On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
It’s Albatrossity Monday! This week we also have the final 4 posts from Uncle Eb’s beautiful 8-part series of Eastern Sierra Fall Foliage.
Albatrossity
I left Paso Robles, heading for Bishop CA in the eastern Sierra, on Monday Sept. 30. The day that Verizon had a nationwide network outage, which meant that my phone-based navigation was inoperative. Fortunately, I had an actual paper-based road atlas, and managed to get to Bishop just about the time my phone started to get a signal again.
Bishop is a nice little town on US395, with great views of the mountains to the west, and impressive basin-and-range panoramas to the east. The next morning, before I continued my eastward peregrinations, I headed up into the high Sierra toward a village that is aptly named Aspendell, So here are some mountain pics (with a few birds, of course) from that morning. If you know anything about Bishop, you might know that it was the home of Galen Rowell, one of the greatest and most influential landscape photographers of the 20th century. His images of the Sierras, and other mountain landscapes around the world, are unparalleled. And once you have been to Bishop, you can see why he chose this place to live and work.
As we have seen in recent On The Road posts from UncleEbeneezer, the aspens (Populus tremuloides) were showing off their fall colors about the time I was there. Here is a nice flame-colored aspen from just below Aspendell (about 8300 ft. elevation). Click here for larger image.
Closeup of some of the more orange-tinted leaves on these Sierra aspens. Click here for larger image.
I made my way up toward Sabrina Lake, and the scenery just kept getting more glorious. And there was still some snow in the north-facing cirques. Sun on the high peaks and shadows on the aspens. Click here for larger image.
Another smaller lake up there was North Lake, and I had time to head up that road as well. I was greeted by more aspens spreading their glow across the mountainsides. Elevation here was about 9300 ft. Click here for larger image.
At this altitude one does not have to walk far to get winded, so I found a streamside spot with some pines, a few aspens and some scattered shrubs, and plopped myself down to see what birds might present themselves. First out of the gate was this Mountain Chickadee (Poecile gambeli), grabbing a pine seed from a nice ripe pine cone. Click here for larger image.
More Mountain Chickadees followed, and this one was quite suspicious of me. That head-on angle really accentuates the bandit-mask effect that these guys wear so well. Click here for larger image.
Aspens make a nice colorful backdrop for birds, so I was glad to see this Song Sparrow (Melospiza melodia) choose a twig that allowed me to keep that autumnal hue as an out-of-focus backdrop. Click here for larger image.
The western subspecies of the Yellow-rumped Warbler (Setophaga coronata auduboni) has a nice yellow throat that perfectly matches the fall aspen leaves. Click here for larger image.
During my stay in Bishop I noticed several SUVs, with Michigan license tags in the hotel parking lot, clad in what I would call an automotive burkha. These seem to be new models of Kia and Hyundai vehicles, all covered up so that their stylish secrets would not be prematurely revealed to the automotive cognoscenti. I saw them again in the parking lot above the dam at North Lake, and my hypothesis is that they would be unveiled for photo shoots in some scenic spot up here. So if, in the future, you see an ad for a Kia or Hyundai SUV that features a gorgeous aspen-filled Sierra landscape, you can say that you saw it here first. Click here for larger image.
And finally, for WaterGirl, a lovely mountain stream flowing under a fall aspen bough. Click here for larger image.
BigHank53
The SUVs are going to stay covered up forever—the dazzle camo is vinyl wrap, and those black fabric covers are hell on the paint underneath. What’s happening is the last rounds of pre-production road testing. There are perfectly good test tracks in Michigan but none at 9000 feet, so those cars are out there with the A/C turned up to max, getting driven up and down the passes to see if they overheat, that the shift points of the transmission are good, that sort of thing. The disguise is so that the 2026 cars aren’t all over the web now. If it was an advertising shoot, they’d be in a fully enclosed semi trailer, polished and perfect.
Baud
Come for the birds, stay for the car facts.
Nice.
Rusty
The aspen colors are stunning. As a northeastern resident I love autumn and all the colors, but the narrow band of yellow to a hit of orange emphasizes all the subtle tonal variations. Lovely!
p.a.
Gifted you BirdButts calendar to a birder friend, thought he was going to have an accident he laughed so hard with each page turn 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻
Winter Wren
Beautiful capture of the birds and scenery!
Winter Wren
Beautiful captures of the birds and scenery!
J.
What @WinterWren wrote! And thanks for the explanation, @BigHank53!
KSinMA
Beautiful!
stinger
I love the way you tell the “story” here, Albatrossity. The leaves and wide scenic shots, and then — bird closeups! Nice dramatic pacing!
Chris T.
