A Journey of Mammoth Proportions, Part 2

We emerged from our morning excursion to Devil’s Postpile tired, dirty and hungry. It was a little after lunchtime, and since we still had a little time to kill before we could check in to our cabin down at Convict Lake, we decided to grab some lunch at a local pizza parlor. Did I mention we were tired and dirty? I probably neglected to emphasize just how tired and dirty. And, well, smelly. A day’s camping with no showers, followed by a day on the trail does not render one as fresh and breezy as you might like. Or rather, as other patrons in a fine dining establishment might like. We ordered our pizza and sat down and spent the wait-time counting the number of people who approached a neighboring table, stopped, wrinkled their noses, and went to find some other place to sit. But while we may have been off-putting to others in the restaurant, to our frenzied appetites, the pizza, when it arrived (how quickly the waiter scurried off!), was honey-drenched manna. We pounded the pie then graciously evacuated the building, taking our green fog cloud and whirling mass of flies with us.

The Convict Lake Resort is only about 10 minutes south of Mammoth Lakes. When we got to the “resort” (really just a dozen or two rustic cabins scattered about), Stacy and the kids stayed in the car while I went and checked in. When I came out a few moments later with our key I got the exaggerated pantomime “don’t make any sudden moves” wave from Stacy, who with the kids were sitting in the minivan with all the doors wide open. At first I had thought that the open doors meant that even they needed to get a fresh breeze circulating, but soon realized through Stacy’s theatrical mute pointing that they were watching a deer munching some grass rather placidly a few feet away at the edge of the parking lot. I froze not to startle the timid creature. A few seconds later another car peeled into the parking lot and whipped into a space adjacent the deer in a cloud of dust. The owner got out, slammed the door and marched on into the resort office. The deer half-heartedly raised its head, gave a couple of sideways chews, then sank back into feeding position, clearly stunned into near-immobility by the event. The next fifteen minutes were spent taking innumerable flashy photos of the deer from every angle, with every possible permutation of child, parent, and wildlife in the foreground.

The view from our cabin.

We found our cabin on the southwest edge of the resort and were stoked to find that the picture window of our mini-living room look straight out across a meadow to the imposing cliffs of Laurel Mountain. Pretty cool! We unpacked our 1200 square foot house from our 100 square foot minivan into our 500 square foot cabin and began the hard work of afternoon napping. Eventually the other demands of life asserted themselves and we were force to undergo an al-fresco spaghetti dinner under the watchful mountain eye. A postprandial stroll down to the eponymous Convict Lake completed the evening, where we got to watch enough trout snapping at low flying bugs to make the water look lightly carbonated.

I pretty much had the agenda for the next day nailed down. We would sleep in, get up and have a leisurely breakfast, then get back to the difficult challenge of sleeping in until noon. A light repast would fit us perfectly for an afternoon of competitive napping. After that I expect we'd be rather tied. (We always seem to need a lot of down time after a particularly grueling round of competitive napping.) So we'd rest up before straining ourselves with a nice dinner up in Mammoth. The sheer effort of the day would no doubt mean we'd be ready for an early turn-in, during which we would sleep the sweet, nourishing sleep reserved for those who have accomplished much.

Stacy, it seems, had other ideas.

Stacy was up at the fiendish crack of dawn and once she had established me on pancake duties, trotted down to the resort office and scheduled horseback riding trips for her and the kids. (She knows better than to subject a poor innocent horse to the likes of me.) At the ghastly hour of 10:30 she was rounding us up and heading us out under threat of giving us rawhides.

I accompanied the family to the stables and as we went we played a game we often play, our version of "I Spy" which awards quarters to anyone who spots something interesting or novel. We had long since given out quarters for all the boring birds and ubiquitous deer that dominate the landscape (I'd have been impoverished by squirrels and deer if we hadn't adopted the no-repeats policy), so no one was making very much money. Suddenly N turned and pointed, yelling "Aslan! Aslan!" Sure enough, there on the side of the mountain, sitting serenely and regally, surveying his wide domain with evident satisfaction, sat the king of beasts. Or at least a prominent rock formation of especially leonine proportions. N was twenty-five cents richer, much to the protests of his sister who tried in vain to add organic clauses and other such living-tissue requirements to the game rules.

Excitement?  Not so much.

We got to the stable and found the horses looking as horses always do: bored. Stacy has some uncanny sixth horse sense by which she can tell the innermost thoughts, emotions and quandaries of a horse from a thousand feet. To me they all look the same: bored. (Though I have to admit that I did detect, when they saw me approaching, a brief flash of panic in their otherwise monotonous, empty eyes. Don't worry, Silver. This Lone Ranger won't be a-striding your saddle any time soon.) Another couple from San Diego had also signed up for the ride, so soon the five caballeros were saddled up and ready to ride into the morning sunset.

