Between Lone Pine and June Lake the Honda's "Trip B" trip meter, which is accumulating our overall road trip mileage hit 5,000 miles, averaging 38.9 mpg of regular. Combined with the nearly 7,000 miles on our European road trip in May and June, by the time we are back in Gold River tomorrow we will have logged over 12,000 miles in 2015 of rubber hitting the road to see the sights - It's been a ball and now it's time to kick back a bit.
Left the Inn at 10am - weather is overcast. so unlike yesterday's clear blue sky. Weather reports can be wrong.
Not much difference between this and the lowest spot in the valley and also the U.S.
Drove to the Ranch for breakfast and to check out the gift shop and golf course.
Why visit the golf course when neither Pam nor Norm qualify as even bad duffers? At 214 ft below sea level, it is the lowest grass golf course in the world. In addition, it's rated by Golf Digest as "One of America's Toughest Courses". Worthy of a visit by The Travelin' Twosome.
Next on the agenda....
Built in 1960, it was totally rennovated in 2012 to be environmentally sound. All exhibits inside were totally redone to great effect.
What? Flash flooding? This notice posted in the visitor center. On October 18, torrential rains estimated to be of the "once every 100 years" variety struck the northern part of Death Valley causing major damage to Scotty's Castle, a water treatment plant, roads and other infrastructure. Scotty's Castle was also inundated by mudslides. No weather report suggested anything of this magnitude. The Castle probably will not be reopened for months. We had visited it a couple of times before, but for first time visitors to the park that hurts. Death Valley has more than one way to bite unexpectedly.
The following 6 shots are inside the visitor center.
No more worries about hunters.
The unexpected flood event could have caught us if we'd arrived just a bit sooner. Now, what with that overcast sky and all, we scampered back to the car and peeled out of the parking lot to gain some elevation.
The Valley even has sand dunes. Photo taken by Pam as Honda is accelerating under full steam down the road.
Love the purpley mountain backdrop. Shot taken moving at speed.
"Stovepipe Wells"? Been there, done that, just keep on truckin' by.
My God, we have such a way to go and it's all so flat. And flood water really gets deep on flat land.
Lone Pine Visitors Center. You who have driven westward out of Death Valley Valley know that to get from the previous photo to Lone Pine means climbing two mountain ranges, the first of which tops out near 5,000 feet, with Lone Pine itself at about 4,000 feet. We now thumb our noses at flash floods and were never really worried - nyah, nyah water.
Pam wants to adopt this one...
Lone Pine was practically an offsoot of Hollywood in the 1920's - 1950's, even continuing today to a lesser extent. The Alabama Hills behind the town, with the soaring vista of the Sierras as a backdrop, caused hundreds and hundreds of movies and TV productions to be shot here either in whole or in part. Not only cowboy movies - the area substituted for whatever locale was called for. The 1938 blockbuster "Gunga Din" was shot entirely in Lone Pine even though it was about British troops in India in the time of Empire. The title shot to Hopalong Cassidy movies featured his Wyoming "Bar 20" ranch with the song "In Old Wyoming" being sung western style. The mountains shown behind the ranch were actually the Sierras behind Lone Pine.
This was a neat place to spend an hour and a half. As Larry David would say, "It's prrretty, prrretty nifty".
Jim Rogers was a philanthropist and owner of the NBC television affiliate for Southern Nevada plus several other TV stations in the West. He created and financed the museum - many of the displays and memorabilia were contributed by him. He died 8 months ago at age 75 but seems to have been collecting until the last. Portions of a Star Trek movie, "Ironman" and "Django Unchained" that filmed here are represented in the displays.
But the biggest draw is the cowboy movies. Only 3 years separate Norm and Rogers and both share the same groove about the museum's content. It's like diving into a pool of the familiar.
Some of the sets built at Lone Pine for "Gunga Din".
Roy and Dale in their prime. They had as much to do with real, working cowboys and cowgals as high fashion has to with sweatpants. But when you were a kid, who knew?
Was Dale Evans a separated Siamese twin?
Most hero cowboys, like the Lone Ranger and Gene Autry, shot the guns out of the hands of bad guys, or winged them just enough to go "ouch" and drop their guns. What a thrill to see that Hoppy shot to kill, no dickin' around. Norm's hero. William Boyd, who played Hoppy in 66 films, saw the future of TV and bought the rights to the Hoppy character, books and films for $350,000 in 1948. TV quickly developed a voracious appetite for product. Boyd cleaned up. And it's TV that brought Hoppy to Norm, not the theater.
A parade saddle. Riding the range on this behemoth would have killed the horse.
A panorama shot of the Lone Ranger exhibit. Unbelievable the amount and infinite variety of stuff, stuff, stuff in just this one area. Were Rogers stll alive Norm would have offered to sell him his collection of 8 years worth of circa 1950's Lone Ranger comics (he had a subscription).
Most good guys wore a white hat. Hoppy wore a black hat. But the Lone Ranger wore a mask.
A mint condition Hopalong Cassidy bicycle. Even at 72, Norm wants it bad. Those saddlebags!
Dozens and dozens of posters.
In the '30s and '40s "B" westerns were cranked out like widgets to pad the Saturday matinees. The posters were usually better than the movie. This one sounds like a bondage flick, but that's perhaps a bit ahead of its time for straight arrow Tom Mix.
When you've become an artifact in a museum you know the salad days are in the past.
In 1941's "High Sierra" Humphrey Bogart played "Mad Dog" Roy Earle, who attempted to escape from the cops by heading to, where else, the high Sierras. The car in the background is the actual car "Mad Dog" drove in his getaway from the Lone Pine "back lot" halfway up nearby Mt. Whitney. Jim Rogers also had an extensive car collection.
We like the old-fashioned look of the buildings along Lone Pine's main street.
The amount of snow on mountain peaks seems to be getting denser.
As we got closer to June Lake, the air was quite smoky with an eerie film over the lake. Fires?
We drove 223 miles today.