@BigHank53: Some time in the late 1990s I think, I was driving on the California Coast (near Mount Tamalpais but on the ocean side; it was one of the little roads in this map section I think) when I got stopped because there was a car company making advertising for their new models. Professional drivers were driving, lots of stage and camera people standing around and polishing the cars whenever they stopped, etc. I was amused that the (American, Oldsmobile Alero I think) cars being advertised were nowhere else to be seen: the film crew were all driving Japanese models or, in the rare case of someone who needed one for equipment, a pickup truck.
Helicopters swooped overhead to catch the cars winding along the road with the ocean in the background. Didn’t see the trucks that, no doubt, had been used to bring the to-be-advertised cars there.
Rob
Wonderful, gorgeous photos. I love the second chickadee photo, of the one that has opinions. Maybe it could be in one of next year’s calendars?
SteveinPHX
Thank you! I have seen wrapped (disguised) cars here in AZ on occasion. Usually on two-lane roads near great background scenery!
Thank you for bird photos.
Betty
All great pictures, but the chickadee with the pine cone is especially sweet.
Wag
@BigHank53:
Here in Colorado I see similar wrapped cars every year or two. My favorite sighting was summer of 1996 or 97 when I saw a small, odd, bulbous vehicle that looked like a VW Bug on steroids driving over Loveland Pass at 11,000 feet. Turned out to be the New Beetle out for a test drive a year before release.
Great photos of the aspens! One of my favorite times of year to get back into the mountains.
Trivia Man
@BigHank53: Car Talk? What is this, a crossover episode?
Funny, that Latin name looks a lot like the English word quaking. Cause California has earthquakes, i bet!
lashonharangue
Great photos!
WaterGirl
Beautiful colors, and photography! Thank you for the mountain stream.
Trivia Man
@Chris T.: First many years that bit of Marin County has been a favorite for car ads. New roads, epic scenery, good weather, easily secured from other traffic.
Albatrossity
@BigHank53: Thank you! That makes better sense; I really could not understand why they would drive them from Michigan!
Much appreciated.
@p.a.: Glad to hear that your friend enjoyed the Bird Butt calendar. I have a lot of fun putting those together every year!
martha
Love love love these photos. Also, hwy 395 is such a gorgeous stretch of road, along the Eastern Sierras. Thanks for sharing!
Albatrossity
@martha: Well, another name for that species is “quaking aspen”, but it does not have any relation to earthquakes, It refers to the way the leaves of the tree are in constant motion, even in a slight breeze. More at this link!
mvr
Thank you for these. Aspen are lovely. And Mountain Chickadees (and your photos of them) are wonderful as well. The photos make me want to go to the mountains, but it will be a while before the ones I go to look anything like that again. Right now it is very snowy. I may ski or snowshoe up in the Spring as I just got a Christmas card from my octogenarian mountain neighbor suggesting a trip.
Anyway, thanks! Your photos are always worth looking at.
Interstadial
Wow for the bird photos especially! I’ve gone to that area so many autumns for personal relaxation and restoration. The summer is very busy with vacationers and the winter is busy with skiers, but both off-seasons are relatively uncrowded.
UncleEbeneezer
Great pix and thanks for the shout-out!
If you are ever interested in meeting up in the Fall, we should connect, since we go up there every year. My wife has recently been getting really into bird-watching too.
UncleEbeneezer
@martha: From Lone Pine to Bridgeport, it really is a spectacular drive.
BeautifulPlumage
Great post and comments.
Was very excited to get my Birds of Flyover Country 2025 last week! It’s going up by my reception desk at work so all can admire your photography.
way2blue
Love the last photo of aspen leaves above the stream. (Your photos are all stunning as usual, but the patterns & contrast in the last one—very cool!
Ruckus
Had a HS buddy whose dad lived in Mammoth Lake which is up the road from Bishop. Have spent quite a bit of time in the Mammoth Lake/Bishop area over several summers – a rather long time ago – over half a century. If it looks anything like it did then, it is beautiful country. I’ve traveled for work to every state but Alaska and still, the Mammoth Lake/Bishop area is one of my favorite areas. And there are a lot of memorable places in this country. Many very, very memorable.
BigJimSlade
Wonderful set! Man, I haven’t been to Lake Sabrina since the early or mid-80s!
MCat
Thank you! Magnificent photos. The birds look like they are going to talk to you. I just love your bird photos.
StringOnAStick
@BigHank53: Hey, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen your nym!
David, these photos are always such a treat. Thanks for the fall aspens, something I miss now that we no longer live in CO. The mountain larch here are a different shade of fall, but nothing beats looking up into a colourful Aspen trees as the breeze tickles the leaves.
Tom D
For the record, the name of the area where I’ve lived for decades is The Sierra, or Sierra Nevada. It means range of snow. “Sierras’ is not a word in Spanish, and, usage notwithstanding, not in English either. This post did way better than most, only adding an ‘s’ once.