up tomorrow morning, but he couldn't help me right now - it was about 7:30pm by this time. Ugh, what to do, what to do. Fortunately, just the day before, I had the foresight to renew my AAA membership. I called the lady - who must have thought I was insane - and she said that she'd send someone up who could unlock the car. If the keys were not in the car, it would start getting ugly.

Now we all got back in the van and headed up to the campground to wait. It was about 8pm and C, bless his heart, had not had a bite to eat yet. So I started to get together the wood to make the fire, when the AAA dude pulled up. He gets out of his car and proceeds to tell me that I'm super lucky. That he was heading to bed when he got the call. I say great! let's hope my luck has changed! Well, he busts out these crazy little rubber inflater-thingees that he fits in the cracks of my passenger side door and he starts pumping air into them... the whole point is to get enough of a crack to stick this little bendy rod thing in there and pull the door handle. After some time, he actually gets the thing to work! WOO! Except my car alarm starts going off and the rest of the car locks down. Ugh.

Knowing that the only place the keys would be is in the trunk, I decide to go in through the back seat. So I have to get all the car seats out and everything. It was totally worth it, when moving my luggage from behind, I heard a distict clinging of my keys dropping. Huzzah! I grabbed them and we were back in business.

Needless to say, it was a little late when we sat down to cook. Again, C was a real trooper and never complained. We got the fire on around 9:30 and were done eating by about 10:30 - s'mores and all.
Into the tent by 11pm, two Richard Scary books, and we were both asleep by 12:30 - though C was out almost instanteously.

Saturday

We were packed up and out of the campground by about 8:30. Off to Schat's bakery in Bishop for our morning sweet roll before heading up to Mammoth. We also got some gummy worms, gummy sharks, and jawbreakers at Schats for treats throughout the weekend - yum. After a stop at Subway to pack some sandwiches for lunch, we got up to Lake George by about 10:30am. We quickly found a great little inlet to fish from, got ourselves comfortable, and got the lines in the lake. C was playing with his Power Rangers in this tree root castle and I was watching the lines. Then, we hear these people yelling out something... "Bear coming! Bear!" Now, I've fished at Lake George for probably 10 years of my life and I've never seen a bear at the lake, but lo and behold... on this particular trip, there's the bear. It was a little bear cub (no sign of Mom tho) and it wander past everybody's stuff without paying attention - of couse, until it got to OUR stuff. First it thoroughly sniffed C's Power Rangers, then it tried to open up my brand new Playmate cooler - no doubt smelling the fine 2005 Bud Light can in there. Finally, frustrated by the cooler, it moved on and left. Playmate Cooler 1, Bear 0

The rest of the day was pretty uneventful. We only caught one fish out of the lake before we headed down to the condo to check in. C was pretty zonked and he fell asleep on the way there. So I put him in his bed and he took a good nap. I took the chance to actually read for once... woohoo! It was great. After that, we hit Giovanni's for dinner and played for a while over at the kid's playground in town.

Sunday

We got up Sunday and hopped in the car to do some exploring. When I was a kid, Radies and I used to go to this place called Obisdan Flats. I didn't remember anything about it, just that I thought it was cool. So we headed that way.

On our way out, we stopped at the Earthquake Fault - one of the places on the earth, where you can actually see where the earth's plates have seperated. I used to think it was pretty hokey, but it actually is pretty cool to see. It's just this giant crack that runs along the earth. You can't climb all the down anymore, but you can walk across it and peer down into it. It's pretty deep and filled with old snow. Cool stuff.

After the Fault, we were off to Obsidan Flats. The thing was... I didn't really have a clue where it was. See, here's the drawback about the "information super highway" - it works great as long as you're on it. When you can't get online, you can't find squat. You forget that a long time ago, people used to write books about this stuff. So nowdays you take it for granted that you can get instant access to information when you need it. But in typical Leo form, I set out determined to find the place.

Well, I was close, we were aiming for Obsidan Flats and I found Obsidan Dome. It worked out well tho. It was this really cool mound of huge obsidan rocks. C thought it was really cool and looked like something from a castle. So we actually walked all the way up this path to the top of the rocks and had some lunch there. It was over a 2 mile walk and C did it w/o any help. Not bad!

After that, we headed back to the condo to play some tennis and go swimming. There's something awesome about staying at snowcreek, b/c the tennis courts have these amazing views. So surreal. The whole town is amazing like that. After the tennis and swim, the boy crashed and had another nap - lucky him! Once he woke up, we went back to the park again and then picked up some more dinner - this time it was Carnitas from Robertos - good times!

Monday

Bleh, another year, another birthday. At least I started it right by having breakfast at the Stove. If you ever are in Mammoth and love good breakfasts, go to the Stove. Do it. It's majestic. Seriously. Yum. After that, we played at the park again (right next door). Then we headed up to Horseshoe Lake to see how it was doing. To my surprise, it was overflowing with water and there were people out there on boats! Just last year, Horseshoe had been closed b/c of CO2 emissions, but there it was... being used as a lake again. Not sure what happened. I'll never swim in that lake again (or sail another raft ;-) ) but C and I did skip some sweet rocks across the lake. Back in the car and out.

Leaving Mammoth is always a real downer for me. I have a lot of amazing memories up there with my dad and my friend, Jason, and all the stuff we used to do. I always get bummed when we hit that stretch of 395 where you can no longer see the mountain. It's a magical place for me. A place I go, when I need a recharge and a life reproritization. I'm sure everybody has there own place for this. For me, it's the Eastern Sierra - Mammoth, Lone Pine, even Yosemite (when not too crowded). These are all places that make me feel small. Which is a good thing since I often probably think way too highly of myself ;-)

On the way down 395, we stopped at the Mt Whitney Fish Hatchery. I was bummed to learn that they don't raise the small fish there anymore, but they did have the big fish in the pond and in the troughs... Such a strange experience for a fisherman. You spend all this time trying to catch a huge fish, with different bait and lures and what not. Then you come to the fish hatchery and these MASSIVE trout all swarm around this fish food you can buy for a quarter. I'm tempted to put that feed on a treble hook once and land me one ;-)

The last place that we stopped on the way out was Fossil Falls. This was a place that I have to thank Radies' dad - Papa Radies - for introducing us to. I bet 99% of motorists going to Mammoth have never stopped at Fossil Falls. It's a couple miles north of Little Lake, but it's one of the coolest places you'll see. It's basically a little canyon of all this crazy lava rock. The rock is shaped and curved into all these insane formations. I remember as a kid how much fun it was to clamber around in these rocks. Now as an adult, I think... how did we not end up dead? The drop offs are pretty steep, it looks like the terrain for a rattlesnake display... how did we survive? C and I did a little exploring in the rocks and then we got back in the car and drove back.

Photos from the trip are here