Bishop, California

Fall weather is changeable.    We know that and we watch the forecast carefully when our path will take us up into the mountains.     McCloud was to be a few days stop for us but, when we saw that a nasty sounding winter storm was approaching the Sierras and would hit just as we were trying to drive through the area, we changed our plans.   Driving Beluga in 40+ mph winds and through accumulations of up to a foot of snow isn't ever going to happen.    We stopped for one night in Susanville and then moved on through the high elevations of Lee Vining and June Lake while the sun was still shining.     The happy result of that pivot was that we'd have a few more days in Bishop!  

 

 

Our Plan B worked beautifully.   We arrived in sunny cool weather, and it will be that way for our whole visit, we leave here on Tuesday. 

Here comes the weather, sneaking over the mountains.....

 When we woke the next morning, the mountains we had driven through just the day before were beautiful and snow covered.     We made the right choice.

 

Bishop and its surrounding areas are one of our favorite places.    Craggy mountains, lakes, streams, shimmering Aspen trees, the Owens River, plenty of off roading adventures, spectacular scenery and lots of rose bushes to accommodate the Rose Robbers favorite pastime.    And....Erick Schat's Bakkery is in Bishop.

Dave preparing to eat Santa

oh Dave....

Schat's Bakery serves fresh roast turkey sandwiches on an array of freshly baked breads.   It also offers a large number of German style cookies (think...the sorts of cookies Foof baked for us growing up) pastries, coffee cakes, candies, etc.   Dave's sandwich choice is always the "Santa".   It's basically a huge turkey club sandwich with cranberry sauce on sourdough bread.  The fact that the bakery building is surrounded by rose bushes seals the deal for Dave.

So, I mentioned off road explorations.   One day we took lunch, pointed Rocky east and headed up Silver Canyon, just to see what we could see.   It was a scenic, fairly easy, but rocky road with 10 water crossings (as far as we went at least....) that would eventually take us up to 10,500 feet and into the Ancient Bristlecone Forest.

We turned around well before that, however.     The Bristlecones would wait for another day, another and easier route. 

Silver Canyon

very bad picture of a flock of Chukar trying to lead us somewhere

back down to the valley floor

Another day we decided to explore the nearby Volcanic Tablelands.   They rise abruptly about 300 feet from the valley floor and were formed by a cataclysmic volcanic eruption 750,000 years ago.   I've borrowed a photo to show you since we were ON them instead of looking at them from a distance.

 There are interesting petroglyph panels scattered around this area and we were on a mission to find some.       

Not another soul around, absolute silence.....just us and the drawings made by Piute Shoshone hands, some as long ago as 3000 years ago....

Private pilots beware says Dave....wave clouds

I won't bore you with the rest of the pictures, needless to say we were on overload.

Ok, just one more.

 On our way back, we took a few sidetracks and found ourselves in a beautiful, narrow red rock canyon.   We didn't follow it all the way through, it was obvious that there had been a decent flood of water there recently.   Better safe than sorry, especially near the end of the day.

  I think I'll end this post right here.    I'll show you our drive around the June Lake Loop and another day's exploration in the snow at over 10,000 feet in the next post. 

Here's Annie!