Three subjects that are all really about a gap: an arch that is a hole in a rock, a town that is mostly the spaces where buildings used to be, and calcite towers standing apart in still water. Shoot the interval and the objects either side of it stop mattering.
The east side of the Sierra strung out over three days, and the shape of it is decided entirely by one fact: Bodie cannot be driven to in winter. Everything else here is open all year, so the season is set by the one stop that is not — which makes this a summer trip, the longest in the library, and the only one where the drive genuinely outweighs the shooting.
And under it one rhythm: through, between, apart. A gap you stand inside, gaps you walk past, and towers holding themselves at a distance from each other.
Summer or not at all. Sleep in Lone Pine, then Lee Vining. Shoot the gap.
Teaches · Interval — after Lucien Hervé · Julius Shulman
Open the whole day in Google Maps ↗ — in order: Alabama Hills · Bodie · Mono Lake South Tufa. It routes from wherever the phone is, and every spot below links its own leg the same way.
Tap any point for the day it belongs to. This is the most spread-out trip here — about a hundred and fifty miles between the first stop and the last, all of it on one road.
Only one thing here has a gate and a clock: Bodie, $8 a head, 09:00–18:00 in summer. Alabama Hills has no gate at all, and Mono Lake's South Tufa is sunrise-to-sunset for $3 a vehicle. None of the three takes a reservation. The Bodie Foundation does run photography tours that get you inside the buildings — those must be booked, cost $200–$750, and run late May to mid-October only.
A weekend's unit is the day — each carries a locator map, its theme, and an energy read. A gold pill on the clock means that time belongs to someone else: a door that opens or a slot that was booked. Everything unpilled is a suggested shape, not a schedule.
Arrive early enough that the evening is not wasted.
A straightforward run north. Nothing to photograph and nothing to decide.
Straight through on one charge this leg reaches Lone Pine on about seven per cent. Twenty minutes here removes the entire problem.
The mountains on the left get steadily more absurd until Whitney is standing over the road.
Charge while you eat. This is the closest fast charging to any stop on the trip and it makes the Alabama Hills effectively range-free.
Midday light is useless here so treat this as reconnaissance: walk the half mile to Mobius Arch, work out exactly where you need to stand to line Whitney up inside the hole, and note it. Tomorrow at five in the morning you will not want to be searching.
Five hours of unusable light. This is what an early arrival buys you — the option to do nothing until the sun is low.
The usable window is shorter than the almanac suggests: the crest stands about ten degrees up from here, so direct sun leaves the boulders around 19:20 even though sunset is not until 20:14. Work the rounded granite while it still has the low light on it, then stay — once the foreground drops into the crest’s shadow and only the high wall is lit, the arches read as holes rather than rocks.
Everything happens today, and it starts at five.
The classic frame and the reason for yesterday’s scouting: stand so that Whitney sits inside the arch, and let the granite go dark so the hole reads as a shape rather than a rock. Shoot the gap, not the arch. The interval is the picture; the stone around it is a frame in the literal sense.
Fill it. Bishop and Mammoth both have chargers on the way, but you are about to climb four and a half thousand feet.
The first hour of genuinely one of the best drives in California.
Short and worth it. Sherwin, Deadman and Conway summits between here and Bridgeport add close to six thousand feet of climb, which the mileage alone does not tell you.
Up over the summits with Mono Lake appearing on the right near the top.
The last charging before Bodie, and the one that matters: Bodie is thirteen miles up SR-270 at 8,375 feet and there is nothing at the top.
A gold town left exactly as it emptied and held there deliberately — not restored, not allowed to fall down either. Weathered board and rusted iron, and about two hundred buildings standing in a valley that once held ten thousand people. The gaps are the subject: most of the town burned, so what survives stands isolated with wide empty ground between, and that spacing is what the place actually looks like. Interiors are visible through glass only unless you have booked a Foundation tour.
Back down the unpaved miles, then south on the 395 with the lake opening up on your left.
Deliberate downtime, not a gap. You have been driving since half eight and the tufa does not want you until the sun is nearly down.
An evening pass to learn the ground before tomorrow’s dawn. The towers are calcite, deposited underwater by springs and left standing when the lake dropped. Work out which grouping has clean water between the towers rather than reeds — that gap is what you are coming back for.
Still water, and then the drive.
The signature frame and the reason the trip goes this far north. Before the wind starts, the lake is a mirror and each tower is doubled — so the interval between two towers becomes a shape with a reflection, which is a better subject than any single tower. Adams and Weston both worked this basin. Shoot low, put the horizon high, and let the water carry it.
Eat here, but do not plan to charge here — the village has no Supercharger and the two nearest sit twenty minutes in opposite directions. Mammoth is the one on the route home, and it is the next beat.
Slightly off the highway and worth it. From here the 395 is well covered all the way down.
The whole east side in reverse, and the descent gives a useful amount back.
🔴 Two stops on the way home, not one. Mammoth to the basin is about two hundred and ninety miles with a climb at the end — it does not go on a single charge, and the beat that used to say ‘south on the 395, all the way’ was quietly wrong about that.
Out of the Owens Valley and into the high desert.
The same stop as the way up, doing the same job in reverse.
Down through the pass into the basin.
Three days, about fourteen hours of driving, and three gaps.
Three anchors on one road, each about a gap. Only Bodie has a gate. Tap a spot’s map for driving directions.
The geotag gets each frame close to where it stood — close, not exact; the last hundred yards are always a hunt. What a machine can't do is the part below: which ones survived, and whether the day was worth the drive.
The frame of the trip.
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Did I come back with the gap, or with the thing either side of it?
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Bodie in flat midday light — did that beat me?
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Was the tufa still when I got there?
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Eleven hours of driving for three subjects — worth it?
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Which of the three intervals actually held as a picture?
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Would I do this again with a Foundation tour booked for the Bodie interiors?
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Is there a version of this that is two stops instead of three?
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