It is worth saying at the outset: this is a driving trip. There is no reasonable way to do it without a car, there is no fallback if something closes, and the distances between services are real rather than a brochure warning.
01 Why the eastern side
The Sierra Nevada is a tilted block: it climbs slowly from the west and stops dead on the east. That means the western side — the Yosemite side, the sequoia side — is travelled through forest at middling altitude, and the eastern one is travelled through desert, looking up.
The practical difference is one of scale. From the floor of the Owens Valley, at about 1,200 metres, the range reaches the 4,421 metres of Mount Whitney in a little over fifteen horizontal kilometres. There are no foothills to prepare the eye: there is scrub, and then the whole wall, visible from the road for hours.
The second difference is crowding. The western side concentrates the famous parks and their entrance queues; the east has the same mountain and a fraction of the people, because hardly anyone goes there on purpose.
02 Mono Lake and Bodie
Mono Lake is the natural starting point if you arrive from Yosemite. It is a lake with no outlet, more than a million years old, into which water comes from the Sierra creeks and leaves only by evaporating. Everything those creeks carry stays behind: it is now about two and a half times as salty as the sea, and strongly alkaline.
What you go to see are the tufa towers: columns and knobs of calcium carbonate formed underwater, where freshwater springs rose inside an alkaline lake. Those on the south shore are between 200 and 900 years old; the ones standing well above the present water level are over 13,000.
A little over half an hour away is Bodie. It was a mining town that reached some 8,000 people and around 2,000 buildings; two fires, in 1892 and 1932, left less than 10 per cent standing. Since 1962 it has been kept in what they call arrested decay: nothing is restored, it is only prevented from falling down.
The distinction registers the moment you arrive. There are no costumed actors or souvenir shops inside the town: there are houses with the furniture where it was left, broken glass and peeling paint, at 2,500 metres and without a tree in sight.
03 The Owens Valley
Southwards the road enters the Owens Valley, a long dry basin wedged between the range and the White Mountains, with Bishop and Lone Pine as the only towns of any size and very little between them.
In Lone Pine the thing that justifies the whole leg happens: you cross the main street, look west, and there is the highest point of the contiguous United States with nothing in front of it. Just below it lie the Alabama Hills, a chaos of rounded granite blocks that has been used as a film set for a century.
It is also where the contrast of scales becomes hard to ignore: in a single field of view there is a town of a couple of thousand people, a desert and a range of over four thousand metres.
04 Dropping into Death Valley
From Lone Pine you cross east and drop into Death Valley. The change is not one of landscape but of regime: from the 1,200 metres of the Owens Valley to the 85 metres below sea level of Badwater, the lowest point in North America.
Here the calendar matters more than on any other leg. From June to September the heat makes walking unviable and the visit shrinks to looking from the car. From November to March the desert is at its best, but by then Tioga Pass has been shut for months and the link with Yosemite disappears.
The practical consequence is that this trip has two narrow windows and no more: late May and June, when the pass has just opened and the desert is still bearable; and September and October, when the heat has eased and the pass is still open.
05 What doing it this way costs
The first toll is the driving. These are long legs on two-lane road, with the towns far apart and petrol stations you would do well not to pass. It is not a difficult road, but it is a road on which running out of fuel stops being an anecdote.
The second is provision. Outside Bishop and Mammoth Lakes, sleeping and eating comes down to motels and a couple of places per town, and in season they fill. Booking ahead is not fussiness: it is how you avoid driving two more hours at the end of the day.
And the third is the date. The whole route depends on Tioga Pass being open, and that opening shifts every year with the snow: in the last cycle it closed on 12 November and reopened on 15 May. If the plan involves linking with Yosemite, it is the first thing to check.
In exchange, this is probably the stretch of California where you see the most different things per hour of driving and where there are fewest people to see them with. If that is worth it to you, the coast can wait.
LordDimwit Queensland, for the traveller who swaps the Cairns catamaran for a cay on the southern reef.
Marklchaves Bali, for the traveller who swaps the whole south for three bases in the north and east.
José Luis Filpo Cabana