After visiting Yosemite we drove to the Mono Vista RV Park in Lee
Vining, CA. It was a pretty decent place. It did have pay showers which
we thought was a little strange. I did not realize anybody still did
that. It had clean bathrooms and a nice dog walk area.
In the morning we drove to Mono Lake which was just down the street. I had read about the lake in <a href=“http://wbcci12.org/LATrip/mono2.html“>another persons travel journal</a>
which I had read while planning our trip. She described the strange
tufa formations that are present because of the lakes high saline
content. Apparently they were only visable because the water was being
diverted to Los Angeles. Unfortunately for me I learned the night
before that the water diversion had recently been stopped or at least
slowed down and that the water level of the lake was now much higher so
the formations are barely visable. It was still an extremely beatiful
area just not what I came to see.
Next we went down the road a bit further to the town of Bodie, CA. It
was apparently a boom town in the gold rush era and then slowly faded.
It apparently had some residents for at least half of the twentieth
century. The road leading up to Bodie included a three mile stretch of
the bumpiest dirt road I have ever driven on. It was basically not
navigable, at least not in the van, but we had already drove about 40
minutes and I wasn’t going to turn around.
I couldn’t get many good shots of the interiors of the buildings
because of the glare from the windows. I did take this shot of a saloon
through a hole in the door.
Several rusted shells of cars and machinery littered the town.
After we left Bodie the alternator light came on in the van and the
battery gauge was really low. I assumed the alternator had died since I
had been using it to charge the staring battery and a bank of RV
batteries as well. It took me a while to realize the rough roads had
knocked some of the wiring loose from my dual battery isolator. I
finally got all the connections tightened up not after a couple tries.
This car trouble happened just before we were set to drive through
Death Valley. We were a bit scared since I wasn’t 100 percent sure I
had found the problem. It was a little intimidating driving through
what seemed like infinite desert without being confident the van would
make it. We almost stayed at this hole in the wall Casino/RV park in
the middle of nowhere but decided to press on to the KOA behind Circus
Circus in Las Vegas.