Tuesday, November 6, 2012

M3 9538 points, 4Runner 11800 points


A few years ago when I bought my convertible, my little brother scoffed at what he saw as a City Slickers car (who me?). So I sent him a picture like this (but with the convertible in the same spot). It shut him up for a coupla minutes.


Ellery Lake just the other side of Yosemite, 9538 ft high.

I got both of them up in to the White Mountains to see the Bristlecones...


Trees so ancient they used them to correct Carbon Dating. There's 2 groves of them, the Schulmann Grove then the Patriarch Grove, higher up. The road to the Schulmann Grove is paved, so they both got there no probs. I tried to get the M3 further up but the pavement stops and the road gets quite bumpy. I got so far but the amount of rocks bouncing off the underside made me stop and turn around.
No such problems with the 4Runner of course. I had made it up to the Patriarch Grove in 2001 in my Jeep, but I'd stopped on the way to catch Sunset light on trees on the way up, and arrived in the dark.



In fact I got quite a bit further, all the way to 11800 ft, right to the start of the trail to the top of White Mountain. It's nice to be able to go anywhere again.

In this case those points don't mean prizes - they're vertical feet.



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