Tehachapi News

All > Columns > Overall Picture
Overall picture: Mountain trip peeled back the years for me
Topics:
Posted by editor Mon Jul 9, 2007 11:33:00 PDT
Viewed 466 times
0 responses 0 comments Being the grandfather of high-achieving kids has its downside. They are living reminders that I was a slow starter when I was their ages. One of my grandchildren is manager and part owner of a good-sized business in San Diego, another is going to become a mechanical engineer in a short while, his brother is a Coast Guard sea marshal while my 18-year-old Florida granddaughter will leave for the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis this month. When I was several years older than these kids are now I was toiling as night cook in a little Italian restaurant. It took me a while to get traction.

I enjoyed some quality time with our budding Naval officer at our desert hideaway at Inyokern last month. She and her mother wanted to spend a day in the High Sierras so we drove to Lee Vining and went up Tioga Pass as far as Olmsted Point where you get a spectacular view of the backside of Half Dome which looms over Yosemite Valley. They had just returned from China, where my granddaughter had graduated from high school. They were fresh from visiting the Great Wall, the Forbidden City and other exotic Chinese attractions but the craggy Sierra Nevada Mountains of California meant even more to them.

The Sierras have always exerted an emotional tug on me as well, especially the east slope which is a steep and spectacular wall of stone as compared with the gentle slope on the west side of the range. Whenever I drive up Highway 395 I wonder what early pioneers must have thought as they looked at this lofty barrier to the productive inland valleys and coastal regions of the state. It will always amaze me that over many decades of the 19th century so many inexperienced eastern immigrants crossed the Sierras in their primitive conveyances with so little tragedy. These days I would have a cow if my car broke down within a couple of miles of Bishop.

Driving Tioga Pass always gives me an opportunity to play the part of the old timer and describe what that road was like the first time I traveled it. The year was 1948 and my car was a well-used Studebaker. The Tioga Pass road, if you were generous enough to call it a road, was unpaved and one lane wide in those days. When you met somebody coming the other way you both had to squeeze right as far as possible, even in spots where there was no place to squeeze.

The eastern end of that prehistoric Tioga Pass road, where it plunged steeply toward Lee Vining and Mono Lake, was a narrow rocky ledge along the side of a high cliff, as narrow and unimproved as the rest of the road. Late one evening, as I was heading west toward the San Joaquin Valley, a carload of terror-stricken tourists heading east refused to pull any closer to the yawning canyon edge to let me pass. I had to pull onto loose rock which blew one of my tires.

As the sun disappeared, I was frantically changing wheels while totally blocking the road but nobody came along. I wasn't sure if that was good or bad. Twilight across the high peaks must have been beautiful that night but I don't recall enjoying it much. I might have liked it a lot more if I had known that 60 years later I could bore you with this pointless anecdote and get paid for it.

Send to a Friend

Report a Violation