Day 17: To Lone Pine

July 26, 2009

The temperature got down to 77F overnight. I got away from the motel at 7. Probably my earliest departure on this tour.

The temperature was pleasantly cool for about the first hour. It was nearly 100F by noon. Amazingly I only got noticeably sweaty when climbing hills at less than 6 mph. There was never any shade on the road. The only shade was at the occasional convenience store or restaurant. So I rode from one air-conditioned place to another. There were more air-conditioned stops than I expected.

Eastern Sierra Nevada mountains near Inyokern. The mountains are relatively small at this point.

US 395 and the Eastern Sierra Nevada. Getting bigger as I travel north.

US 395 is relatively flat, with a gentle uphill trend. Lone Pine is 3733 feet elevation, 1300 feet higher than Inyokern. The highway is mostly a 4-lane divided highway with a wide paved shoulder and rumble strip. That makes for low-stress cycling even when trucks go by at high speed. But there was a lot of tire debris, requiring me to weave around a lot.

I wonder if/when these lava rocks fell out of the sky?

Owens lake in the distance. Inyo mountains on the right.

I'm not sure what this is. Maybe a salt plant. Inyo mountains in the distance.

Owens lake salt playa. It was a large lake before Los Angeles diverted the water.

I rode along the west shore of Owens Lake. In 1916 the City of Los Angeles diverted most of the water that flowed into the Owens valley into the Los Angeles aquaduct. Owens lake was once a large lake, but now it's a large salty lakebed.

Storm clouds over the Sierra Nevada mountains near Lone Pine.

I got a motel room in the touristy town of Lone Pine. It's a gateway town to the Sierra Nevada mountains and to Death Valley. It was by far my most expensive room of the trip. $100. My first motel with a flat screen TV. I arrived at 4PM and spent a lot of time just relaxing and cooling off in the room. Shower, wash clothes, check email, etc.

The high temperature was 105F. Probably 5 degrees cooler than the high in Inyokern. I'm handling the heat pretty well as long as I have a place to cool off every couple of hours.

Distance: 74.9 mi (120 km)

Climbing: 2525 ft (765 m)

Average speed: 10.4 mph (16.6 km/h)

Max speed: 33 mph (53 km/h)

Today's ride: 75 miles (121 km)
Total: 843 miles (1,357 km)

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