Tuttle Creek Camp | BLM | Alabama Hills | California

 



Tuttle Creek is a BLM (Bureau of Land Management) campground about 5 miles from Lone Pine on Route 395 in California.  It's a nice campground, but the spots are not very spacious and the two I tried needed quite a bit of leveling - not a problem if you have automatic leveling.  This was my campsite for a while. 

The campground has a small creek running through it and some people were catching trout.  It's a nice little creek and I went down to take a few photos.

 

 

I took a drive up the mountain where there are campsites at 8,000 feet.  It was a steep drive on a curving narrow road perched on the side of the mountain.  I was treated to scenes of tall pine trees and the snow covered peaks.  I could not imagine towing anything up that road but I did look down at one of the campsites and saw a trailer.  Impressive!  I was happy to be safely at the bottom, after a slow trip down.  There were many areas where the road did not have any type of guardrails.

 

Great scenery!

Check out the curvy road on the right in this photo.  And this was one of the straighter areas!

This is looking down from about halfway from the top of the mountain road.

 

Alabama Hills is nearby and there were conflicting reports of boondocking allowed - or not.  There were quite a few rigs scattered around the area and there were no reports of anyone being told to leave, so as of May, boondocking was allowed.  The brochure for this area states that dispersed camping is allowed for 14 days. 

 

It is said that the prospectors who mined here named the area after a Confederate warship of the same name.

 

This is the first thing you see on the way to the campground, or entering the Alabama Hills area.  I'm not sure if he is just graffiti or someone dressed him up for a movie.  In any case, he gets lots of attention and photos.

 

This is a large area of dramatic boulders.  I only saw a small portion of the area, it keeps going for miles.  The area is famous for movies - back when The Lone Ranger and Hopalong Cassidy were in the area.  There were movies filmed during the 1990s in the area also, including Star Trek Generations.

There is a famous arch that I wanted to get some photos of, so I set out on the trail.  There weren't any signs, so I saw a small arch and went over to photograph it.  Not the one I was looking for, but it made an interesting photo.  I had to crawl up and sit on the rocks to get low enough to get the mountains in the shot.  I kept thinking that it certainly didn't look like any photographs of the arch I was searching for.   

 

Only a few minutes later, I came across the Mobius arch, the one I had set out to find.  Much easier to photograph, although I like the photos of both of them. 

 

 

 

These are different angles of the same arch.

 

There were some great views and the rest of these photos are shots of different areas I saw.  There were also rock climbers in the area.

 

 

 

Arches National Park - Part 2

 

For the next trip to Arches, I picked a nice sunny day - love the blue sky in my photos. It may have been hotter to hike, but I like the pictures better.

 

Not everything in this park is arches, as you can see by the balanced rock below. This one stands 128' tall, and there used to be a smaller balanced rock, but it tumbled down.

 

 

The broken arch has a very small crack at the top, which means it is subject to weather and erosion.

 

 

The Landscape Arch is very thin and if you look at the left side, you'll see a long horizontal crack in it. In 1991, there were other cracks like this and the weather finally chipped away a few parts of it. Before that happened, the trail went under the arch - but since it's so fragile, no one is allowed under it anymore.
 

 

This next rock formation is called "The Gossips" because it looks like people gathered together telling stories.
 

 

Just a few extra shots I like.....

 

 

 

Arches National Park, Utah - Part 1

 

This park is so big I had to spend the better part of two days to see most of what I wanted to see.  It's the hiking part that slows me down, you can drive through it all in less than a day but you don't get to see everything.  The photo above shows me under the Delicate Arch, an hour's hike mostly uphill on sandy trails and slick rock. Slick rock isn't really slick, it's rock covering a massive area that's been shaped almost smooth by wind and weather. It's usually good to hike on as long as you've got hiking boots with good traction, since it's not really slippery. The first day I was there, it was totally overcast the entire day, great for hiking and keeping cool - but not great for pictures.

 

This area is full of gigantic red rock formations shaped by changing geological conditions and weather for millions of years. The scenery here is spectacular, within a few short miles you are surrounded by these rock formations and then you'll come across a valley area with mesas at the horizon.  This arch is the iconic one shown on license plates and other advertising for the area.

 

 

I hiked to several other arches that day, most of the other hikes weren't as strenuous or as long.