Our accidental "national park." - Owens Valley, CA - includes trip planning guide

Sunset, Sept, 1994 by Jeff Phillips

No visitor to Mono Basin should leave without standing on the salt-encrusted bank of its most defining feature. The best Mono Lake access is at South Tufa. Check on guided walks at the visitor center in Lee Vining.

While Lee Vining itself doesn't offer much more than standard motel rooms and a couple of coffee shops, its location at the junction of State 120 and U.S. 395 makes it California's back door to Yosemite and the base for outstanding fall hikes up Sierra canyons forming the western rim of the basin.

Envisioning a park

From Lee Vining, it's an easy climb to the 7,032-foot rim of Panum Crater, whic offers one of the basin's best views. (Drivers heading to South Tufa recreation area will pass the gravel turnoff to the trailhead about 3 miles from U.S. 395.

Walking the loop around the crater rim counterclockwise, at first you can see only the lake, but as you continue, the view gradually expands to include the northern bowl of the basin and then finally encompasses the entire sweep of the range south to Carson Peak. Looking at the march of deep canyon waterways emptying through sage-dotted hills into Mono Lake, it takes no engineering skil to see the elegant simplicity of DWP's geography of plumbing. Building the Los Angeles Aqueduct was not so much an act of genius, but of vision.

Now, some 80 years later, a new vision for the Owens Valley and the Eastern Sierra is beginning to be shaped, not by Los Angeles engineers but by local visionaries such as Phil Pister and Andrea Lawrence. As water slowly seeps back into dry streambeds, desiccated lakes, and even the parched depths of the Owens River Gorge, it carries hopes for restoring some balance between nature and a city's arrogant reconfiguration of it. But it also carries the possibility of the kind of development it so far has been spared.

"While we rightly owe the DWP a vote of thanks for leaving much of the Eastern Sierra ecosystem intact, ultimately we can't rely on them to maintain the statu quo," Pister says as the sun slips behind the mountains. "This is a magnificent landscape of immense recreational value and very little development that is worthy of a national park. What we who live here now need is the vision to simply leave those natural values intact."

TRIP-PLANNING GUIDE

Following is a list of organizations and agencies that can help you plan a fall vacation in the Eastern Sierra, along with some of our favorite places to eat and sleep. The area code is 619 unless otherwise noted.

Eastern Sierra information

Eastern Sierra InterAgency Visitor Center, a mile south of Lone Pine (about an hour south of Bishop at the junction of State Highway 136 and U.S. 395), offers an unbeatable view of the Sierra and Mount Whitney and the best selection of books and maps on the area. Open daily from 8 to 4:50 through October; 876-6222

Mono Basin Scenic Area Visitor Center, at the northern edge of Lee Vining overlooking Mono Lake, has a good bookstore, along with photo galleries and interpretive exhibits on the region. The center offers several naturalist-led hikes: Mono Lake walks at South Tufa daily at 10 A.M. and 1 P.M. through September; weekends only from October on; fall-color walks up Lundy Canyon weekends when aspen turn (call for dates). Open 9 to 7 through Labor Day, 9 to from Labor Day through October; 647-3044.