Bridgeport, California is at Eastern Sierra on the Highway 395 between its junction with Rt. 108 and Rt. 120. Both routes cross the Sierra Mountain to the West Coast. Rt. 108 is also know as Sonora Pass Highway and the part of Rt. 120 that cross the Sierra Mountain alone the Yosemite National Park is also known as Tioga Road. Both roads close during the winter snow season. We were fortunate that we were able to pass both highways during our photograph tours to Yosemite National Park and Eastern Sierra last october.
The Highway 395 provides easy access to the north (Lake Tahoe-Reno), south (Death Valley, Las Vegas, Los Angles), east (Salt Lake City) and west (Yosemite, Sonora). In addition to the easy access to all directions, Bridgeport has its own attractions of trout fishing, hunting and winter sports.
In reality, the town is just houses along a segment of Highway 395, less than a mile long with several motels, one supermarket/grocery store, a butcher, several sandwich shops and restaurants. The most important structure in the town is the Bridgeport courthouse, an impressive Victorian building completed in 1881. It is featured in the first three pictures.
After our visit to Yosemite National Park, we took the Tioga road to cross the Sierra Mountain and used Bridgeport as a base to visit many surrounding attractions such as
Bodie,
Twin Lake,
Mono Lake,
South Tufa, etc.
This is the outside terrace of Bridgeport Inn, built in 1877, one of the better hotel/motel/restaurant in town. You can see Grace's reflection on the stool.
Here is the entrance of Bridgeport Inn, we went there for lunch sandwich the first day, we went for steak dinner the next and we went bak for prime-rib dinner the last day. All around Bridgeport are cattle farms. I was at the local butcher for a fresh made roast beef sandwich one lunch time, a couple of cowboys walked in. "Relatives are coming, we need some meat", they said. The steaks were 1 1/2-inch thick, the size of a large dinner plate, the pork chops were 2-inch thick. I have never seen so much meat for a dinner party before. By the way, if you bring your own deer (presumably dead one that you hunted down that morning), the butcher will skin, clean, cut for you at a cost of $100.
After all that beef, very delicious beef I must say, where are the leftover. They are high up in the air.
This one is a real long-horned cattle. The aspen tree was in perfect yellow Fall color in the background.
Well, Bridgeport is such centrally located for the travel in Eastern Sierra, of cause it has a garage. I like the symmetry of this photo.
Click
here to see several of our past blogs of our photographic trip at Eastern Sierra, or
here for our photos of the Eastern Sierra.
To see more entries of ABC Wednesday click
here.
October 23, 2009, it was the first day of our photo trip to Eastern Sierra, we woke up early to first photographed the sunrise over the Mono Lake, we were than at the ghost town of Bodie. Grace was tired and wasn't feeling too well, we thus went back to Bridgeport and had sandwich from the local butcher. In the afternoon, we joined again with the rest of the group at Lundy Lake.
Lundy Lake is formed by one of the many tributaries that originally feed into the Mono Lake. It was damed in 1911. We first went further upstream to photograph the pond formed by a beaver dam. In the first two pictures, you can see the perfect blue sky reflected from the pond filled with trees fallen by the beavers.
The main purpose for us coming to the lake is to photograph the Fall Colors. Unlike the Northeast, the Fall Colors of the Sierra Mountain is mostly yellow. This tree at the bank of the lake was showing off its Fall Color at its best.
Now we see the Lundy Lake proper and the Aspen tree turing yellow along the lake.
Here we were looking toward the west from the dam with view of the whole lake and the Sierra Mountain at the back drop. The lake is famous for trout fishing.
