After a few days of heading north from the Mojave Desert and J-Tree, we arrived back at Lone Pine - the first town you come to on the west side of Death Valley. Thus, we had completed a giant circuit around Southern California. We camped in the same spot at the base of Mount Whitney, as we had on the first time round. Lone Pine is such a pleasant and unassuming town, that rolling up there again almost felt like coming home! The only weird thing was that as close as 40 miles from Mammoth (where we were going skiing), temperatures were still in the 80s (above 30C).
Nonetheless, as we approached Mammoth (which appears to be in its own freaky micro-climate) the temperature dropped and snow appeared on the ground. During the night before our first day of skiing there was a dump of 12 inches of fresh powder, which made for an awesome debut on the slopes! This being only my second ski-outing, the first being to a small resort in Slovenia, I was awed by the scale of the aptly-named resort of Mammoth Mountain. Although only a fraction of the lifts were open - it's very early season - it was more terrain than I thought was possible to conquer in 5 days!
Our lift passes were in fact valid for 5 days out of 6 (i.e. you take any 1 day off in the 6 you're booked in for). By the end of day 1, we had recaptured the form we had had at the end of our previous ski trip.
On day 2, I fell over a lot (Andy irritatingly, did not), so day 3 became designated as our day off, allowing my aching body to recover! After a day's rehabilitation in the hotel, days 4, 5 and 6 saw steady improvement in our skills – we were even doing black runs by the end!
We were sorry to leave Mammoth at the end of the week (though I'm sure our bodies were thankful!). We headed north along the eastern side of the Sierras to beautiful Lake Tahoe and beyond.
Before dropping down into the Sacramento Valley, where we are now, we paid a visit to Lassen Volcanic National Park, the site of an eruption in 1914 and ongoing low-level volcanic activity. Although much of the park is currently inaccessible without snow-shoes or snowmobile, we were able to take a short (and slippery) hike to get some stunning views of the volcanoes.
And the egg-stink of belching fumaroles reminded us of our adventures way back in Yellowstone.
Now we are in the lowland warmth of Red Bluff, CA and have just listed Grayham for sale on the internet - sadly our time in the US is running short. However, as Grandma and Grandpa were unable to meet us in San Diego, we have decided we will take an internal flight back to New Jersey to stay with them around Thanksgiving, which we are really looking forward to. Then we begin a new adventure when we fly down under on Dec 4th.
