Crowley Columns

Just outside of Mammoth Lakes, CA., Crowley Lake has some extremely rare nature made columns!

In order to find them, you must take some dirt roads. They are located in one specific section of the lake. If you search on the AllTrails App., it will be listed at roughly a 4 mile round trip “hike”. I put hike in parenthesis because it is more of a walk, than a hike in my opinion. It will also list in order to make the trip significantly shorter, you can do so if you have a 4x4 vehicle. What we discovered when we went…if you have a little bit of experience with off-road type driving and a vehicle with 4x4, then you can make this drive! The only section over the 2 mile (one direction drive) which requires this is a somewhat steep, sandy, with big dip/whoops hill. With my experience with off-roading…I got out of my truck and walked up the hill to see if it was manageable, and also to find which route will be the safest for us to take. First of all the hill looks much worse from the bottom. Once you walk up, you will be less threatened. Also keep in my mind I have a stock(non lifted) Toyota Tacoma. There is a section of bushes down the middle, where I decided to hug on the right hand side(bushes on my left/driver side). I made sure to utilize 4low and 1st gear, and we crawled up this with ease! DISCLAIMER….I only recommend this IF you have the right vehicle and experience! We did see a handful of people who parked at the bottom of the hill, which I completely understand. But I will say, this hike looked really boring, mainly because it’s just a dirt desert type road. We actually ended up giving one couple a ride back to their vehicle.

Once you’ve gone past this, just use the AllTrails map to guide you to the end of the road. From here all you have to do is go down the short, steep hill on foot. Which is only .1 of a mile…but it’s about 150 feet straight down and full of BUGS. There were swarms of HUNDREDS of gnats or harmless mosquitoes. We did not get bitten, but it was unclear what exactly they were. Mainly due to how fast we were moving to go past them. It really isn’t a difficult hill at all, but it’s good to know it’s basically straight down.

Once you make it down to the sand/beach area, you just walk right over to where the main section of columns are. It is awesome to be able to walk through them and really see the details of how they are created. I couldn’t get enough of it. It amazes me nature created these. They look as if someone had designed them. While you are able to walk in and out of them, it really gives you an appreciation of nature(in my opinion). There are many broken pieces which have fallen off, so be careful. DO NOT try to push on them as I fear you may seriously disrupt them, and/or get hurt if they were to collapse on you.

After we checked out the columns, I decided to walk towards the side where we walked down because I saw a cave. Unfortunately it was full of those same bugs so did not spend much time inside of it. But I still would recommend checking it out while you are there.

With exploring the columns, the cave and walking back up the hill to the truck…it wasn’t even an entire mile, only .7 of a mile! Easily, check all these out in less than 30 minutes. Also can walk around the lake a bit more to see what else you may find. If you do, let me know if I missed anything!

Overall I would say if you’re looking for something short or possibly a time killer before maybe a check in, then go check these columns out. It’s definitely an awesome photo and video opportunity.

As always pack it in and pack it out!

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