For the uninitiated, California is not all palm trees, beaches, and Liberals. I live in one of the most rural and isolated areas of the state─the Owens Valley, located along the eastern scarp of the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range. Their are four small towns in the valley; Bishop, Big Pine, Independence and Lone Pine. The eastern face of the Sierra is also known as the High Sierra and Eastern Sierra. Fishing and hunting are popular here, and rifle racks in pick-up trucks are still a common sight.

The Sierra Nevada is the highest mountain range in the U.S. outside of Alaska (yes, higher than the Rockies) culminating in 14,496’ Mt. Whitney, near the little town of Lone Pine, some 70 miles south of me. Close to the Nevada border, the Owens Valley is sandwiched between Yosemite and Death Valley Nat'l Parks surrounded by the 14,000 foot glacier-clad Sierra to the west and the 14,000’ White Mountain Range to the east, making the Owens Valley "The Deepest Valley in America." The small town of Bishop, California (pop. 6,000), is the jumping off point for Boundary Peak, 13,143' in the northern end of the White Mountains, the highest mountain in Nevada.

My home in Inyo County, on the Mono County border, ranges in elevation from 282’ below sea level in Death Valley to over 14,000’ in the High Sierra─an astonishing 15,000’ range in elevation in the second largest county in California with a population of slightly over 17,000 souls. Although we are only 80 air miles from the Free Republic web site headquarters in Fresno, it is a 6 1/2 hour drive around the mountains to get there. The nearest big city by car is Carson City, Nevada, 155 miles to the north, Los Angeles is 280 miles south, and the nearest city east of us is Salt Lake City, Utah, 600 miles away. We do most of our major shopping (cars, clothes, etc.) in Nevada.

In this wild land in Inyo and Mono counties along U.S. Highway 395, you will also find volcanic tablelands, vast vistas and thousands of square miles of sagebrush, in what is called the Great Basin. We don’t know anything about the Old West here, because the New West has never arrived, it‘s just The West - like Wyatt Earp died yesterday.

In fact, Wyatt owned a saloon in nearby Tonopah, Nevada in the early 1900s and his brother Virgil was sheriff in Goldfield, just south of Tonopah, where he died in 1906.

The town of Big Pine in the Owens Valley. The glacier shown above is where the bodies of two WWII airmen were recently found after spending 65 years frozen in the ice.

Most of the water for the City of Los Angeles comes from the melting snow pack of the High Sierra and drains into the Owens River which terminates in an aquaduct which carries the water 280 miles south to the city.

Between 1905 and 1907 most of the land in the Owens Valley was purchased from farmers and ranchers at bargain prices by William Mulholland , superintendent of the Water Department for the City of Los Angeles under the guise of a local irrigation project. Their real goal was to send Owens Valley water south to Los Angeles . By the time the now famous Los Angeles Aqueduct was completed in 1913, it was too late for valley residents to take any action.

The aqueduct, 223 miles long, used no pumping stations just gravity siphons sending water from the Owens Valley to Southern California . The City of Los Angeles receives 70% of it's water from the Owens Valley and the Eastern High Sierra. With the diversion of water to Los Angeles , the Owens Lake and lower Owens River dried up and many valley residents were forced to pack up and leave the area forever.

For a number of years, Owens Valley residents expressed much animosity toward the City of Los Angeles as can be seen in Dry Ditches , a little book of poems published in 1934 by the Parcher family of Bishop. The Owens Valley-City of Los Angeles conflict was the subject of the 1974 film Chinatown, starring Jack Nicholson.

With an extremely diverse topography, the Eastern High Sierra has been the scene of literally hundreds of motion pictures and TV series for the last 80 years from Gunga Din with Gary Cooper, to How the West Was Won, to Maverick, starring Mel Gibson. Even some scenes from Gladiator were filmed here.

Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter filmed at Mono Lake in the High Sierra.

Scene from True Grit with John Wayne filmed at Hot Creek near Mammoth Lakes in the High Sierra.

John Wayne made a number of films here too including his Academy Award™ winning role in True Grit. Clint Eastwood also made a several films here including Joe Kidd and High Plains Drifter. The opening scenes of several TV series were filmed in the Eastern High Sierra including the classic 1950s series Wagon Train and The Lone Ranger.

Scene from Joe Kidd with Clint Eastwood filmed in the High Sierra near the town of Bishop.

