Today was another planned driving day to get me from Ely, NV to Mammoth Lakes, CA.  Mammoth Lakes is a small resort town about an hour from the East entrance to Yosemite.  I wasn’t able to secure a campsite in the park so I’ll be staying at a campground on the west side of the park the next two days.

After driving all the way across Nevada, I didn’t want to have to deal with the potential traffic getting through Yosemite.  It’s at least another 2 and a half hours to the other side of Yosemite and I had been driving about six hours already.  In any case, the Devil’s Postpile National Monument is just a few miles from here, which is why I decided to overnight here.

I arrived and set up camp by about 4:30, finally grabbed a late lunch (there’s not a whole lot of civilization between Ely and here), and then hopped the shuttle to the Monument.  It’s an intersting geological formation related to an ancient lava eruption.  The history of the monument is also interesting; it was originally part of Yosemite but later removed from that park due to logging and mining interests.  It was then threatened to be dynamited in order to form a dam on the river and finally President Taft set it aside as a separate National Monument in 1911.  Glad they saved it.