Trailhead: South Landing
Elevation: 6780 ft
Difficulty: A supposedly easy paddle
Fees: $10 to park near boat ramp
Are you looking for a cool rest-day activity? Do you know a thing or two about kayaks? Do you like both geology and migratory seabirds? The Crowley Lake columns might be just the thing!
The columns with human for scale
During the first few months recovering from my hip repair, I wasn't allowed to do much at all with my legs and so we started kayaking. We've tried everything from kayaking in the bays of Northern CA near Point Reyes and Monterrey - chilly and kelpy with lots of good sea fauna like otters and rays - to kayaking on a trip to Hawaii - warm water with dolphins and sea turtles. The Sierra eastside is dotted with lovely alpine lakes as well as much larger LADWP reservoirs, all conducive to flatwater kayaks.
Lake Crowley was created in 1941 as a result of the construction of the Long Valley dam by LADWP (see: Cadillac Desert for an account of how LADWP stole the waters of the eastern sierra - the movie Chinatown is based in part on the annexation of water rights in the Owen's Valley). After a while, folks began to notice strange rock columns appearing on the southeastern shore. Turns out, the dammed waters had begun to erode into the long valley plateau and had exposed a volcanic layer about 800,000 years old. Geologists think that shortly after a volcanic eruption, snow or water seeped into the still hot new rock layer and the boiling of this water caused columnar spaces to form.
You can drive your 4wD vehicle out to the south side of the lake to see some of the columns but we decided to kayak from the more accessible south landing. They charge $10 for parking at the boat landing and the man looked at our kayaks and warned us that the wind had kicked up and told us to expect choppy waters. We're not good kayakers but we ignored him for some reason - somehow kayaking doesn't seem as scary as mountaineering or rock climbing - but we were about to learn that we were hanging out at the dangerous part of the Dunning-Kruger curve.
The kayaks we used with dog for scale
The 2 mile paddle out to the columns in our open-cockpit Pelican kayaks was uneventful although we did notice the waves seemed high for a small-ish lake. We noticed sea gulls and one pelican surfing the waves - apparently Lake Crowley is a popular stopover for migrating white pelicans on their way from the southeastern US to Canada. We disembarked on the beach and walked around the columns for a while. Each column looks like it is composed on dozens of flat rocks stacked on top of each other and the shore surrounding the columns is littered with spikes from collapsed columns.
The wind had continued to pick up so we started to kayak back to the landing zone. About halfway back GG called to me to note that he was riding low in the water and wanted to head to shore to drain his open- cockpit boat that was being continually swamped by the large waves. I agreed and we headed to a small beach maybe 200m away. Suddenly GG called my name and I turned to see him capsizing. I paddled to him and he tried to salvage the contents of his boat - most of which were fortunately in a dry bag. We did lose a nalgene so apologies to the people of long valley - we don't normally leave trash when we recreate. We didn't have a bilge pump and besides the kayak was 90% full of water at this point anyways so I attempted to tow GG and the craft to the shore. I gave 100% effort and we barely crawled to shore - GG later claimed ungratefully it would have been more efficient for him just to swim.
Still happy, but you can see it's a little choppy!
After dumping out both kayaks we resolved to stay near the shoreline and eventually made it back to our car. Obviously we should have had spray skirts and bilge pumps in addition to the life jackets we were wearing. It reminded me of some of the disasters (fortunately non-lethal) of our early days climbing and backcountry skiing. Good sense goes a long way but sometimes you have to make a few mistakes to really learn the risks of a new sport!
Wow, how long did it take to get there w/o the wind?