Driving up 395

Around 11am today, the babies were yelling and it was getting hot, and Rocket Boy and I looked at each other and said, "do you want to go somewhere?" We considered driving the 114 miles to Bakersfield to go to Trader Joe's, but it seemed too late in the day already. Then I suggested, "let's just drive up Highway 395 and see what it's like." So we did that. We headed for Lone Pine, which careful readers of this blog will remember as the place that last weekend's houseguests drove from in a very short time. Only 83 miles away!

One nice thing about Ridgecrest is that even though it's in the middle of nowhere, it's not TOO far away from a lot of places, such as National Parks (Death Valley, Sequoia, King's Canyon), and other states (Nevada, Arizona, Utah). It's also near a whole lot of wide open spaces, seeing as how it is itself a wide open space surrounded by wide open space.

Highway 395 from Ridgecrest to Lone Pine involves a lot of wide open space. Also a lot of really big mountains, but I found them a little depressing. They are so dry, so barren. Mountains in the desert are different from mountains in semi-arid areas like Colorado. Also, it was the Sierra Nevada we were driving past (to the west of us), but the eastern Sierra Nevada is very different from the western side (which is gorgeous).

We drove through a few little towns, so little that it was hard to call them towns. Coso Junction, Olancha, Cartago. Who LIVES in these places and how do they make it through the days? I have quite a lot more sympathy for the residents of such towns now. Though of course Ridgecrest isn't really a small town, it has more than 25,000 residents. What must it be like to live in a truly small town in the middle of nowhere, a town with no library? I simply can't imagine it. I hope they live there because they like it, not because they have to.

In Lone Pine we had a snack at a little restaurant with no other customers. There were four kinds of pie on the menu and two kinds of muffin, but in truth, they had only one of each. So RB and I both had cherry pie and the babies split a banana nut muffin.

Then we took the Whitney Portal Road west to the base of Mt Whitney, where people start to climb the mountain. That was very interesting. On the map, the Whitney Portal Road looks like this short straight road west. It isn't. It climbs approximately 5000 feet in just a few miles. It winds, it switchbacks, it changes from bare desert to, basically, Yosemite, except it isn't Yosemite, it's a little ways east of Sequoia National Park, but same difference. When we reached the Whitney Portal, it was packed! So many cars, so many people milling about. People getting ready to climb, people who had just finished climbing, people who wanted to see the base of Mt Whitney I guess. People like us, who just wanted out of the heat.

My heart ached. All around us were slim, fit people in hiking clothes. People who had been shopping at REI or the North Face. People who knew how to lace up a pair of hiking boots. People who THOUGHT HIKING WAS FUN. People who would RATHER HIKE THAN GO TO WALMART. In other words, we were probably the only Ridgecrest residents there. I saw a middle-aged couple eating some interesting food that they brought out of a Trader Joe's bag. "Which Trader Joe's did you get that from?" I wanted to ask. The couple did not look like they lived in Bakersfield. They had a serious, private, look to them, that look that says "we have several advanced degrees and we belong to the Sierra Club." As Rocket Boy said, there were probably no bumper stickers in that parking lot that said "Obummer."

Well, I shouldn't complain. It's nice to know that a place like that, with people like that, is so close to us. Only 83 miles away! I told the babies, "Someday you can come back and climb this mountain!" And that's a nice thing to look forward to.