The Road Through Eastern California.
In December of 2023, my wife and I took a trip back to the US to spend the holidays with my family. My family is dispersed all over the states, and we would be doing a fair amount of traveling over the three week holiday, but we decided early on to reserve the first week for ourselves. We would fly into Los Angeles and do a small road trip up to San Francisco by way of Joshua Tree, Death Valley, and Lake Tahoe. I had visited California plenty of times already, but only ever by the Pacific Coast. Big Sur, San Francisico, the Redwoods - all places that have had a significant mark on me, but for this trip, we wanted to see the other side of what the state contained. Setting off from LA in the morning, we headed east on the 10 towards Palm Springs. The concrete and rush of LA quickly fell behind us as the landscape shifted from urban to desert to a rocky expanse.
Joshua Tree. Stop One.
Joshua Tree was the first stop on our trip. A place I had heard so much about but had never had the chance to see for myself. One of my closest friends had spent years telling me about this place - the expanse, the tranquility. The peace and quiet among the sand. I arrived with high expectations for something, even if I didn't know what exactly I was expecting. What hit me first was the color palette. Muted, varied, dull, and deep. The blues and oranges dominate the landscape with golden greens and soft reds filling in the bushes and plants. A place that overwhelmingly felt both empty and vibrant. Dead and alive. The juxtaposition of life and death in the park is present everywhere you look and provided a beautiful landscape for reflection and peace.
Death Valley.
After Joshua Tree, we headed north east in the direction of Death Valley. As we moved further east, the desert become more sparse, more quiet. The ever present greens and reds of Joshua Tree were soon forgotten as the ground began to crack and the desert slowly began to win the battle of dominance over the vegetation. Approaching Death Valley, everything becomes more distance and empty. A hundred kilometers between service stations and food, nothing but a road and sand, quiet and alone. Driving into Death Valley, as could have been expected by the name, was desolate. Dead and grey. The sun beating down relentlessly onto cracked clay and stone. We didn't see animals anymore, no humming and rustling from insects, no trees and plants scattered throughout. It was an impressive sight, if not slightly disconcerting. A feeling persisted of being in a place I wasn't supposed to be, demanding a reverence for the desert and the quiet that it brought.
Mono Lake.
Leaving Death Valley behind, we began to make our way further north - past Mammoth Lakes in the direction of Lake Tahoe. As we passed through Mammoth Lake, we stopped into the ranger station to ask for some advice on how to fill our day ahead. The ranger told us about a place called Mono Lake, a little gem rarely visited on an otherwise busy tourist highway. I really couldn't have prepared myself for what would soon become one of my favorite places in the states. As we approached the lake, we were greeted with a field of crimson. Bold, red, striking fields of grass set starkly against blue mountains and golden fields. The history of Mono Lake is fascinating - a mixture of incredible natural formations and human intervention has led to a quiet place that fully embodies what I had come to love about the California desert up to this point in the trip - a vibrant and muted color palette that balanced life and death. Sprawling copper fields, stark monuments of salt and rock emerging from a still blue lake, and fields of crimson grass with dead trees filling out the valley. Mono Lake will live on for me as one of the most impressive places I have ever been, a gem hidden in the desert.
Until the next time.
There is so much variety in California - forests, cliffs, mountains, cities, deserts. It is no wonder why artists, writers, and musicians have flocked here for a century to experience the beauty and the wonder that it can provide. This trip gave me a chance to see a new side of the state. A more empty, dry, challenging side. The resilience of the vegetation, the adaptation of the people who live there, the colors that make a dead world come alive - it all makes a visit here formative and memorable.