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The Eastern Sierra mountain and high desert region of California and Nevada, an extreme land, is most famous for outdoor sports, recreation and vacation. On a clear day you can see from Mt. Whitney, the highest point in the lower 48 United States, to below sea level in Death Valley National Park. Activities include skiing, snowboarding and other winter sports, as well as fishing, hunting, hiking, camping, bicycling, rock climbing, boating and sailing, waterskiing and wakeboarding, birdwatching and wildlife viewing, motorcycling and dirt biking, off-highway vehicle travel, scenic drives and photography, and much more. Geographically, the area reaches from Yosemite National Park's eastern boundary and the Lake Tahoe / Carson City areas in the north, to the great Mojave Desert in the South. The Owens Valley, Mono Lake and the Mono Basin, as well as the Walker River Drainage comprise the westernmost rim of North America's Great Basin and Range Province. This vast region is very sparsely populated, and visitors can often outnumber residents in popular tourist areas. The people here are diverse, as is the climate in different areas. There are pastoral ranch and farm communities, high mountain villages, and desert outposts. Bishop, California, a small town by many people's standards, is our largest "urban" area. The area is rich in history, from the Paiute and Shoshone people who originally inhabited the land, through to the explorers and later the prospectors and miners who arrived in the 19th century. There are many "ghost town" sites, including the Bodie State Historic Park, a very real relic of the old west, where rangers maintain a number of old buildings in a state of "arrested decay." The geology of the eastern sierra is most fascinating. While the Sierra Nevada range itself is relatively new in geologic terms, the nearby (and nearly as tall) white mountains contain pre-cambrian fossils, some of the oldest known. Also in the White Mountains are the Bristlecone Pines, the earth's oldest living things. The area near Mammoth Mountain is currently one of the most geothermally and seismically active areas in the west, and the Mono Basin hosts a chain of very young volcanos. Higher in the Sierras, glacial valleys have sculpted some of the most dramatic and beautiful high mountain scenes with fabulous mountain wilderness and back-country lakes: yet, it is just several miles away from much more arid, desert-like valleys. |
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Friday May 16, 2008
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