Hundreds of TV commercials have been filmed here too. Chances are, if you see a commercial with an SUV flying through a creek with mountains in the background, it was filmed here.

U.S.395 in the High Sierra of California & Nevada, one of the the most scenic highways in America. Looking west from Mammoth Lakes toward the eastern boundary of Yosemite Nat'l Park from 10,000 feet in elevation.

Death Valley in Spring after rare heavy rains.

Fall color in the High Sierra.
Mt. Whitney 14,496', highest mountain in the lower 48 states.

Silver Canyon in the White Mountains a few miles from my house. Bighorn sheep in Silver Canyon.

My favorite trout fishing hole in the High Sierra, 19 miles from my house. The White Mountains in the Great Basin, called "The Great American Desert" in the 19th Century

Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest in the White Mountains near Bishop, oldest living things in the world. Some of the trees, still living and growing, are over 4,700 years old.
Ancient Indian Petroglyphs near Bishop Pioneer graffiti near Bishop 140 year-old wagon tracks on the old stagecoach road between Bishop and Bodie
A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition. -Rudyard Kipling
My Great-grandfather (pictured above) joined Beckett's Cavalry, 36th Virginia Infantry, C.S.A. in 1861. He was a poor western Virginia frontier farmer who never owned slaves - just fought to protect his home from invaders. He was captured by Union forces in 1863 and sent to Camp Chase, Ohio as a POW. One of his brothers was in the Union Army, Co. A, 7th WVA Infantry, nicknamed the "Bloody Seventh," and was at Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee's surrender in Appomattox, Virginia in 1865. Their grandfather was in the Harrison County, Virginia Militia in the War of 1812 and their great-grandfather was in the Pendleton County, Virginia Militia, 1780-1781, and was at the "Siege of York" where British Gen. Cornwallis surrendered to Gen. Washington.

In all, I have seven ancestors who fought in the Revolutionary War (1775-1783). One was a British soldier who was captured by the Americans in the Battle of Saratoga in 1777 who decided to stay in America after the war rather than return to England.

This custom made flag is a replica of the first American flag to fly at Yorktown, Virginia in 1781. I fly it in front of my house during every American holiday.

My family first arrived in America in 1620 aboard the Mayflower, so I consider myself a true "Native American." One of my ancestors was Joseph Kellogg (1691-1756), captured by Mohawk and Huron Indians in Deerfield, Massachusetts in 1704, and held captive for twenty years. His sisters were captured too, and married into the tribe. During his captivity, Kellogg became the first non-Indian, native born American to see and travel, the Mississippi River. He became an Indian interpreter and helped in the release of many captives. He died in New York in 1756 during the French and Indian War while on an expedition against French and Indian forces. Joseph Kellogg was also an ancestor of W.K. Kellogg, founder of Kellogg's Corn Flake Company.

Another ancestor was John Justus "Yost" Hinckel. His father, the Rev. Anthony Henckel, the first "High German" Lutheran pastor in America, brought his family from Germany to German Town, Pennsylvania in 1717.

In 1750, along with their neighbors the Boones, the Henckel family emigrated from Pennsylvania to the Forks of the Yadkin River in North Carolina─at that time, the western most frontier in America. Yost Hinckel later established a fort on the frontier of western Virginia after being driven out of North Carolina by the Cherokee Indians in 1761. One of his sons married Susannah Bryan, a sister of Rebecca Bryan, who was married to Daniel Boone.

Most of my family went west after the Civil War. One of my great-grandfathers, T.B. Hord (1850-1910), became the largest cattle rancher in the state of Nebraska after nearly losing it all in Wyoming during the Blizzard of 1887. He was very influential in state politics and was the first person in the entire state of Nebraska to own an automobile.

The Hord Ranch near Central City, Nebraska circa 1902
My Father was a 1st Lieutenant in the Army Air Forces in WWII. He flew fifty missions against the Japanese in the Pacific Theater on a B-24 Liberator as a bombardier including the Battle of Midway. B-24 in action.

My son is in the U.S. Navy proudly serving aboard the USS Kitty Hawk.

He was aboard the Kitty Hawk (center) when the photo above was taken last year. End of an era, arriving in San Diego, August 7, 2008 where the Kitty Hawk will be decommissioned.

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I created the graphic below for my all time favorite FR thread: Man (Freeper kanawa) stabs bear to death See posts 304 & 428.