  

L upon Fork and N astride Socks

Bon-N-Za

She looks like she may have done this before...

I played the role of National Geographic photographer and documented the lineup and the pack nags' slow trudge down the trail with quite literally bridled enthusiasm, after which I made a similarly enthusiastic retreat back to the cabin to try to recover some of my original day's agenda.

I got back to our cabin and went into the kitchenette to pour myself a glass of iced tea in prep for the two hours of relaxation I would have to get through before Stacy and the kids got back. As I was finishing my pour, busy contemplating the ways I could conserve energy for the task at hand, I chanced to look up and out the window. There, about a hundred feet from our cabin, was one of those exceedingly timid and easily spooked mule deer, having its gastronomical way with our shrubbery. I snatched up my camera and tiptoed stealthily out the front door and around the side of the cabin trying to look like David Attenborough on the trail of a wildebeest. I managed to get a shot or two off unobserved from the cover of the corner of the building, and that, building my confidence, prompted me to venture closer. A few more without my prize dashing off, and I slipped closer still. Soon I was having to defog the deer-breath from my camera lens and I was starting to question my convictions about these easily traumatized, hypersensitive creatures. I got bored before the deer got spooked and retreated back into cabin to resume my planned mapping of my inner eyelids.

Eventually Stacy and the kids got back with breathless tales of high horseback adventure. No one, it seemed, had gotten thrown, bitten, or kicked, and as far as I could tell no one had contracted horse-lice, so it appeared to be a good trip all around. They had taken a trail down to the lake, packed to a shady forest glen at the lake's far end, had a brief picnic snack, and then packed back out. L and N tried to extort a quarter from me for a bald eagle they had seen on the trip, but Stacy ratted them out, telling me it was the San Diego woman who spotted it first, so no dice!

The horses rest, but not the horseplay.

The real Eagle Scouts

Doh!  A deer!

That afternoon Stacy once again ransacked my agenda by insisting on me getting up off the bed that so easily ensnared me. We threw on ball caps and windbreakers and headed down for a hike around the lake. As we walked through the cabin paths on our way to the lake we came across a party of a half-dozen people all making the same afflicted mime gestures to one another that Stacy had modeled in the parking lot the day before. We looked to where their attention was fixed and saw a family of mule deer contentedly going about their business. They were just at the edge of the path we were about to traverse, so we stopped so as not to frighten them off, though I was beginning to have doubts that the phrase "Dash away, dash away, dash away all" had any meaning for this particular branch of the deer species. We stood watching them as they stood watching us, and as the other party stood watching both of us. We waited, the deer waited, the tourists with cameras waited. Five minutes in and the stalemate unbroken, we decided to slide along stealthily hoping to bypass the deer and leave them for their other admirers. As we stepped a step forward, however, one deer in particular looked up, eyed us, and responded by taking a step forward. We took another step forward. It was echoed. Every movement brought a reciprocal. Pawn to G7. Rook to B5. A tense hush fell over the tourist party as they watched our halting interspecies dance. The next thing we knew the deer decided it was done playing and blithely wandered up to Stacy and stood gazing into her eyes. At this point Stacy entered "get your germs away from my children" mode and slowly escorted the kids around and to our trail, giving Bambi as wide a berth as she could. Once downstream, we proceeded on to the lake, looking back occasionally to see the doe-eyed, um, doe, staring blandly after us, and listening to the cacophony of clicks and coos and desperate coaxing enticements that erupted from the other folks as they pleaded with the deer for their own special visitation.

Stacy is endearing.

There is a beautiful and mostly-level trail that goes all the way around Convict Lake, a jaunt of a little over three miles. A good portion of the trail followed the same route the kids had taken earlier on horseback, so they were able to point out with excited squeals every spot where they got flicked by the horsetail in front of them and other such excitements. (It also gave one all the more reason to watch one's footing on the trail.) When we reached the wooded area at the halfway point of the trail on the far side of the lake the kids gave me the full-detail play-by-play of their dismount and snack time, a story with took probably longer in the retelling than in the time they were allowed to enjoy it. "This is where I scratched my arm on a bush. This is where N dropped his Nutter Butter. Here's where Mommy told me not to kiss the horses," -- sentimental reminiscences of distant events so many hours ago. I expect that, in his wizened years, if Gilligan were ever to bring his grandchildren to his desert island, he would ramble on a lot like that.

