Wildlife, sport and activities, sometimes all at once

(Editor's Note: This story first appeared in the July 2007 issue of Mammoth Monthly magazine. Subscribe here.)

When first light touches the lake, it's hard to tell where water ends and sky begins. Shimmering indigo water -- there is a reason they call this lake Bright Dot -- meets the horizon, meets the sky, then disappears from sight, tumbling, unseen, down, down, five thousand feet down, to end in another lake far below. Up here, at twelve thousand feet, no trees ring the lake, no trees define where the lake ends or begins and it looks this morning as if a person could cross the lake and continue walking forever into the sky.

But no.

Here in camp, breath steams in the cold air, making mockery of the fact that it is mid-summer, that the valley floor below is already simmering in the brilliant heat of an Owens Valley July. Numb fingers break ice off the water bucket, fumble with the balky stove, dance in the icy air, waiting, waiting, then cramp gratefully around the ancient plastic coffee mug, the steaming bowl of oatmeal and honey.

When the sun finally clears the bulk of Mount Baldwin, it is hard not to shout for the sheer pleasure of warmth returned to the world.

The trail-less walk up out of Bright Dot and high into the 12,600 foot hanging bowl lying beneath Baldwin and its companion, Mount Aggie, is surreal. The soil is almost completely bare, cut with deep, melt-off fed gorges some fifty feet deep, ringed with jagged spires and the blocky bulk of Baldwin and Aggie.

Across the way, massive Red Mountain blocks the southern horizon. Over here, a huge, transparent calcite crystal the size of a Volkswagen Beetle lies like some exotic spaceship in the moon-grey marble dust of this high country basin. The crystal is bare to the sun, cube-shaped, glass-clear. Looking through it at the sun, the world splinters into rainbow pieces. Hundreds of these calcite rocks litter this grey basin, born of the ancient, marble mother rock that defines this watershed and sets it apart from the vast majority of granite-rich Sierra basins.

Over there, another odd rock, this one also calcite but milky-white and opaque, studded with foot-long hexagonal crystals and sheets of shimmering mica, packed ten inches thick. This one and the rest in this high basin seem to concentrate in the many, many avalanche chutes and deep, narrow drainages falling from Baldwin, revealed in their crazy beauty by the scouring snow and water.

The temptation to illegally haul one out in the backpack is seriously considered and, far too reluctantly, discarded.

It is noon now, time to head down. The thin mountain air is full of light, easy on the lungs, bright. Everything up here is bright, everything white, silver, gray. The brilliant yellow of the first flower, a wallflower, is a shock after the severe upper basin. When grey-green sedge and lavender aster and fiery paintbrush and pale columbine begin to crowd the tumbling creekside heading back down to Bright Dot, it is like returning to earth from a visit to the moon.

Walking on, down, always down, another revelation. The huge meadow that marks the final plateau before the steep, narrow, relentless descent to Convict Lake, still three thousand feet below, is, simply, someone's idea of mountain meadow perfection. Braided with dozens of deep, teal-blue creeks lined with molten-silver mica strewn gravel, hip-deep in red, yellow, magenta, lavender, blue, purple flowers, the meadow is seductive.

It is hard to keep walking. After all, who wants to leave paradise?

But no.

Today is the end of this trip, not the beginning.

Passing limpid, shallow Mildred Lake at almost ten thousand feet, the trail turns red and rocky. The heat from the valley floor begins to waft up the narrow canyon. The air thickens, it is harder to breathe. Crashing Convict Creek comes in on the right, tumbling in a relentless white froth. This is a part of the trail where men and mules balk, where there is still two thousand precipitous feet to drop, where one mistake could take–and has taken -- a life.

Dropping out of the steep upper drainage, the trail relents and eases the last thousand feet down toward Convict Lake. Like the upper moonscape basin below Mount Baldwin, the lower Convict Lake basin is geologically and botanically one of the most unusual in the Sierra.

Its marble soils host several plants found no where else on earth, and no right-minded botanist will tell you what or where they are.

Convict Lake itself is known to the potato chip crowd as a family-fishing mecca and to almost as many others as the site of two deadly incidents -- one a historic shootout between outlaws (hence the name, Convict Lake) and another more recent ice skating accident causing seven fatalities.It is also, ironically, a lake of extraordinary beauty, and as one might now expect of this place, extraordinary oddities.

Going off trail, heading for the creek, boots off, sandals on, the oddities are revealed. Slipping, sliding, grey marble rock underfoot, aiming towards home, the creek makes its final, lazy descent to the lake, sprawling luxuriously across the delta, in a series of channels.

High desert junipers crowd toe to root with creek-loving aspens, prickly pear cactus pricks the bare toes, lies inches away from water-loving monkey flowers. Desert meets water meets desert meets creek, over and over again. In the fall, this same delta will be ablaze with a spectacular golden flame, and aspen leaves will fall so thickly they dam the creek, creating even more braids.

But today, it is hot, dry and the day is almost over.

But not yet.

At the lake's neon green-turquoise edge (no Sierra lake is the color of Convict Lake, a result of the marble rock that underlies the lake) the shoes come off, the clothes come off, the heated, dusty, sun-burnt body goes in. The turquoise water is icy cold, blue to the opened eye, deep, deep, seven hundred feet deep, unsurprisingly, with Convict's penchant for oddness, one of the deepest lakes in the entire Sierra.

This time, when burnt shoulders surface the still-roiling blue water, nothing stops the shout.