Up 395 Along the Sierra's East Side

North of the desert, past the last dry lakes and the first cattle ranches, the highway comes at the mountains all at once. The Sierra Nevada does not approach gradually. It stands up, a wall of granite and pine shadow running north until it loses itself in haze, and the road stays beside it rather than crossing it. This is US 395, the long route up the east side, the side the weather forgot.

The Dry Country Under Whitney

The Owens Valley is a long open trough of alkali flat and irrigated field. On its floor, ranches spread green water across the dirt in thin, exact lines, while the uncultivated ground goes no color at all — the gray-tan shade of absence. On the western side rise the great rock faces; on the eastern side, lower bare hills hide the beginning of the desert. The east side of the Sierra is the shadow side, the dry one, the side that kept fewer trees and more weather.

The small towns come at intervals, one after the next: Lone Pine and its movie rocks, Independence with its quiet blocks, Big Pine, and then Bishop, the largest of them all, where the smoke from a few chimneys points straight up on a cold January morning. These are valley towns. Their main streets tolerate dust; their bars tolerate silence. A man who runs the feed store can tell how hard a winter is shaping up by the state of the snow-fence orders and the freight schedule on the pass roads.

Outside Lone Pine, the round boulders of the Alabama Hills lie scattered like something tipped from an enormous wagon. Filmmakers have been reworking these rocks into other places for decades, and the daylight still has a cinematic exactness — hard and white in the morning, crimson at the end of the day. But the scale of the view always wins. The hills sit in the foreground while Mount Whitney stands behind them, snow-capped, entire, so huge it undoes the idea that the foreground was the subject. Its summit is the highest point in the lower forty-eight, a fact the body registers from below even on hazy afternoons.

South of Lone Pine, the lake bed goes white where water used to be — the old lake taken down to almost nothing by the aqueduct that carries the Owens River toward Los Angeles. The highway runs alongside this pale subtraction, a bowl of blown white light that makes the eye ache. The dust hangs over everything, glittering and absurd, and the road points north out of it like a line drawn by someone who wanted out.

The Interrupted Land

The road also passes a place where the land remembers interruption. Manzanar sits on the west side of the highway, below the great wall of the Sierra — a camp built during the Second World War to hold people of Japanese ancestry, moved from homes along a coast that had suddenly turned against them. Its concrete foundations now trace the outlines of the barracks, as if the floors had been taken from under a small city and only the footprints remained.

Wind moves through the sage. The same blue-and-white mountains that bless the rest of the valley here look indifferent, or heavy, or simply official. A stone monument stands in the cemetery, and the garden near it holds small things left by visitors — coins, notes, bits of color — ordered and prayer-like. The highway is not far, yet its sound stays thin. The traveler holds the image for miles; then Bishop restores the normal world, warm and lit. That is one thing this road gives: the chance to keep going, which is also a form of forgetting.

Fields, a Lake, and the High Passes

At Bishop the valley broadens and the farms thicken. Alfalfa lies in green squares beside the highway, watered precisely and kept, in drought years, like a portrait of what is wanted. Farther north, the road leaves the last ranches and tilts upward, out of the long trough, over a ridge, and into a separate country. The air thins; the wind smells of pine sap and cold rock.

This is no longer the Owens Valley. The highway crosses a corner of the Mono Basin, and Mono Lake appears below — its tufa towers rising as gray spires from the blue water, looking less like geology than like the ruins of a city that never built itself. The lake's flat surface, ringed with white, has an unearthly stillness, and the road holds high above it so that the view west turns to the crest. There, at Lee Vining, a road departs for the true crossing of the Sierra, climbing toward the high country and Yosemite beyond. It opens with the spring melt and closes with the first heavy snow; when it closes, the east side is a place entered and left by the same long pavement.

North above the lake, the highway climbs over Conway Summit, a high pass where the wind is constant and the vegetation is low, then descends toward Bridgeport. The country softens. Cottonwoods line a running stream, and a valley floor of grass appears — a reasonable green that startles after so much dry. Cattle stand in the middle distance under a sky the size of counties. The Sierra on the left keeps its head in the clouds; on the right, the land spends a long time climbing toward Nevada, a slow bronze slope with nothing on it but afternoon.

The Dark Side, Then Night

The day runs out early on the east side. The sun goes down while the mountains still hold its final redness, and the white peaks turn pink as if embossed from behind. A traveler might pull to the shoulder to watch — a familiar sight on this road — and see the whole Sierra become a single long silhouette, each summit sharp as cut paper, while the pavement gives back the day's heat as a gust of warm tar smell.

In winter, the whole register changes. Snow fences appear along the shoulders; chain-up signs go out; the valley floor goes dusted or erased. Ski traffic rolls north at dawn in a parade of black-ice headlights. The pass roads close and reopen; the highway itself mostly stays open, because 395 is a route somebody needs in every season — the school bus, the plow, the rancher hauling a trailer to Bishop. The desert east of the Sierra takes winter as a kind of manners: sudden, sharp, over by early afternoon when the sun clears the crest and pours a thin gold over the valley.

The road returns to the desert from which it came. What it leaves behind is a matter of double scale — a granite wall on one side, a brimming emptiness on the other, small towns strung between like beads. In winter it is a route; in summer, a destination; in the late light, proof that the country out here still runs in large, unapologetic pieces. The wind in the sage, the passing truck's alarm, the mountains holding their snow — the road passes them all, and asks only that the driver not look away.

Photos: RuggyBearLA (CC BY 2.0); David Jordan (CC BY-SA 3.0)