Independence to Rock Creek
All day in the Eastern Sierra :-)

At the Winnedumah hotel break­fast this morn­ing I was chat­ting with a cou­ple from San Diego. Inter­est­ing­ly enough the man of the cou­ple turned out to be best friends with Scott Allen when they were at Poway High School togeth­er. I made a small record­ing of Paul with my iPhone so I could pass it along to Scott, which I did lat­er in the week, it was all very fun.

After break­fast and load­ing up of the Suzu­ki I rode up the due west road to Onion Val­ley (that’s me in the upper left start­ing up). I have only been to there a cou­ple of oth­er times, both in the 70s. The first one was when I walked out from the trip up the John Muir Trail to pick up a food par­cel Car­ol and I had mailed our­selves to the Onion Val­ley Ranger Sta­tion. The oth­er was a few years lat­er when best friend Dave and I parked in Onion Val­ley and hiked up over Kearsarge Pass and into the Rae Lakes basin in late Octo­ber. It was a beau­ti­ful ride up to the val­ley and back down to Inde­pen­dence before head­ing north on 395.

It was up to Bish­op for a late break­fast then by the Millpond Recre­ation Area where we all used to attend the annu­al Sep­tem­ber music fes­ti­val (which is still hap­pen­ing in two weeks). Favorite bicy­cling coun­try all around this area from those years. Up the road along the low­er rock creek to Tom’s Place for a stop and shop then UP the Rock Creek Road to the end for a won­der­ful six mile hike.

After the hike I rode over and reserved camp­site #17 in the camp­ground adjoin­ing Rock Creek Lake then found out that the clos­est din­ner was at Tom’s Place, The “Pie in the Sky” restau­rant across the lake was not open for din­ner. Oh well, too hun­gry to do much inner brain bar­gain­ing so it was down the 13 miles to Tom’s. As I was eat­ing I debat­ed whether to for­go the $10 deposit I’d paid for #17 and stay in the low­er (and poten­tial­ly much warmer) camp­ground 1/4 mile from Tom’s. But I decid­ed I had not been camp­ing in the high coun­try for a long time so, well fed and con­tent, I enjoyed the 13 miles back up the moun­tain, set up my camp and wan­dered around the lake for awhile as the day was ending.

A very won­der­ful day in my favorite ter­rain. Click on the mon­tage above for some shots of the day. Click­ing in the cen­ter of the screen dur­ing the slideshow will cre­ate and pro­vide full screen images to you if you wish to see the images enlarged a bit.