A 61 degree day that ended with 81 degree temperatures and unexpected hiking. We are now enjoying the comforts of the Sierra Nevada Resort and Spa. An old but, a goody comforting the mind, body and soul.
It turned out to only be a 7+ mile or 16,000+ steps hike today but, the views were well worth the effort.
Rainbow Falls is the highest waterfall on the Middle Fork of the San Joaquin River, in the eastern Sierra Nevada mountains of California, in the United States.
Plunging 101 feet to the turbulent water below, the falls are named for the rainbows that appear in their mist on sunny summer days unlike today. Sunny today but, we saw no rainbows.
And if you don’t pay the piper on the way down then be sure to do so on the way back up. Either way the piper always collects their dues. Ask Patti.
The site, located near Mammoth Lakes in the eastern Sierra, is small, a mere 798 acres. It is buried under upwards of 400 inches of snow a year, so its visiting season is a short four months (It just opened on June 29) and we are here on a Covid 19 – July 21, 2020 day. The majority of the hikers are wearing masks and so are we.
Even the pile to which its name refers–a columnar basalt structure, formed from a lava flow that may date back 100,000 years ago–isn’t particularly unusual; they can be found across the globe.
Curiously, it wasn’t the first national monument named after Beezlebub; that nod goes to Devils Tower, founded in 1906.
Neither can it claim the same kind of legendary status attached to such legendary places as Arizona’s Petrified Forest(1906), California’s Muir Woods (1908), and Utah’s Mukuntuweap, which later morphed into Zion National Park (1909).
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