[September 2023]
We made this trip to June Lake in NRI's fixed gear 182, newly upgraded with a Garmin AP, which makes travel so much more relaxing. I've only ventured over the Sierras when the winds are light. One of my instructors - I can't remember which - suggested 20kt as an upper limit for winds aloft across the summit. Any more than that and the turbulence and potentially downdrafts start to get unpleasant.
On this trip we went over Yosemite valley with El Cap off the left wing, then up past Half Dome to Tuolumne meadows and the Tioga pass. Those wiggles in the route going over the summit are mostly about avoiding the higher terrain. Having done this trip now three times I think I could do it without GPS guidance, but I still preferred to program the GTN with all the waypoints, which I figured out in Foreflight using Waypoint/Radial/Distance off of FRA and KMMH. In total there are 7 waypoints going over the top., for which I had us up at 12.5K for terrain clearance of at least 2K. Once you get to the Tioga pass itself you're going from terrain with 13K peaks around you to looking out at Mono Lake far below at 6K.
Mammoth Lakes has a single runway, no tower and a hospitable little FBO. We gathered all our stuff, got a ride from the line guy to the car rental counter, where we ran into a problem of my making, trying to save on the car rental by rebooking at the last minute, only to find when we got there that reservations with less than 48 hours lead time are not guaranteed.
After getting the car situation straightened out we headed over to the town of June Lake where we stayed in a comfortable motel-ish lodge. After settling in, the next order of business was heading over to Wild Willy's Hot Spring, just southeast of the airstrip. It's an open site about a 1/4 mile down a boardwalk from a parking area at the end of a gravel road. There were lots of people there, but the semi-natural pool we chose for our soak wasn't too crowded. Surreptitious parting photo below.
The others there were mostly young people who'd just finished a marathon-length trail race in the mountains. They were mainly Europeans plus one American, coincidentally from Jackson Hole and who knew people who knew Anna. The Europeans were from Italy, Romania, France, Norway, Finland and I can't remember where else. The Mammoth run was the last of an annual series of races, the first two of which were in the Alps, the third in Colorado. Next year they said the group that puts these on will be adding two more in Asia somewhere - probably one in Japan and one somewhere else.
Next day we went for a somewhat strenuous hike up to Gem lake, about 6 miles total out & back. Then another visit to Wild Willy's, followed by dinner in Mammoth at a very good Cuban-Puerto Rican place called Dos Alas.
Day 3 was the return flight. I wanted to get up to 12.5K again for the mountain crossing, but at about 10K, as we buzzed along near the mountains we'd hiked the day before, I found that I couldn't get the plane to climb. Our track shows the groundspeed dropping to ~90kts with no climb. I had the plane very nose high as the speed bled off, before I finally realized that we were just caught in a fairly strong downdraft from the ~20kt winds over the summit. Turning away from the mountains for a bit fixed the problem. The rest of the return flight was pretty routine - at any rate I no longer remember anything about it.