The little woods there leads down to a nice access point to the lake; we went down and puttered on the beach a bit, watching the fishermen dotting the shore and the occasional kayaker gliding past. I tried to teach L and N the fine art form of skipping rocks (with explicit instructions to avoid the kayaker), but it was to little effect. Our time-honored rock skipping techniques were not to be passed down the generations that day. L and N both managed, however, to speedily acquire the skill of rock plunking.

Ummm, no.

Wild currants

We managed to wrap up our beach time without anyone giving anyone else a concussion or even anyone getting their shoes soaked, which is a true rarity and a sure sign the kids are growing faster than I want them to. We proceeded back to the trail and continued our revolution around the lake. It was only the last quarter mile or so that our old friend from the Postpile revisited us and found in N a suitable host.

 

These strange blooms were all over the place.

Picnic table pout.

Later that evening back at base camp, while Stacy and N were in reading, or playing a game or doing something far less interesting, L and I stepped out on our little deck area and turned out the porch lights. It was pitch black except for the wildest array of throbbing, sparkling stars arching over us! It was a warm night so we pulled some chairs together and sat out trying to figure out all the obscure summer constellations. (I gotta admit, while it's undoubtedly beautiful, the summer sky pales in comparison to the winter sky. The winter sky, with Orion and Andromeda and the Pleiades and all the major and minor dogs running around, is so much more boisterous and dynamic!) We were able to find Scorpio and of course the ever-present Dippers. We found a hazy band that we figured had to be the Milky Way, but could have just been some lazy clouds with nowhere to go. A half dozen satellites buzzed by like highly focused insects on a mission. We were gaping upward with our mouths open and our throats bared when we heard the crack of a branch in the blackness of the meadow before us. In the deadness of the night it was a rifle shot. We grabbed each other's arms painfully and froze. We listened intently. Nothing... Just as we decided we could breathe a little and let our heart rates step down a notch, "crack!" There it was again! This time there was a definite rustling of something large moving through the brush toward us. L and I scrambled over each other, frantically fighting to get to the door first. (My paternal protective instinct is much more theoretical than actually applied.) Just as we got to the door we turned to get a final look at our pursuer and saw a ghostly head with two large ears and glowing voodoo eyes materialize before us. We... Um, L screamed and flung ourselves through the door, slamming it behind us and sending whatever game Stacy and N were playing in a thousand directions. "Something's out there!" we... um, L cried. After panting a few seconds and recovering our breath, if not our dignity, we slowly gathered back at the door; listening at the wood, and not hearing any gurgling growls or demonic breathing, we cracked it open and peered out.

"It's just a mule deer," said Stacy as though a deer wouldn't leap upon you and rip out your throat in a heartbeat, given the chance.

"But it attacked us," we protested.

"It's just hungry. People probably feed it a lot," she said. Right on cue, without missing a beat, the deer licked its lips in a big wide sloppy circle. The kids squealed with delight and started to open the door wider. Reading that as an invitation, the deer immediately proceeded on forward and had I not been quick to slam the door violently to, it would surely have been in the cabin among us. The kids started protesting and begging me to open the door, and I had to patiently explain to them that their throats were currently intact only because of my quick wits and decisive action. I nevertheless feel they failed to understand the grisly horrors I surely spared them.

The next morning our stay was over; we rose sluggishly and proceeded to pack up the car. (I made sure to check the outside of the cabin for signs of bloody hoof prints on the step and fang marks on the doorknobs.) We returned our key at the main office then proceeded to rerun our happy journey in reverse, watching the grandeur of the mountains slowly subside into the grisly greys and browns of the dreary deadlands below. As we descended the passes and drove further down the increasingly depressing Highway 395, L and N played a game they always play on that road.

"Look, L! Bad giants!" N would scream pointing out the window.

"Ahhhh!" L would echo. "They're all around us!!!"

"Don't worry, L. Look over there. It's the good giants to the rescue!" N pointed to another direction and L's sudden cheering would indicate that she did indeed see her salvation approaching.

"Daddy," N would explain, "the big metal towers are the bad giants that try to get up the mountain to get us. But the little wooden one always fight for us and protect us! Yay, good giants!"

The evil giants!  They're everywhere!

But here comes the cavalry!

The giants took turns assaulting and defending and thus we were entertained the five hours back to our other, only slightly larger, cabin. After we stumbled into the house and stashed the very few things that truly needed putting away, we tossed the kids in their beds and sank deep into our own. Although a vacation is always nice, it is nevertheless a blessed thing to be back in your own home, especially one the good giants so faithfully keep watch over.

Our home security system.