1st Time to Convict Lake, Part I of the Convict Lake Trilogy

Boris came to my work one Tuesday morning in summer, 1990 and said, "Let's go to the Sierra's."
"I have to work Thursday," I said.
"Call in sick.  You can use the phone up at the lake."
And that is how I went to the Sierras for the first time.


I knew the Sierra's were mountains, and I knew they were up north somewhere, but I had no real concept of what they were.  To me, mountains were Palomar Mountain and Julian.  Idyllwild in the San Jacinto mountains was the furthest I had traveled to be in a mountain.  I had camped there maybe twice, and Palomar a few times too.

I didn't know how much space the Sierras occupied.  I didn't know there was a chain of mountains here in California that stretched for hundreds miles, starting in the southern third of the state, over one hundred miles wide in some places, all the way to Washington and beyond.  It took three hours of driving just to hit the southern end of the Sierra range.  We had to drive three more hours just to get to our destination: Convict Lake.  I was completely awestruck by the mountain range as we drove its southern length.  It was the most forbidding and intimidating landscape I had ever seen.  A gigantic sheer wall of broken granite, the range rose out of the desert like a barrier to the West.

If you have not seen it, a lot of the South Eastern Sierra is an arid and prohibitive climate.  There is very little rainfall in that area, just west of Death Valley.  If you removed all the vegetation, it would look like Mars.  Many of the rocks are black, remnants of not-so-long-ago volcanic activity.  If you look around at the piles of black and maroon lava rock, you can certainly imagine the multiple volcanic explosions depositing all of those sharp mounds and rough undulations.  You can actually see cooled rivers and lakes of lava as they had flowed down the eastern slopes of the range. 

If I ever want to landscape with lava rock, I am going to drive up to the Little Lake area along Highway 395 and load up a truck there.  You could back right up to a mountain and have all the lava rock you want.

Since it was my first time, and I didn't really understand the size of the Sierra Nevada range, I asked Boris, "when do we get to the mountains?"
"These are the mountains." He pointed left, west, out the window of his Volkswagen Scirocco with his thumb.
"I mean, in the mountains."

He struggled with his reply.  He didn't know how to tell me that you don't really go in to these mountains, you just get as close as you can.  There are only seven open passes in a 400 mile stretch through the Sierra Nevada during summer.  During winter, they are impenetrable, as the Donner Party found out.  There is one length, from Inyokern to Lee Vining that is almost 200 miles long with no paved road through the mountains.

And we were headed to the heart of that stretch, a little place called Convict Lake.  It is 45 minutes past Bishop, and 6 miles south of Mammoth Lakes.

It changed my life...