On the Road

SEATTLE – I stopped working three weeks ago. Like most of us I haven’t taken an extended break from my job for years. It’s a very liberating feeling, and it feels good. Maybe a little bit too good.

I’m not in a rush to get to Ecuador. I need bit of time to prepare for my adventure, and I’m waiting for my new passport to arrive from the State Department, so I can’t leave the country right now even if I want to. Besides, the last time I checked a map it didn’t look like the South America was going anywhere quickly – plate tectonics seem to be doing an admirable job of keeping the continent in one spot for the time being.

I have lived in San Francisco for a couple of years, but my hometown is Seattle. What better place to prepare for my adventure while awaiting a new passport? I might even be able to fit in some snowboarding or backcountry adventure while I’m there. OK, the real reason I decide to head for Seattle is that I’m officially homeless — almost everything I own is in a self-storage facility — and I have free places to stay there.

Having no deadline, I decide to take the road less traveled and go by way of the Eastern Sierra. It’s difficult to cross the Sierra Nevada in winter unless you’re wearing skis, so I will need to travel south and skirt the extreme end of the range before turning north again on U.S 395.

I make a slight detour through the western half of Kings Canyon/Sequoia National Park. A short hike through the forest takes me to a rocky outcrop with a spectacular view across the San Joaquin Valley to the west, with the coastal range visible over 100 miles in the distance. I wait a couple of hours for the light to change; just before dusk a haze settles over the valley with tendrils of fog invading the Sierra foothills.


Continuing south I reach the Mojave Desert and head east toward the town of Boron, California, home of the world’s largest borax mine. Reaching U.S. 395 I point north and set my sights on the Searles dry lake bed. Searles is one of many dry lake beds covering this stretch of the American southwest. During the ice ages, runoff from glaciers to the north covered this area with large lakes. In places, calcium-rich water seeped from beneath the lakebed and mixed with the alkaline water above. Over thousands of years this chemical interaction formed tall, porous towers known as tufa. Now that the water is gone, the tufa stand like sentinels in the middle of the flat, dry lake.

I follow a washed-out dirt road across the lake bed. Recent rains have made a mess of things, and for a rare moment I am glad to have 4WD. Ten miles later I arrive at the Trona Pinnacles, a large group of tufa standing lonely in the middle of the desert. As the sun sets, I watch its rays illuminate the tufa as an almost-full moon rises behind them to the east.

Cruising north I make my way to Lone Pine, a small town in the Owens Valley just below Mt. Whitney, the highest mountain in the continental U.S. The morning light in the eastern Sierra is very unique; leaving well before sunrise I drive 25 miles to photograph the mountains from across the dry bed of Owens Lake. Rising behind me the sun illumines the atmosphere above and behind the mountains before its rays ever strike stone, resulting in an eerie neon-like glow.



Continuing north I reach the town of Lee Vining, on the western shore of Mono Lake, a large, saline lake just east of Yosemite. The same forces that shaped the Trona Pinnacles are at work in Mono Lake, except that most of the Mono Lake tufa have only recently been exposed for the world to see. Water management policies have caused a precipitous drop in the lake level over the past 50 years, revealing many tufa at points around the shore.

I wake at 3:00 AM. Following a dirt track around the south end of the lake I arrive at the shoreline tufa in complete darkness. Almost immediately I realize that I have made two important mistakes: First, I haven’t checked to see what time the sun will actually rise. Second, I have forgotten how cold the desert is in the middle of winter.

It is eerily silent. Standing next to my tripod bundled in down jacket, I listen a pack of coyotes howling at the moon in the distance. Over time the howling grows closer and, before I know it, is almost right on top of me. I begin to wonder whether packs of coyotes have been known to attack humans.

I reach over and quietly fold my tripod, thinking that it might make a good weapon, as if a human swinging a carbon fiber tripod around in the pitch blackness is any match for a pack of wild coyotes. Hunkering down on a narrow strip of dirt between a tufa and the water’s edge I sit completely still. The howling increases in volume until it sounds like they are right behind me. I can hear small grunts and barks between howls so I know they are close. Eventually the coyotes move on, either not detecting me or, more likely, not caring that I am there. When the sun finally breaks the horizon my moments of terror are rewarded with a spectacular technicolor sunrise.

I amble north through California, Nevada, and Oregon, always staying to the east of the Sierra and, subsequently, Cascade mountains. For the first time in years I have no agenda, no schedule, no deadline. I stop for coffee in small towns and take photos when the light is good.

Shortly before reaching the Columbia River I catch a glimpse of the full moon rising over a farm outside of Pendleton, Oregon. Pulling over to the side of the road I set up my tripod, fire off a few shots, then stand there absorbing the tranquility of the scene. I could return to that spot every day for the next year and I would probably never see the same view again.

Getting back in the car I complete my trip to Seattle in the dark. The first leg of my trip to South America is complete, even if it takes me north instead of south.