I'm in mammoth lakes, a great town in the eastern sierras where, despite being midsummer (although really summer only starts on the solstice over here), the ski resort is still open. it snowed on us for the 14 miles walking to reds meadow - the trailhead we accessed mammoth from. mammoth was apparently named to inspire people to come to the gold mine here in maybe the 1860s - an overblown description i believe as there never was much gold...
for the last 2 weeks we've been walking on snow. it's been so amazing; so incredibly beautiful. i have definitely taken too many shots of very similar scenes, but i have been completely blown away by the mountains, and the sheer quantity of snow...
most days we go up over a pass, successively decreasing in height since forester. we try to camp as low as possible, between the passes, and have been searching out dryish spots of rock or earth...
above is drop dead cowboying amidst the snow...
this is a lake/creek crossing - one of the very easy ones - but beautiful: i could see fish swimming in the ultra-clear water... the creeks have been incredibly high and fast flowing, there are some crazy stories of crossings (not me, i have crossed in an eminently sensible manner...), sometimes they thunder past like furious horizontal waterfalls, but in the flatter areas they are deceptively placid, sliding past like great slabs of inviting green, pulsing and erupting strangely... they often look like brilliant swimming, until you notice chunks of ice and snow floating down, and realise it's just above freezing, and each ford crossing numbs your legs for ten minutes walking afterwards...
this is the lake we were crossing...
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