A lazy departure, a quick gas fill, and on to California highway 58. If you can, check it out on Goggle maps, looking at the satellite images. I haven't done that yet, but I imagine it would be awesome since the drive itself was awesome.
A stop at the visitor centre gave me these two pictures. One of dandelion-like yellow flowers growing with minuscule white flowers in soil that can best be described as dusty dirt. What brave little souls!
Beside the parking lot, they tried to stabilize the hill by applying some kind of burlap mat. A few years of ultra violet rays disintegrated most of the mat leaving only the horizontal strings to hold the hill. This made for an interesting [to me] composition of struggling plants, barely anchored on the hill.
Our day consisted of traversing valleys and scaling the mountains at either side of each valley. All the more Northerly passes through the mountains were closed for the season, so we had to head back South to use this pass. The next two pictures show a major pipeline, transporting who-knows-what over the mountains: down the side in front of the car, and up the next one to the right. This pipe was well over 5 feet high and stretched on for miles.
Much further along, we stopped along a secondary road to look at the scene below: note the silver ribbon across the picture? It's California #58. You can click on any picture to see them all larger. Please also note a source of some angst for me: there were no guardrails anywhere along this highway! The drop here would have been well over a mile!
The speed limit was 55mph, but our side-road had many switchbacks to make the inclines doable... My average speed was between 25 and 30 mph, and that was far from comfortable. Remember, no guardrails.
We took the side-road to witness this fantastic railway 'loop'. The engines had come from the upper left of the picture [down about 1/3 from the corner of the frame, and looped around underground and reappeared about a half inch ahead of where the locomotive is in the picture. Then it circled counterclockwise, [you can just see the back part of the train coming out of the ground on the other side of the tree in front of the locomotives,] went behind the hill in the middle and kept circling counterclockwise to the left, leaving the picture frame, then re-entering the frame to tie onto the back of the six locomotives that were hauling this long load. An amazing loop! All this to gain about 100 feet in altitude within a short space. You can click here to see Wikipedia's splenation...
If you look carefully at this picture, you can see the entire train. The train lies clockwise starting at the locomotives, to the left and behind the hill in the middle, then continuing clockwise until it re-enters the ground just to the right of the tree in front of the locomotives. How cool is that? This section of line is doubled and handles 50 trains each day.
A few hours later, we were winding along Ca#58 through these hills decorated with yellow flowers on their south facing sides.
The sun was peeking through the clouds and made some pretty nice vistas for me to shoot.
You can just see an oil derrick near the middle on the next picture: this area is well know for its oil and gas.
While making some pictures, I chanced a look between my feet where the mud was still caked. During the recent rains, most of these mud-cakes turned into good old sticky mud, but this patch kept its scaly skin.
And lastly, another scene of yellow flowers miles away from the previous bunch. What a glorious sight.
Much like yesterday, today's drive was exhilarating: one had to keep ones mind on the task at hand: the road was hilly, twisty, and with some potholes. As I mentioned, much of the day was spent driving at the breakneck speed of 30mph and less... ...without guardrails. Fun or what?
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