Highway 395 is lined with views and culture — from Alabama Hills to Mono Lake, the iconic Mobil mart at Lee Vining, and all the hot springs on dirt roads shooting off into the desert.
This is the part of the drive where patience is a virtue. It’s far and away the busiest section of road — and the most terrifying. People with places to be and no time to spare love to pass lines of cars and trucks on blind corners, where the road dips up and down. I recommend settling in for an hour, getting comfortable behind a big semi truck, chilling out and taking inuntil the road banks a big left turn and drops down into the desert outposts of Ridgecrest, Inyokern and Pearsonville.
. This is the western boundary of the Great Basin where, from the Sierra Nevada Crest, the terrain dramatically dives down thousands of feet in elevation. We stop for sandwiches at the famous Schat’s Bakery in Bishop and we top off for gas here, too. Expensive as it is in Bishop, just an hour or so north, gas was about $7 a gallon in Lee Vining and Bridgeport. You need enough fuel to make it to Carson City, where prices get lower again.
Driving the last leg of the trip through the Carson Valley, the ridge line of the Sierra Nevada was a dark silhouette. From this vantage, those mountains look gigantic. From the other side, in the Lake Tahoe Basin, they look much smaller. Highway 395 offers this incredible perspective to recognize just how deep Tahoe is.