High, and dry
It was just two years ago. The Sierra Nevadas were positively pounded with frozen water. Snowpacks were hyper healthy. I remember that bounty of the winter of 2010/2011, not in terms of skiing fun, which I'm sure was titanic, but in terms of summer drives on highway 120 from Lee Vining up over Tioga Pass into Tuolumne Meadows. Yosemite was just bursting at the seams with water, leaking all over itself, and it was a marvel to behold. It was one of those fantasy times, that August 2011, with rivulets trickling, brooks babbling, creeks gushing and rivers churning, all flowing into one another, doing their circulatory thing. It was all drippy and sloshy and gooshy—unsafe for crocs/sneakers!
Driving along Highway 395 this past week, that all seems like a long time ago. Like two years ago. Man, we're lookin' at a dry one this year. The mighty Southern Sierra, the tallest mountain range in the lower 48, the monstrous wall of granite that takes the most brutal, drenching, stormy haymakers that roll in from the Pacific, and then shakes itself off in the sunsoaked morning that inevitably follows and dares to say, “Is that all you got?”… Well, those peaks just don't have much going for them this season. Pretty dang lean scene, snow-wise. And the fantastic White Mountains, that hefty range directly east of Bishop, home of the world's most impressive garden of the some of the planet's oldest plants, the bristlecone pine, and capped by the peak called White Mountain King, which tops out at 14,264 feet, only 231 feet shorter than famous Mt. Whitney, which looms from the other side of 395 west of Lone Pine. The Whites this year are downright brown with about as much snow as your average Lemmon Valley back yard.
Which, you know, sorta sucks. I mean, it's looking like a big summer for chapstick and cracked earth and water cops. Oh sure, we may still catch a break and get a few good rainstorms in April/May. You never, after all, know. I just got the feeling during my drive that we in The West are very much like a guy who lives, hydrologically speaking, from from paycheck to paycheck. But then, that's been our reality for longer than we care to admit.
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OK, I think it's now officially a trend, not a fad. More and more people cancelling their landlines and opting to go with their smart phones only. I understand. It's a good way to reduce the monthly nut. I get it.
But man, I just can't pull that trigger. There's still something superior about talking on the landline. It's just better. Must be that satellite lag in the cell phones? Or somethin'. But it's just more of a stress to chat on the cell. So like an old geezer who blathers on endlessly about the days of 50-cent gas and 10-cent stamps, I just gotta keep that landline.
