I’ve been under the weather for a few days, so I have a lot of catching up to do on my blog. Heat doesn’t agree with me, and by heat I mean any ambient temperature over about 75 degrees. Just can’t do it. We’ve been so hot in so many places (including Seattle) in the past year, I’m thinking we may have to move to Canada. I looked up the symptoms of heat-related illness, and I have been feeling most of them: fatigue, nausea, headaches, excessive thirst, muscle aches and cramps, weakness, confusion or anxiety, drenching sweats often accompanied by cold, clammy skin, slowed or weakened heartbeat, dizziness, agitation. On the other hand, it could have been a bug.

Anyway, back to events. Coincident with our high school reunion was the annual car show on Main Street. Cheryl was staying with us in the RV, so Saturday morning she and I drove the mile or so from the beach to El Segundo and parked near the high school, across from the library (where I used to spend many, many happy hours). Ours is, in my opinion, the most beautiful high school ever:

We found Cathie, Jeannie, Vonnie, and Dan eating breakfast at the Main Street Café.

So odd to be eating at a restaurant in downtown El Segundo, a restaurant with reviews on Yelp and TripAdvisor, no less! When we were growing up, there were almost no restaurants in town because who needed them? Everyone’s mom cooked dinner every night, so who would be eating dinner in a restaurant, let alone breakfast? Inconceivable.

We commenced meandering through the car show, where all up and down Main Street, from Mariposa to past Grand Ave, were parked pre-1975 custom classic street rods, antique sports cars, race cars and special interest cars.

This was the 17 Annual Main Street Car Show, sponsored by the El Segundo Police Officers Association. (Side note: Cathie, who lives in ES, mentioned that a police officer once told her that the most common crime in ES is passing bad checks.)

I know little about cars and care less, and the sun was beating down, but the people-watching was good, and we ran into a few old friends.

I was impressed with the care that some people bestow on their old cars. Southern California in particular has given rise to a car culture that I suspect is unmatched anywhere. To me, a car is a thing that gets you from here to there, and if it can do so with good gas mileage, some degree of comfort, and the ability to carry 4×8 sheets of plywood on its roof, so much the better. But it seems I’m in the minority.

The car culture in SoCal pervades casual conversation. While doing laundry back in China Lake, I chatted briefly with a guy from Carlsbad. When he learned where we were headed, immediately he began giving me advice on which highways and freeways to take and to avoid, and at what times of the day. I’ve heard this sort of thing again and again: Whatever you do, don’t take the (freeway no.) between (location) and (location) between (time) and (time) – my brother got stuck there for 4 hours last week; or, Be sure to take the (freeway no.) to get to (location) but then switch to the (freeway no.) before you get to (location). Route management consulting seems to be a pervasive and constant preoccupation here, at least a hobby, maybe even an art form.

Have I ever mentioned how much I love the beach? Probably. We’re now camped at the beach just west of El Segundo CA, where I grew up and spent many, many – too many – hours baking in the sun on the beach, body surfing, hanging out with friends. The sand is the perfect texture and color, and the water is the perfect temperature, with ideal waves for body surfing, and the breeze is just strong and cool enough without being too strong or cool, and the culture on the beach is as familiar to me as my own family. This is the place on earth where all my molecules are at home and I feel the best.

We’re here for my high school class reunion tomorrow night. This is not the 40th or the 50th or anything like that. No, our class in general had a good time in high school and still likes to get together, and we’re blessed to have two, well, party girls – Patty and April – who do the work to make the arrangements and get us together, as well as a larger group of helpers who support them. This one is our “Medicare-Eligible Reunion” – we’re all turning 65 this year.

So as a pre-party to the reunion tomorrow, we invited the class to come out to where we’re camped on the beach and join us for a cook-out and later a bonfire on the beach. We picked up lots of wood from Cheryl’s when we stopped in Reno, and she brought more when she drove down. Fortuitously, just before we left Bellevue our friend Mike gifted us with a beautiful Gränsfors Splitting Hatchet for the RV that Patrick put to good use chopping wood for the barbeque as well as kindling for the bonfire.

So good to see everyone! and talk as though 47 years have not passed since graduation, except that now we’re more comfortable with our own selves.

