[img_assist|fid=1045|thumb=1|alt=Anne, Chuck, and Marta on top of Mammoth Mountain|caption=You can be a little short of breath at >11,000 feet!|width=100|height=75]

The sky is cloudy this morning in the Sierras. Anne is suffering a bit of gastric distress and we are staying in today. The heat is on. Whereas the forecast for Death Valley is 100 degrees, here it is now 38 degrees and is expected to reach only 50 this afternoon. Chuck says that this should condition us for Alaska, but we are happy to be crossing the Sierras tomorrow and descending into the hopefully warmer Central Valley tomorrow.

Yesterday morning found a friend and we at the greater sage grouse lek near Crowley Lake. At dawn more than one hundred cocks were on parade there. The only human observers were we an a couple that we had found a few days earlier at this same remote location.

After a time we left the grouse and drove to the lakeshore. There an assembly of shore and water birds provided additional entertainment. Ducks, avocets, gulls, grebes, and a loon in “alternate” or breeding plumage refreshed themselves in the here precious fresh water.

After lunch our friends took us to Mammoth Mountain itself. We rode the ski lift to the summit. There we watched the skiers and snowboarders, the broad snow covered slopes, and the surrounding mountain landscape. Far to the east a ridge of the Coast Range was barely visible through a gap in the Sierras. Immediately to the west and below Mammoth Mountain was the oval caldera known as Long Valley. We could scarcely conceive of the magnitude of the explosion that occurred here some 750,000 years ago and removed some thirty cubic miles of earth and rock to other places. Today lovely pine parkland, the Mammoth Lakes community, and ash cones occupy the floor and slopes of the caldera. Warning signs and patches of dead trees mark where current geological activity is fatal to life.

On our return to town we stopped at the post office and received our mail. The arrival of last week’s packet was a cause for celebration. The previous week’s mail is lost in the post office. We had sent it to ourselves “general delivery” at Las Vegas. Incredibly, the Las Vegas post office does not provide general delivery service. So, we were told, the packet would be returned. Unfortunately it has not been. Calls to the post office have been futile. Local post office numbers are unlisted. The national post office answering service provides local phone numbers. We received two. One is always busy. The other is never answered. So much for governmental efficiency.

This time the problem was that the packet did not arrive at Mammoth Lakes. So we visited the post office every day this week. Its arrival on Friday, ten days after its priority mailing was, in the end, a pleasant surprise. It sure beat having to leave a card requesting that the packet be forwarded to us farther along the trail.

The mail incidents created numerous headaches. We had to call various parties asking about possible bills and worry that checks to us are floating in postal oblivion. The experiences make us worry about future deliveries as we proceed to even more remote locations in Alaska. We are anxious that this week’s mail, that we cautiously had sent farther up the road, will be there when we arrive.