Epic Travel → North America → The West Coast → Northern California → Eastern Sierras → Mammoth Lakes Area → Lake Crowley Columns

Location: Mammoth Lakes Area, Eastern Sierras, California

Time Required: ~2 hours (including driving time from the Hwy 395 turn off)

Red Tape/Notes: This route required traveling around 4 miles on a rough dirt road. Clearance and AWD/4WD are probably required. We attempted to follow directions from the Outbound Collective. They were somewhat misleading, so I took careful notes of the mileage and road signs in the hopes of producing a more accurate set of directions. Directions: Turn (northeast) onto Benton Crossing Road, from Hwy 395 just south/east of Mammoth Yosemite Airport and zero your odometer. After 5.5 miles, you’ll pass Owens River Road on your left, and shortly after that, at around 6.5 miles, you’ll pass the turn off for Forest Road 347A, which is your access road for fishing the Upper Owens River. Continue driving on Benton Crossing Road, and at 11.5 miles, you should pass Layton Springs Road on your right, and then at 13.5 miles you’ll come to a junction with a dirt road on your right. The road is labeled 3S151A on a marker. Turn onto this road and continue 0.3 miles (don’t take the turn off for 3S151B) to the dirt road on your right labeled 3S151 and take this road. Continue on the dirt road 3.5 miles (17.3 miles from the turn off to Benton Crossing Road) where the road ends at the lake. You can turn left in front of the cliffs and drive further along the beach, depending on your vehicle’s tolerance for loose sand, or just park your car off to the side and walk down the beach to the left to find the columns.

What’s Nearby?: Upper Owens River, Convict Lake, McGee Pass Trail, Tamarack Cross-Country Skiing

Sometimes nature makes super weird stuff. This is one of those times. After a fun drive on an occasionally sketchy dirt road (or I suppose you could take a boat, or walk…but that seems less fun than a sketchy drive), you’ll find yourself on the northeast shore of Crowley Lake, in what feels like an alien world. It’s hard to imagine a place more different than nearby McGee Creek or Convict Lake: a line of cliffs drops to a dry, sandy shore studded heavily with large rocks fronting a seemingly lifeless lake (it’s actually a popular trout fishing spot, but it doesn’t feel like it should be).  And all along the cliffs are strange columns, rock formations, and caves. The columns look manmade in places – so straight and uniform, topped by perfectly formed arches, that they look like the ruins of an ancient temple. Other places, they look like the spikes of some kind of giant rock porcupine, emerging from the cliff. It’s hard to describe in words; you kind of need to see it for yourself. The columns were apparently formed when cold water from snowmelt percolated down into hot ash spewed by a cataclysmic event some 760,000 years ago; when the cold water hit the hot ash, it created large amount of steam, forming evenly spaced convection cells of denser rock, which became the columns. The columns have been uncovered as erosion has worn away the softer ash/pumice, and you can see more columns “emerging” from the cliffs in the area. Scientists estimate that there are as many as 5,000 columns in the cliffs by the lake, covering a 2 to 3 square mile area. So if you think it looks weird now, imagine how it’ll look in a few hundred years!

Epic Travel → North America → The West Coast → Northern California → Eastern Sierras → Mammoth Lakes Area → Lake Crowley Columns