I flew from Boston, MA to Houston, TX on Continental Airlines, arriving at 1048 (all times from now on will be in 24-hour time, FYI). After a brief shopping trip to pick up some last-minute food items, my father and I drove out of Houston at 1400. We stayed the night in Sonora, TX after discovering that the Volvo (a 1993 Volvo 740 GL, if I recall correctly) had a bulging right front tire.
The next morning we took the car to San Angelo, TX for a new set of tires. Important lesson here: always make sure you have your car's tire history on you! We then drove to Benson, AZ in the middle of a very bad thunderstorm (the car was shaking with each blast of thunder, for some idea of how severe it was). We'd been planning on staying the night at a local state park, but the weather was so bad (gusting winds and rain) that pitching the tent would have been very unpleasant. We opted to sleep overnight at the rest stop instead; although it was cramped (I slept in the back seat, my father in the passenger seat), it was very warm and dry and well-populated enough to be safe.
We crossed the California border on the morning of Day 2, arriving in a giant desert bowl surrounded on all sides by high mountains. It's amazing how much California feels like home; even Arizona isn't quite right. The sky is very large here out west- if you've never seen it it's hard to picture. I wrote something poetic at this point: "The sky is so big here, the ground so flat and curving except where the dry rock mountains without names puncutate the skyline like brooding brows of some unfathomably huge god." These are just little mountains, too - and so desolate: dry grass, chaparral, sagebrush, and absolutely no water to be seen. The gaps between the mountains are huge - I can't even begin to estimate the size of them, nor the height of the mountains (though looking them up on the atlas lists heights of only 4000 feet, about the size of some of the mountains home in New England. We passed by Palen Dry Lake - another geographical feature not common in New England! - and continued on our way.
Just past Chiriaco Summit on I-10 we hit a grayout of fog and wind, which disappeared 5 miles down the road. Indio, CA was very smoggy (I actually got sick from the smog) as was San Bernardino. Palm Springs had a huge bank of wind turbines. We drove by an Army convoy of trucks - the trucks lacked windows or air conditioning and the soldiers were wearing heavy desert fatigues in 100 F weather. They must have been miserable. The convoy turned off on a mission to invade a roadside restaurant. We then drove by Orthanc - no wait, it was Morongo, a roadside casino in the middle of nowhere - but it looked like Orthanc, rising high out of a featureless plain. The air was still terrible, but improved once we turned off I-10.
We drove by Edwards AFB, where the shuttle had landed earlier this morning, but saw no sign of it - not surprising, but alas! A solar farm north of Four Corners provided additional roadside viewing. Finally, for the first time, we saw the Sierra Nevada's southern end. They are very large. We began driving up on the alluvial fans of the mountains - literally the mountains' knees. The next big landmark, Owens Lake (now a dry lake as well after Los Angeles' water demands) was visible as a reflection of silvered sunlight far before we saw the actual lakebed. The mountains on the left (the Sierra) and the right (the Inyos) got very large as the valley closed in from its earlier openness, becoming nothing but merged alluvial fans and the lakebed.
We finally arrived in Lone Pine, CA and slept overnight at a motel after making our permit and transit arrangements at the local ranger station. Also, freeze-dried food fits better in bear canisters if you put it in ziplock bags beforehand.
The next morning we drove up with our shuttler to the Cottonwood Lakes trailhead (just south of Lone Pine), then left our car and got in his for the ride to the Kearsarge Pass trailhead (in Onion Valley, just west of Independence, CA). We arrived at the trailhead at 1000 and registered to spend the night before beginning our hike the next morning. Spent the day lounging in the sun and sleeping. There was lots of smoke at sundown- nearby forest fires, apparently. Spent the rest of the evening mourning my finger/toenails, which I'd cut short but were still sad. The plan for Day 4 was to hike 8 miles up over Kearsarge Pass, then 5 miles south to Bubbs Creek and set up camp.
My father's shirt was munched on by a ground squirrel during the afternoon; we also spied hummingbirds, chimpmunks, hawks, ravens, and vultures, as well as wild geranium, columbine, hellebore, and cottonwoods and conifer trees. Most of the ground in the campsite was scree- loose rocks, gravel, and sand eroded from the peaks. We were camping at 10,000 feet, so the extra day to acclimate to the elevation was very much appreciated, particularly by my lungs, which complained frequently about the thinner air. Even at this altitude the mountains seem very tall above my head. The three waterfalls high above us are quite impressively noisy - apparently the winter of 2004-05 was very wet, hence a large melting flow. As the sun set, it grew quite cold.