As it began getting dark, Patrick built a huge fire in one of the firepits on the beach, where we used to come with our families as kids and later with our friends as teenagers.

We roasted marshmallows and ate S’mores – yum! Such a good time, in spite of one narrow escape: in the dark Cyd bumped into the outer edge of the firepit and lost her balance and would have gone right into the fire if Patrick hadn’t leaped across and pushed her away. Thank God for his quick thinking and action – that could have been a horrible tragedy.

Yesterday we continued south on U.S. 395, same spectacular Sierra Nevada scenery, same hot weather (around 90 degrees), moving more and more into desert. We made an early stop in Bishop to visit the Laws Railroad and Historical Museum. (Anything with the word “railroad” in it causes the RV to detour.)

The railroad town of Laws CA was built in the early 1880s in anticipation of the arrival of the Carson and Colorado narrow gauge railroad, the first train of which arrived in April of 1883.

Homes, barns, two general stores, a rooming house, eating house, hotel, pool hall, dance hall, blacksmith shop, post office, doctor’s office, and barber shop sprang up. Ranches surrounding Laws used the railroad to ship their crops, and a number of mining operations in the area shipped out their ore.

The decline and demise of Laws and the railroad in the early 1900s were the result of the local mines closing, trucking becoming cheaper than rail freight, and the City of Los Angeles buying most of the valley for the water rights to build the Owens Valley Aqueduct, which put an end to farming and turned fertile farmland into desert. Eventually all that was left were the depot, agent’s house, oil and water tanks, and turntable.

The Museum was begun in 1964, and local period buildings were relocated to this site to rebuild a replica of the town as it had existed in the 1880s. The number of buildings and quality of their exhibits is astounding! We’ve been to a lot of historical museums all over the country, and Laws is definitely one of the best! Building after building has been lovingly and expertly restored and stocked with quantities of period artifacts. Among our favorites were the print shop (with more interesting equipment than the famous one at Sturbridge Village),

the dressmaker’s shop (exquisite pin tucking, lace, and drawn thread embroidery on those little dresses),

and the blacksmith shop (built of stone to avoid fires):

Oh, and the trains. We were able to go into the train barn, where repairs and restorations are done. There we found a fully restored green trolley car. The volunteer working there showed us photos of the car as they had found it years ago – what a mess! The restored car is beautiful and is regularly taken out to give people rides.

This photo shows Patrick on the steps of a very old caboose:

In pride of place was a liquid (not coal or wood) -fueled steam engine:

We walked through in only about an hour but could have spent all day there, poring over all the exhibits. Highly recommend! Like!

Back on U.S. 395, we continued south to our destination, the FamCamp RV park at the China Lake Naval Weapons Center. We had debated stopping there, because we knew it would be hot, but there was no better location to stop and we didn’t want to drive all the way to L.A. and arrive at rush hour. The further south we went, the hotter and more deserty it got. In hot weather we hang a quilt behind our seats as a barrier to keep the cooled air from the air conditioner in the front rather than letting it go to the back of the motorhome, but even so we were pretty ragged by the time we got to China Lake.

Opening the RV door was like opening an oven door. We hooked up and started both air conditioners. I went to do laundry while Patrick took a nap. By the time we went to bed, we had gotten the motorhome cooled down to about 80 degrees. Have I ever mentioned that I HATE being hot? Enough said.

Before we left China Lake this morning, we spent an hour at the China Lake U.S. Naval Museum of Armament and Technology on base. The museum houses a large variety of present and past US Navy aircraft, weapons (missiles and bombs) and technology developed at its test ranges there in the desert. As one of the exhibits states, everyone knows about the pilots, but no one thinks about the ordnance people who arm and load the weapons, nor the technical people who develop and test the weapons systems. It’s true, I never thought about them.

Besides two jet fighters in front of the museum,

there were lots of bombs and missiles

and pictures of explosions and tests.

Patrick had his Geiger counter in hand but was disappointed to find that the guts of the ordnance had been removed so he wasn’t able to pick up any radiation. I guess they didn’t want the museum to blow up accidentally.

