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.