Mt. Mary Austin, named for a natural history writer who lived in the town of Independence in the Owens Valley below, around the turn of the century before last.
Black Mtn. & Diamond Pk, Bighorn Sheep paths in the talus
Top of my ski line
Cumulus growing, time to get going (yea, it snowed, chasing me off the hill, and then stopped and cleared up. Go figure)
Skied the line at center, the most south facing snow I could find. I drool at all the beautiful gullies around here, but most all of it’s frozen hard and treacherous. I found some nicely softened snow in the due south though, and even managed to ski it before the clouds came in and it started refreezing. This high country is dramatic in so many ways.
Indian Paintbrush (Castilleja)
Dessert Peach (Prunus andersonii)
Ghost Forest We had been backpacking around in the west slope high country at the time lightening started this fire. We saw the smoke and wondered, and now four years later, in the canyon that was afire, I see the Oak resprouting and chaparral returning and maybe this unique Oak grove will return, in a century or two. Most of the forest in the central canyon above the Oak perished too. The desert has inherited the lower reaches of this canyon, for quite some time to come. The remains of the forest commemorate in their inscrutable beauty, the knowledge that life can not be, without death in balance.
My ski line is just out of sight in back. I crawled into the back of the truck and woke up a couple hours later, the truck rocking from the winds coming barreling down the canyon, so hard I finally said screw it and drove home, five hours, the wind throwing handfulls of gravel at my windshield at 70mph on 395, whiteknuckled in a blizzard breaking trail over the pass into Tahoe before dawn, slept all day while it dumped, and skied powder the next, rock and roll
