Off-Road and Flying Over Lobdell

 Happy Good Friday and Easter Weekend! 

We are getting near the end of everything I intend to show from what I did last summer. Over this special weekend I am releasing a bunch of videos I took on the way, at, and coming back from Lobdell Lake.

Lobdell is a slightly mysterious lake that is out in the middle of nowhere in the Eastern Sierra. It is east of HHY 395 which usually means it is going to be a lake more in a desert atmosphere. That is not totally true here. While I would not consider the lake that beautiful compared to others, it is in a beautiful isolated environment. 

The reason it is isolated is you pretty much need a 4-wheel drive to get there with the dirt roads the way they are. If you don't have that type of vehicle, you will get stuck! While heading there it reminded me of something when I was younger.

I must have been around eight years old when my dad and grandfather drove me to Lobdell Lake at around 4am or so in the morning. I was pretty much scared the whole way through because I could not see anything other then what the headlights showed, and we were constantly bumping around. I had forgotten about what freaked me out on that drive until we did it again this last summer. My brother told me stories he remembers of my dad telling of some friends getting stuck at the final few hundred feet ascending to the lake during either the late 1940s or 1950s.  

The lake is at about 9,300 ft. of elevation. It used to be a good fishing lake when I was younger. I could not tell you know how it is, but I will get back to this below. I do remember when I was a little kid seeing cattle wondering around the lake. There was evidence when I was there last summer of cattle eating and drinking around the lake. 

I took a bunch of pictures with the drone flying around the lake. I am just going to have these two here. You can check out the video to see every angle I flew.

I got a laugh out a website that called the road to this lake "totally unpaved and pretty rough." I thought I have to used that for the titles of these two of the videos I will be releasing. Below my links I will link to an article that talks about a mysterious fish that used to be in the lake and the reason why fishing ended there for a while. I am still not sure how it is there now. We did encounter some people on the way that said they were coming back to fish.

OKAY! So this is how this weekend is going to work with my three videos. If you come here for my videos you are privileged to get them before they are coming out publicly. I will be releasing them through the weekend, but right now you can access them as unlisted. I do not care if they are shared right now or anything like that. I just did not want to created three separate blogs for this so here we go:

Video #1:

"Totally Unpaved and Pretty Rough" (aka Off-Road Drive: To Lobdell Lake) Youtube Video

This is a GoPro video that shows about fifteen minutes of video footage on the way to Lobdell. So about half the drive and not with all the crazy bumps.

Video #2:

Flying Over Lobdell

This is the drone footage I took flying all around the area. The problem with this one is the first two minutes the autofocus was stuck and not adapting. It is not bad and looks like old SD footage, but at the two minute mark I moved the camera on the drone and then the autofocus started to work correctly. This is the only time I have had this issue, and it was only something I realized when I started looking at the footage at home.

Video #3:

"Totally Unpaved and Pretty Rough Too" (aka Off-Road Drive: From Lobdell Lake)

This is the GoPro video I took on the way back. It is probably about 99% of the drive which takes about thirty minutes to get back to HWY 395. I think I might have changed batteries at one point, and we did have to move off the road to allow some off-road vehicle group get by us. It is shown in the video.

Finally, these two links are the items I referred to above:

1)Article about the road to Lobdell Lake.

2)Article about fishing at Lobdell and the grayling at Lobdell Lake.

Flying Over Tioga Lake

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

 During the summer of 2022 I flew an older drone at Tioga Lake. I liked it since no one was around, but it was early:

The downside was I did not have a enough light. I ended up doing a hike that morning after this, but when I got home I looked at the pictures and video. The pictures I knew could be worked on like the above, but I wanted to go back and get better pictures and video. So, I had already vowed to come back in 2023.

And, I did come back a year later. Also, closer to noon than just a few hours after sunrise. No hikes were planned. Just do this! 

This shot above is close to something I had uploaded on here before. 

This time I wanted to be sure I got picture from all different parts of the lake. 

This is close to the one I did the year before.

Another...

Finally, I had to get the top of Mt. Dana in on the upper left high point! 

Tioga Lake is probably my favorite lake in the whole Eastern Sierra. I have great memories of it when I was kid when my dad and I would fish there. Years back I did scramble up to the top of Mt. Dana. I have been working on some old video footage I took from the top with the current A.I. technology. Not sure I will upload it publicly, but you never know. 

The day was the best weather conditions I had last summer. It was perfect. I have another drone flight I will show sometime next month on the same day. It was my favorite flight. 

As an aside, when I was here people were going into Yosemite's Eastern Entrance like usual. Then while I was flying my drone you can see on the upper right side in the video that the line started to get longer. By the time I left it was near where my brother parked at the end of the lake. Just something I wanted to point out. You will see it in another future video I will show next month.

One last thing in the video is I went by twice the area where the stream comes into Tioga Lake. I wanted to get more video footage of that, but people ended up having a picnic there! Lol! So, no I wasn't trying to "spy" on them, but I just did enough and kept going. I was going to fly lower and stick around, but decided that would seem like I was spying on them. 

Flying Over Tioga Lake (Youtube Video)

Flying Over Silver Lake

 So after June Lake I drove over to Silver Lake. There was something special I wanted out of this one, but unfortunately I was a week or two late in getting it. Still went ahead anyways to fly around this lake.

I have shown Silver Lake in the past because it is a great spot for fall colors. I've never been quite satisfied with anything I have done here because of a sunlight. I show why in the next few pictures. 

So, I have had this type of picture before in the fall. The issue in the upper left hand corner is a lot of sunlight hits this area in a way that comes across as haze or smoke. I purposely flew the drone a lot more to the left to do the best I could to avoid the angle that gets that, but you can see it is still there. I meant to come back here in October to get a shot like this again, but that did not work out this time. 

Trying to get the right time of the day and best season for this shot is challenging for me in flights or just taking normal pictures on the ground. However, this shot was really secondary to what I was trying to achieve at this lake.

 The above is Horsetail Falls which I have hiked by to Gem Lake back in 2010. This was sort of the goal of my flying around here. The water had been gushing out from Agnew Lake during the month of July; I believe that was controlled by man made mechanisms and not something from nature. They were releasing water that had been snow/ice back there. I saw pictures of it and hoped to get this huge amount of water gushing over on video. I was too lake and this was what I got. Still it was fun doing this. Btw, in the video, this is the reason I hang out over here for a while. 

Finally, this is the other shot of June Lake I wanted from the other side:

Not bad. I took a few other pictures. Lots of water around, lots of boats fishing, etc. I was very relaxed doing this one.

Flying Over Silver Lake 4K (Youtube Video)