2003/10 Lassen Peak trip - Mono Lake and Yosemite |
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The next weekend I was off on another trip. I was scheduled to give presentations at our customer conference in Reno, Nevada, the North American equivalent of the European conference in Prague. Reno itself is not all that great, mainly casinos and neon, but the country around it can be beautiful, and I planned to stay on until the weekend and drive up into the mountains. As I was paying for the rental car, I’d booked the cheapest car I could find, a Geo from Enterprise. I don’t think the Geo actually exists as the guys at Enterprise always try to get you to upgrade “For only another $5 a day you could have a much nicer car”. “How about $2 a day?” I eventually weakened and upgraded to a big white Chevy Malibu for 50c a day. I didn’t need anything that big, but at least I could cook and sleep in it if I had to. Never did see the Geo.
I had no meetings to attend on the Sunday, so I set off for a day in the country, heading south along the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada mountains. The road goes through Carson City. It’s the capital of Nevada but it’s overshadowed by the much bigger cities of Las Vegas and Reno, and it’s really an odd-looking little place. It has the usual Greek-style state government buildings but they’re interspersed with much larger garish casinos. And it’s all right next to the main road, so I could imagine the governor of 
Nevada stepping out of his front door and getting wiped out by a truck barreling along 395.
South of Carson the road crosses into California and the price of petrol went from $1.60 to $2.60. I can see why Gray Davis, the governor of California, is in such trouble! The scenery is mainly dry and brown rolling hills with sage brush, but I stopped for a snack in Walker Canyon, a pretty spot where the river tumbles through the mountains.
My destination was Mono Lake, at the foot of Tioga Pass. Mono has always been weird,
sitting on a volcanic hot spot, full of lava and cinders, and so salty that it forms big tufa pinnacles below the surface. It’s also home to thousands of birds that come in the summer to feed off the lake’s shrimp.
In recent years, LA has been stealing the water that feeds it, and there’s been a big battle with the environmentalists about the dropping water level. This has made the lake even weirder as it’s exposed the tufa that you can see in the pictures. I got down to the lakeside in a few places and mingled with the tufa and the gulls and the avocets.
I still had an hour or so of daylight left, so I drove up the Tioga Pass to the entrance into Yosemite National Park. Driving into the park would cost me a $20 weekly pass, so I parked outside and walked in and took a quick look at mountains and lakes, very pretty with the fall colours. The famous waterfalls are down in Yosemite Valley, a couple of hours drive away, so I wasn’t going to get that far, unfortunately. But I’d forgotten how scenic the Tioga Pass is. On our last visit back in ’79 our major focus was on whether the car and tent-trailer would make it to the top of the pass, as we’d already boiled the engine once, the previous day in Death Valley. It was on that trip that I’d first seen an ad for a Suburban and thought “Hmm, that might be a better bet than destroying a car doing this stuff.”
From Yosemite it was a three-hour drive back to Reno. The Hilton Hotel is enormous and dominates the 
skyline. One side of the building is a gigantic parking lot, and the other is a KOA campsite, full of trailers and motor homes. The entire ground floor is a casino. It also has all the obvious hotel stuff: front door, check-in, elevators, and restaurants, but to get from one to the other you have to walk though ranks of slot machines or card tables. The only place to sit down is at a slot machine. Even the rooms are short on furniture. They don’t want you wasting your time in your room. The message is clear “Get down there and gamble!”