Running some 400 miles north to south through California’s Central Valley and Basin and Range Province, the Sierra Nevada mountain range is a truly geologically unique region.
The Eastern Sierra alone provides for a lifetime of exploration—a volcanically active caldera near Mammoth Lakes makes for fascinating topography and feeds innumerable geothermal hot springs, while the Big Pine Lakes area is home to the largest glacier in the Sierra Nevada, and impossibly turquoise waters.
The area’s distinct microclimates extend from the dry valley floor to arid scrublands, streamside woodlands, forests, rivers, glacial lakes, and jagged peaks in the high alpine. This otherworldly combination of geologic and environmental factors creates an area unlike any other I’ve been, where desert sharply rises to meet soaring peaks in an area that contains both the highest and lowest elevations in the contiguous United States.
