Monday - what a day

No wind overnight, and it didn't get as cold as was expected, a good thing.  Coffee/tea outside in the cool sunshine, again watching clouds form and reform over the mountains.  Today, they showed a bit more teeth, the tops of the peaks were obscured with heavy dark clouds.

 This is a quirky western campground.  Mostly 5th wheels and trailers, a few big motorhomes.  Some interesting folks here to be sure.

this sweet guy "walks" his bassett hound around the campground, chatting happily to him and the dog's tail wagging response

Tom, we thought about you when we saw this vw....

and this cheerful little trailer is our next door neighbor

We talked about what we'd do today and decided to just hang around Bishop and see what there is to this small town.  

First stop was lunch at Eric Schat's legendary bakery.  They don't allow photography inside so I can't show you how we were dwarfed by racks and racks of fragrant breads and rolls, cases of apple strudels and pies, shelves of cookies.  We sat outside, ate sandwiches on fresh sourdough bread and were in heaven with the swiss pecan cookies we discovered  tucked under our meals.  I haven't seen or tasted cookies like them since Foof would hand me one hot out of the oven in our pink kitchen on Dodge road.  Tender and beige in the middle, thin and brown on the edges,  Mmmmm.

This sign puzzled us, until we realized that the route 6 we were driving on was indeed the beginning of the same route 6 that we've taken into Provincetown, Massachusetts many times - JoAnn, you were just on  this same road recently, weren't  you?  Small world.

Route 6 travels east and north out of Bishop along the base of the White Mountains, so we decided to follow it for a while.  The scale is so huge, its hard to show you what we saw.  We drove along the wide flat valley and then turned on to a dirt road  (Chidalgo Canyon road) that skirted a high, flat volcanic tableland.  Eventually the road turned again and climbed to the top of the mesa where we parked the jeep and donned our hiking shoes.  Rumor has it that rattlesnakes are still sunning themselves at these elevations....

climbing the volcanic table, the valley and white mountains in the distance.  Cindy, you asked where they got the hay to feed their horses - take a look at these vast hay fields!

It was absolutely silent up there.  No wind, no sounds, just the crunching of our feet in the gravel.  To think that we walked where people walked almost 9000 years ago gave us goosebumps.  Evidence of them was everywhere.  We walked and walked, in absolute awe of the petroglyphs etched into the rock formations all around us.  Sorry for so many pictures, but I was so....Oh, I can't put into words how we both felt up there.

clouds sit on the tops of the White Mountains as I walked

Being on the "sunny" side of the storm all day and so involved with what we were doing, it shocked us when we came back down to Bishop looking for a grocery store.  I took the picture below from the parking lot of Von's (a Safeway affiliate) looking toward the Sierra Nevada Mountains.  They had been getting hammered with snow while we were exploring the dry volcanic rocks.

you hear a lot about the "snow line" here, and for the first time I really saw the snow line literally!

this is the view on the passenger side of Beluga sitting at our site here at Brown's Town Campground.  The mountains lit by the evening sun are the White Mountains.

Beautiful sunset tonight.   lower dark clouds completely obscured the  huge Sierra Nevada Peaks.