“Mammoth” conjures in my mind images of rich kids whose families went skiing during Christmas vacation, and I’m sure it’s a glorious place in winter for wealthy skiers, with 400 inches of average annual snowfall, 28 lifts, and lots of swanky shopping, condos, and restaurants. But there’s a lot to see and do in summer as well.

Like so many beautiful places in California, the Reds Meadow Valley on the back side of Mammoth Mountain (adjacent to the Ansel Adams Wilderness and the Pacific Crest Trail) had been loved to death by summer tourists, so now no cars are allowed and a shuttle bus takes visitors down into valley to begin backpacking trips and to see several interesting sights, including the “Devil’s Postpile.” We took the shuttle bus down and walked the short hike to the foot of the Postpile. Amazing!

About 82,000 years ago, basalt lava flowed here from an unknown source. Columnar jointing occurs when certain types of lava contract while cooling. Because the flow was very thick in this location, much of the mass of pooled lava cooled slowly and evenly, which is why the columns are so long and so symmetrical. Then around 20,000-12,000 years ago, a glacier pushed down the middle fork of the nearby San Joaquin River and carved away one side of the Postpile, exposing a sheer wall of columns 60 feet high. Erosion and earthquakes later knocked down some of the columns, which now lie in a broken heap at the foot of the Postpile.

If the lava had cooled perfectly evenly, all of the columns would have been exactly hexagonal, but some of the columns have 7, 5, or 4 sides due to variations in cooling. We didn’t hike to the top, but I found a picture that shows what the columns look like at their top end:

After we came back up out of the valley, we took a gondola to the top of Mammoth Mountain.

At the summit we were at 11,053 feet!

I could definitely feel the altitude, like a hand pressing against my chest. I’ve never been that high before.

The views out over the Sierras were just stunning.

Many of our fellow travelers brought mountain bikes up with them on the gondola, to ride more than 3,000 feet down the mountain over the 100 miles of mountain bike trails that zigzag across the ski slopes. It looked very fun! for someone else. Not me.

On Saturday we continued south on U.S. 395 to the southern edge of the Modoc Plateau at Susanville. Again, all the rocks and mountains are volcanic. Some of the basalt is flood basalt that erupted around 16 million years ago, as well as rhyolite. Most of the volcanic rocks erupted since that time, from small volcanoes that comprise most of the landscape on both sides of the road.

The Warner Range loomed on our left (east) all morning.

Most interesting were some road cuts that exposed a lumpy black basalt flow that poured over an earlier bed of smooth hardened rhyolite ash, which was white to pinkish gray in color. Unfortunately no photos, but take my word for it, it was super to see!

We ate lunch in Susanville and cruised on to Reno, where we hit Costco and then parked in the driveway of our dear friend Cheryl’s home. Patrick grilled us up some fabulous ribeyes, and we had a relaxing evening talking and watching TV. We’ll see Cheryl again later in the week at the class reunion.

Back on U.S. 395 the next morning, 185 miles south to Mammoth Lakes. We’ve driven this road south to north before, but this was our first time driving south. We were already at 4500 feet in elevation in Reno and never went any lower; we drove over several passes at over 8,000 feet, and when we got to Mammoth Lakes we were at 7800 feet. The Sierra Nevadas rose spectacularly on our right the whole way, and it’s simply not possible to describe how beautiful are the mountains of this granite batholith.

The Sierras are moving west on a fault, which split off the oldest, eastern edge of the mountains, creating extreme steepness of this side of the mountains, the separate range of the White Mountains to the east, and the Owens Valley in between that we were driving through.

We arrived midafternoon at our RV park at the foot of the Sierras, just south of the Mammoth Lakes area which we plan to explore tomorrow.

So where are we going on this trip? The itinerary took shape around two events: a reunion of my high school class and the annual “muster” of the retired military RV group that we went to Alaska with last summer. The reunion is August 23 in El Segundo CA, a beach town near Los Angeles, and the muster takes place a month later in Hemet CA, 100 miles southeast of El Segundo.

We decided not to drive south down the coast, which we did last fall, or down I-5, which we’ve done many times, but to go east of the Cascades down central Oregon, across the northeastern corner of California, through Reno where our friend Cheryl lives, and down the gorgeous eastern side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, coming into the Los Angeles area from the east. After the reunion and before the muster, we’ll spend three weeks in one of our favorite places, Coronado Island, San Diego. After the muster, around the end of September, we’re going to drive east to Utah and spend as much time in the national parks  there as we can before weather prompts us to return home, which we’ll do via Salt Lake City and Boise.

