RVing in Mount Whitney's shadow: Lone Pine

According to RVing friends of ours, when abandoning the heat of Quartzsite, the first real "cool" stop en route to the northwest is along the eastern edge of the Sierras at Lone Pine, California. Pulling out of QZ early in the morning, they shoot across "Inferior California," to Interstate 15, make "the one pull" up to Four Corners, and proceed merrily up 395 to Lone Pine. There, they happily drop the hook and spend the night in a parking lot with a bunch of truckers, but hey, they don't have to run air conditioning.

Pavement camping is fine enough, if you have to; we do plenty of it. But by the time we'd made that "one pull" (and quite a few more, along with some great kidney-pounding roadway south of Four Corners), spending the night in a parking lot listening to reefer trucks was just too much to bear. Where's that little spot of paradise near Lone Pine?  Head for the hills!

You won't have to head far, as Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the Lower 48, dominates the view to the west of Lone Pine. In the middle of downtown a street called Whitney Portal leads--well, where else--but out toward Mount Whitney, and a couple of fine campgrounds--one for the pop-up set with a few bucks, and one for the rest of us who'd like to save a buck.

Lone Pine Campground is a BLM offering seven miles west of town on Whitney Portal Road. We'd describe this as kind of a "terraced" campground, and as mentioned, best suited to pop-ups and small Class C motorhomes. You can tuck a small trailer in here if you're well skilled in backup maneuvering in tight places. While we didn't check out the trash cans when we swung through here, we suspect we'd have found a high percentage of tofu wrappers amongst the yogurt containers. At $17 a night (and precious few sites available on a weekend) we put this little spot in our rear view mirror.

Back down Whitney Portal Road is signage pointing to Tuttle Creek Campground, farther to the south. This is an "every man's" campground--sorry, no pavement here--but views of the wide open west like you'd see in some 1960s western movie. Come to think of it, a lot of westerns were filmed right in this area, so don't be surprised if you see something familiar.

The BLM has provided 83 sites, some of them pull through, and many of them big enough to accommodate the largest of rigs. They are "primitive" with no hookups, but there is a dump station at the entrance to the campground ($5 dump fee as of 2012). Site fees? At $5 a night, here's a bargain among developed campgrounds, and with an access card, $2.50 a night is a steal. All the sites are first-come/first-served, and while the pop-up campground up the road was crammed to the gills, Tuttle Creek had plenty of room available. For Verizon data customers, we found good, solid 3-G signal. 

Tuttle Creek is a great place to drop out of sight for a few days and really unwind.

photos: R&T DeMaris