Well That Was Fun
I had planned to join Bharath and some of his friends at Mammoth Mountain yesterday for snowboarding, my second outing, and I was looking forward to it. They were driving up from Orange County, and I east from San Jose. According to Google Maps, the directions were really simple - after going north up to Dublin, just go east for 200 miles. Near the end of the route was a 40-mile stretch straight across Yosemite National Park.
Leaving my house around 6:30 Friday evening, I get stuck in two whole hours of rush hour traffic and make about 50 miles of progress. Once I clear Tracy, traffic lightens up. It's dark now and I start to pass through lots of small, quiet towns, and for some reason it's getting creepy. At one point I pass a bar called The Whiskey River Saloon, and if you have an idea in your head about what such a place would look like, let me tell you, you're exactly right - that's what it looked like. I start seeing signs that say "Yosemite National Park - Tioga Pass Closed". I don't know what the Tioga Pass is, I just know that I need to take State Route 120 across the park.
As I get closer to the park, I'm seeing more signs. Suddenly it dawns on me, if there are this many signs, it must be a popular route. Taking a close look at my map (for the first time, thanks to my blind allegiance to Google Maps), I see the fine print on SR-120: "Tioga Pass - Closed During Winter". D'oh! Now what do I do? The map seems to show that if I just head south, I can circle around the bottom of the park and come back up the other side to Mammoth - but I have to go all the way down to Fresno, which is 60 miles further south. Unbelievable! So south I go.
The road that I'm on gets narrower and narrower and really quiet. For 45 minutes I don't see a single other car. The road narrows to one lane in each direction and it's on the side of a mountain, twisting and turning as it follows the canyon. It's pitch black out here, no lights anywhere, and I can't tell what's just a few feet away on my right: could be a thousand foot drop down to a lake, could be a five foot drop down to grass and trees, could be an abyss the size of the Grand Canyon - I don't know. What I do know is that the edge of the road has a steep rolloff, and there are no guardrails.
After about two hours of this, I emerge roughly at the bottom of the park and get back onto a straight, level road that heads toward Fresno. A few miles outside of the city, I take a look at the map to figure out which road I can take to loop back up around to Mammoth. It's at that point that I realize, oh my god, there is no road that goes from Fresno to Mammoth, because the Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Parks cut off access to the east. To reach Mammoth, my only choice is to drive another hundred miles south to Bakersfield (which would now put me only a hundred miles north of LA - keep in mind that Mammoth is 250 miles due east of where I live, which itself is 350 miles north of LA; I shouldn't be anywhere the hell near LA!) then reverse direction and go another 270 miles north! At this point it's already 1 AM - hell no I ain't drivin' another 400 miles!
Tired and angry, and realizing that San Jose is only 150 miles away, I give up and decide to just go home. By 3:15 AM, I'm in bed. After 400 miles and almost 9 hours of driving, I've accomplished exactly nothing. It was all a complete waste.
I still thought that maybe going north around the park might work, so I planned to check that out when I woke up Saturday morning. But when I woke up and checked the California highways website, I found that all the highways that cross the Sierra Nevada mountains in that area are closed during the winter, so there is no way to reach Mammoth without going north 200 miles to Lake Tahoe, then reversing direction and going another 140 miles to Mammoth. At that point, the idea of driving 350 miles up there on Saturday and 350 miles back on Sunday after a day of snowboarding did not appeal to me - to put it mildly - and I gave the idea up.
To top it all off, the bastards at Mammoth refuse to refund any money without 2 days advance notice, so, for the moment, I'm out $110 for the lift ticket and rental that I reserved. After all this, let me tell you, I'm not letting that one go easily and plan to fight it.
All in all, it was one hell of a great time, and it left me in a really great mood. One of these days I'ma Fall Down, Michael Douglas-style ...
Leaving my house around 6:30 Friday evening, I get stuck in two whole hours of rush hour traffic and make about 50 miles of progress. Once I clear Tracy, traffic lightens up. It's dark now and I start to pass through lots of small, quiet towns, and for some reason it's getting creepy. At one point I pass a bar called The Whiskey River Saloon, and if you have an idea in your head about what such a place would look like, let me tell you, you're exactly right - that's what it looked like. I start seeing signs that say "Yosemite National Park - Tioga Pass Closed". I don't know what the Tioga Pass is, I just know that I need to take State Route 120 across the park.
As I get closer to the park, I'm seeing more signs. Suddenly it dawns on me, if there are this many signs, it must be a popular route. Taking a close look at my map (for the first time, thanks to my blind allegiance to Google Maps), I see the fine print on SR-120: "Tioga Pass - Closed During Winter". D'oh! Now what do I do? The map seems to show that if I just head south, I can circle around the bottom of the park and come back up the other side to Mammoth - but I have to go all the way down to Fresno, which is 60 miles further south. Unbelievable! So south I go.
The road that I'm on gets narrower and narrower and really quiet. For 45 minutes I don't see a single other car. The road narrows to one lane in each direction and it's on the side of a mountain, twisting and turning as it follows the canyon. It's pitch black out here, no lights anywhere, and I can't tell what's just a few feet away on my right: could be a thousand foot drop down to a lake, could be a five foot drop down to grass and trees, could be an abyss the size of the Grand Canyon - I don't know. What I do know is that the edge of the road has a steep rolloff, and there are no guardrails.
After about two hours of this, I emerge roughly at the bottom of the park and get back onto a straight, level road that heads toward Fresno. A few miles outside of the city, I take a look at the map to figure out which road I can take to loop back up around to Mammoth. It's at that point that I realize, oh my god, there is no road that goes from Fresno to Mammoth, because the Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Parks cut off access to the east. To reach Mammoth, my only choice is to drive another hundred miles south to Bakersfield (which would now put me only a hundred miles north of LA - keep in mind that Mammoth is 250 miles due east of where I live, which itself is 350 miles north of LA; I shouldn't be anywhere the hell near LA!) then reverse direction and go another 270 miles north! At this point it's already 1 AM - hell no I ain't drivin' another 400 miles!
Tired and angry, and realizing that San Jose is only 150 miles away, I give up and decide to just go home. By 3:15 AM, I'm in bed. After 400 miles and almost 9 hours of driving, I've accomplished exactly nothing. It was all a complete waste.
I still thought that maybe going north around the park might work, so I planned to check that out when I woke up Saturday morning. But when I woke up and checked the California highways website, I found that all the highways that cross the Sierra Nevada mountains in that area are closed during the winter, so there is no way to reach Mammoth without going north 200 miles to Lake Tahoe, then reversing direction and going another 140 miles to Mammoth. At that point, the idea of driving 350 miles up there on Saturday and 350 miles back on Sunday after a day of snowboarding did not appeal to me - to put it mildly - and I gave the idea up.
To top it all off, the bastards at Mammoth refuse to refund any money without 2 days advance notice, so, for the moment, I'm out $110 for the lift ticket and rental that I reserved. After all this, let me tell you, I'm not letting that one go easily and plan to fight it.
All in all, it was one hell of a great time, and it left me in a really great mood. One of these days I'ma Fall Down, Michael Douglas-style ...
posted by GregP at 1:58 PM
4 Comments:
I'm telling you, blind reliance on computer technology is going to be the end of us all.
Man, that sucks. I would've been upset as well.
Mammoth! Wow, I was just telling my housemate about Mammoth... As a kid living in El Cajon and San Diego, Mammoth was a wonderland retreat. I could never get enough of that snow... such amazing memories.
Yes, yes, why not rub it in a little more, hmmmm?
I learned my lesson on this one; always check the state highway info page when making a long trip, especially if it crosses mountains.
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