From Bend, the first leg of our route took us south-southeast on Oregon Hwy 31, a road so lonely that there’s no gas for a hundred miles, and for hours we saw only a few cars. Every rock along the way is volcanic. Does that mean the scenery is boring and lacking in variety? Not at all! We saw some of the most extraordinary rocks and landscapes in Oregon along this road. 

About 17 million years ago, an enormous center of volcanic activity appeared in southeastern Oregon. Its edges probably reached into Idaho and Nevada and out to the Pacific coast at Astoria. Something caused enormous floods of molten basalt, more than 100 cubic miles of lava, to flow across the landscape within a day, or even hours. Was it a huge mass of especially hot rock rising through a weak spot in the earth’s mantle? Or was it an asteroid or comet that struck the earth’s surface and punched through it? No one knows for sure – those passionate geologists are still duking it out on behalf of their theories.

Fort Rock, southeast of La Pine, is one of the artifacts.

Today it looks like a ruined castle. It was created when basalt magma seeped from vents into the wet mud of a shallow lake that flooded the valley during the last ice age. Hot (1200 degree) magma hitting lake water powered a jet of steam that blew molten basalt into the air in a cloud of tiny rock shreds, like an enormous geyser. The basalt settled around the vent to make a ring of volcanic ash, an island in the lake, and then lake waves eroded the outside of the ring, leaving steep cliffs that look like a castle. 

At the end of Hwy 31 we met Hwy 395, which will be our constant travel companion for some days now. We continued on into the northeast corner of CA, near the Nevada line, still in the volcanic Modoc Plateau, and spent the night in a nice little RV park in the nice little town of Alturas.

We visited the interesting little local historic museum and were sorry, although of course not surprised, to learn that the indigenous Modoc people were defeated and sent from this lovely if somewhat austere land to live in Oklahoma.

Leaving on an RV trip is like simultaneously preparing for house guests (our housesitter), moving (getting our motorhome ready for extended occupation), and going on vacation (stopping the newspaper & forwarding the mail, cleaning out the fridge, arranging for lawn care, packing, etc). Most of it has to be done just before we leave, so by the time we actually get on the road we’re always exhausted. Note to selfs: next time, plan for short mileage on the first driving day, not 350 miles like we did this time.

So our first stop was Bend, OR, in the high Cascades, where we spent 3 nights and recovered our energy.

It’s a beautiful area but can be hot in August. Luckily for us a cold front was moving through, and we had cool temperatures and thunderstorms on Wednesday. Such a relief from the ridiculously hot summer we’ve been having in the Seattle area.

On Thursday we drove up to Lava Butte and began to learn about the extraordinary geologic history of central and south-central Oregon. Lava Butte is one of many cinder cones that erupted quite recently, about 7,000 years ago, from a fissure system nearly 17 miles long known as the NW Rift Zone.

One of the really cool things about this cinder cone is that you can drive to the top of it, which we did. There are long views in every direction, including up to Mt Adams in WA, so It’s no wonder Lava Butte has been used as a fire lookout for many decades.

Cinder cones erupt from volcanic vents in this manner: rock fragments called scoria or cinders, which contain numerous gas bubbles, explode into the air and cool quickly. As their gas content diminishes, the cinder magma stops fountaining and instead hot basalt oozes from below the nicely rounded cone that was already formed, surrounding the cone with a river of molten basalt. There is some vegetation on Lava Butte, but there’s almost no plant life in the surrounding lava flow, which reaches to the Deschutes River about 2.5 miles to the west.

At the Visitor Center, we had learned about the different types of rock that result from volcanic eruptions of various kinds: andesite, basalt, scoria, obsidian, rhyolite, perlite (a form of rhyolite – yes, it’s the white dots in potting soil), pumice (another variety of rhyolite). We hiked around the concavity in the center of the dome, and Patrick was able to lift a large volcanic rock – either he’s stronger than we thought! or it was rhyolite.