Don't worry, the brakes cooled down again as we emerged from the Valley
of the Shadow of Death. George and the kids say that was the only bad part of our trip. Adventurer me actually enjoyed the the far outness of the scenery, but I was glad and very relieved
when we finally made it out of there safe and sound with radiator
fluid, air conditioning, and brakes fully restored.
The DV Park Ranger had told us to not go through the Sierra Nevada's on
our way to Sequoia National Park as it is too twisty-turny and takes
longer than going around the southern tip of the range towards the town
of Mojave.
He also told us to first take a slight diversion northwestward to Lone
Pine where a bunch of old westerns were filmed. Come to find out, if
you don't go to Lone Pine, there isn't any gas or restaurants for way
further than you probably want to travel on that southerly route. But
it was nice to stop at a fast food place for a late lunch of really
good Chipotle chicken taco salad. We all got huge drinks with refills.
Then we went to Lone Pine's Movie Flats which is located in the Alabama Hills
on the desert eastern side of the Sierra Nevada's where many movies, including one of my favorite shows growing up, The Lone Ranger,
were filmed. I hadn't realized the beautiful mountain in the back drop
was Mt. Whitney, the tallest mountain in the lower 48.
Glenn Hirsch,
the comedian on the ship said, "so what does that make Alaska, the 'upper one'"?
This would have been a great place to go 4 wheeling through the sand dunes.
We completed the wilderness portion of our journey south along the eastern edge of the High Sierra's with desolate dry lake and river beds on our left. The Park Ranger grabbed his chest when he showed us on his Death Valley map how Los Angeles sucked the rest of the water out of the region. I remember seeing a documentary on the aqueduct that dried up many people's farms in this valley between the Inyo Mountains and the SN's. This part of the trip took longer than expected, so we didn't make it to Sequoia National Park until the next morning.
[this is good] Yeah, that was a rather harrowing part of the trip, but too bad there weren't any shadows at all. We could have really used the shade to bring our temperature down to respectable levels to, say, 110 degrees instead of 120.
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