Spring Day Trip Down to Shepherd Creek
Day trip down the eastern side, aimed at Shepherd Creek in Inyo County. Before leaving the lodge we sat a while by the fire pit near the stream that runs through the grounds — the two of us waving from the chairs against the river-rock wall — then got on the road south.
Stopped in at the Dutch bakery on the way, the one with the whole window case of delftware: vases, sugar bowls, candlesticks, a pair of wooden clogs on the shelf below, tulips stuck in everything. Outside, a cloud bank was sitting low on the Sierra crest, hiding most of the snow, but it had pulled apart by the time we got farther down the valley.
Shepherd Creek itself is a small thing, not far from Manzanar and Kearsarge, and only about 3,737 feet up — desert ground, sagebrush and sand, not the Sierra proper even with the crest standing right over it. Someone had laid lines of rocks across the channel, backing the water up into clear shallow pools between the boulders.
