Camping Trip to Inyo

It was the Labor day weekend. Arvind, Sameer, Nara and I were sharing an apartment these days. I had recently bought a large tent in a sale and was craving to use it. Two days before the weekend, I started looking for campsites where we could go on this weekend, but almost every popular campsite was completely booked. After going through a lot of national parks within 500Km radius of Los Angeles, I found some campsites free in Inyo National park. These were at an altitude of 8000 feet and temperatures would fall sub-zero in the night. I guess this was the reason why these campsites were free. Nevertheless, spirits were high and there was no stopping. In addition to Arvind and Nara, Abhimanyu and Arun also were enthusiastic about the trip. So we rented a car and decided to drive up North.

We equipped ourselves with a gas stove and cylinders for cooking, torches, water bags, tent, sleeping pads, sleeping bags, vegetables and spices for cooking, miracle logs for setting up a campfire and all the other necessary campgear and rented a car. In those days only Arvind and I had a driving lisence so we would be the main drivers and would take turns. We started off early in the morning and took 110N to 5 N to 14N to 395N towards Inyo. It was a beautiful drive up north. Throughout the road, Abhimanyu put the songs of Thiruda Thiruda, by A.R. Rehman.

By the time we reached Inyo it was evening aout 4ish. Thats Arun and me sitting in front of the recently unloaded camping material. We then unpacked the tent and set it up. There were no mosquitoes at this site.

Since there would be no light within an hour or so, we decided to finish cutting up all the vegetables and finish cooking before sun set. So it was spicy potato fries and bread for dinner. We realized that we were out of water, so Arvind and Arun and Nara drove down to a newarby town to buy some water.

Meanwhile, Abhimanyu and I decided to climb up a mountain. There was no trail laid out and we were just free hand limbing. It was a very steep climb. We must have climbed for over an hour but we could not reach the summit. Soon we realized that it was getting dark and we better start our way back otherwise we would be lost.

We were too late in our decision. The climb down proved extremely difficult. We could not traceback our path and got lost. Several times we reached deadends and had traceback our path up. In fact, at some point it felt quite frustrating and I felt we would probably get stuck. It was pitch dark and we had to use our cell phone light to guide us.

By the time we made it to the base of the mountain, we were almost a mile away from the place we had started climbing and had no clue of where we were. We had hit a paved road so we hoped that following it would lead us to someone who could help us. After walking for a ten minutes on blind faith we found a campfire and walked towards them. They had a map and we used it get our bearings right. By the time we reached our campsite we had been off for almost three hours and everyone at the camp had been worried.

It had gotten extremely cold by now. It must be close to zero degrees. We were at 8000 feet high and it was expected that night temperature would fall below zero. We set up a campfire and sat around it. We had a great time.

When we woke up in the morning there was a thick layer of ice on our car and all our water had frozen. We then decided to drive to Mono Lake. We packed up, descended from Inyo and drove north on 395 towards Mono Lake.

On the way we found a beautiful lake (Convict lake) with canoes and decided to take canoe. We rented canoes for an hour. Canoeing in the blue lake among the mountains absolutely blissful. There is my canoe beside the lake. After Canoeing I wanted to take a photo of myself in the water and I put the camera on the shore on a 10 sec timer and started to walk backwards. Suddenly the lake bottom became deep and I slipped and fell in. The timer caught the moment nicely.

After canoeing, we continued our drive towards Mono lake. Mono lake was not quite like any other lake we had ever seen. Its a hyper saline lake with large white salt crystals all around the lake. Even the soil around the lake is a bit swampy with all the salt water in it. At many places you can get stuck in the swampy soil. There I am trying to get out of it.

After spending some time at Mono lake we drove to Mammoth. It is quaint town and has skiing resorts. However, we were getting late to drive back to LA and we had to return the rental car early next morning. So we decided to turn back. By the time we reahed LA it was quite late in the night. To this day this remains a very memorable trip.