Reversed Creek — the Backwards Stream

The creek threading the willows beside the road here is doing something no other stream on this entire side of the Sierra does: it is flowing TOWARD the mountains. Look at the water — it's running west, at the peaks, not away from them. This is Reversed Creek, and it earned the name honestly.

Here's what happened. When the Rush Creek glacier pushed down out of the high country, it split against that dome of harder rock on your right — Reversed Peak — and gouged two trenches around it. When the ice melted back, it left moraines, walls of rubble, damming the eastern trench. Water in this stretch of valley had nowhere to go but backwards — west, toward the range — until it finds Rush Creek at Silver Lake and gets carried properly out to the desert.

So the modest little creek in the willows there is a genuine geological celebrity: the one backwards stream of the Eastern Sierra, written up in field guides for a hundred years.

This stretch is also the loop's great aspen gallery. In late September and early October the groves along Reversed Creek go solid gold, and this quiet middle section of road becomes, for about three weeks, one of the most photographed miles in California. If you're here for it, there are pullouts — use them, because you won't want to shoot this through a windshield.