This is Silver Lake, and the cluster of white cabins and the little cafe beside the road is one of the oldest continuously running resorts in the Eastern Sierra — going since nineteen sixteen.
It began as Carson's Camp. Roy Carson came up here as a workman on the dams and the power project you'll hear about in a minute — and like a lot of men on that job, he looked around at where he'd been sent to work and couldn't quite believe his luck. When the construction ended he stayed, pitched a tent camp for the anglers who were starting to find the place, and by nineteen nineteen his wife Nancy was running the cookhouse. A century later, people still book the same shoreline a year ahead.
The cafe here, for the record, is a legendary breakfast stop — locals drive the loop for the pancakes alone.
Look up beyond the far shore of the lake. That headwall is Carson Peak — same Carson — and if you trace the slope carefully you'll see a thin, dead-straight line running up the canyon wall beside Rush Creek. That is a tramway, over a century old, and it is the single most improbable piece of machinery on this loop. Boone will tell you what it was for at the trailhead just ahead — this one is properly his.
Photo: Srihari Yamanoor · CC BY 3.0