April 10, 2023 (First Published)

Bishop and Olancha, California

Southern California’s favorite recreation hot-spots in the Eastern Sierra are seeing a few more Teslas racing up and down Highway 395 from Hollywood to Mammoth every weekend.

Bishop’s peaceful small town atmosphere is already hampered by stop and go traffic on the main street through town, aka Highway 395, which has also become a major truck route from Reno via Highway 6.

Travelers on Highway 395 to Riverside and Highway 14 to Los Angeles will also notice Tesla Charging stations popping up in Mojave, Inyokern, Independence and Lone Pine.

Tesla just announced that 45,000 “supercharging” stations have been built worldwide, with more to come:

The accelerated buildout of the Supercharger Network is invaluable, especially amidst the company’s efforts to open its rapid charging system to non-Tesla electric vehicles, both in the United States and in other countries. Being one of the market’s most reliable rapid charging networks, Superchargers have the potential to make long-distance EV travel mainstream. 

https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-supercharger-network-45000-stalls-worldwide/

It seems to be a common narrative among the elite that can be observed to be false if you’re willing to sit in a parking lot looking at a Tesla getting a recharge as we did. Take our word for it, under ideal conditions, with only 10 or so spaces, you can see how Fridays and Sundays will have anxious Tesla drivers waiting for hours to get a charge so they can resume their road race. That’s probably a bit of an exaggeration but only an itsy-bitsy bit.

Tesla’s supercharging network isn’t available to non-Tesla EV snobs, and they’re not going to like it:

EV discrimination or domination? Tesla will be offering it’s charging stations to non-Teslas at some point, but not today.

“Neither Easy Nor Fast”: Electric Vehicle Owners Admit To “Logistical Nightmare” Over Charging – Zerohedge.com

John Voelcker, an industry expert on EVs and the former editor of Green Car Reports, said this arrangement will allow Tesla to learn a lot about U.S. drivers — “how you charge, where you drive and what car you have.” He does not expect Tesla to commit to additional charging stations.

“Tesla does not want its highly reliable and tightly integrated charging network to be clogged with people whose cars can’t charge as fast as Teslas,” he told ABC News. -ABC News

https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/neither-easy-nor-fast-electric-vehicle-owners-admit-logistical-nightmare-over-charging

In order to accomodate Tesla’s “tourist model”, CalTrans has begun construction of 13 miles straitaway bypassing Olancha and the deadly 2 lane curve renowned for spinning-out speeding LA flatlanders going skiing for the weekend.

Olancha is 200 miles north of Los Angeles and CalTrans recently started cutting a 13 mile four lane route from Olancha to Cartago, bypassing the Highway 190 turnoff to Death Valley and Gus’s Fresh Jerky. The project has been in the planning phase for years, and it became a reality last June when construction equipment, water tankers and large culverts appeared virtually overnight.

Olancha to Cartago Freeway Construction (CalTrans)

Gus’s Fresh Jerky has been in Olancha, together with it’s founder Gus, for many years. If anyone knows what will happen to Gus’s, we’d like to know. We thought we’d ask you to ask Gus, so email him at info@freshjerky.com, place an order for some fresh jerky, and then send a message to: tips@roadrunner395.com and we’ll update this post accordingly along with your “I Love Olancha and Gus’s Fresh Jerky” stories. Photo Credits: Sierrawave.net

Last summer, Olancha locals were concerned about dust from the project and CalTrans was looking to find enough water for the job. Plans to pump water from the now-closed Olancha Elementary School failed to supply the amount of water that would be needed during construction so CalTrans apparently turned to some private landowners looking for more water.

Crystal Geyser has large bottling facilities just south of the project and Caltrans was rumored to be looking there too. We didn’t bother contacting CalTrans to either confirm or deny the rumor so take it for what it’s worth. Crystal Geyser recently completed an expansion project which is hidden behind the massive cottonwood trees that have been a hallmark of the Olancha area for decades. The new plant isn’t shown in the aerials but what’s already there is huge.

Olancha/Cartago will be re-branded as “The Gateway to the Sierra Nevadas” with tourists intentionally cruising through the community instead of driving blindly past it.

The by-pass will identify the eight miles of the original 395, from Cartago to Summit Creek, as a destination as well as the turn-off point to Death Valley. Residents and visitors will actually be able to walk or bike through the communities without fear of turning into road kill.

When the by-pass was first proposed, there was a fear Olancha/Cartago would wither on the vine. But, the goal of the corridor study is to increase tourism and promote economic growth, identifying the area as both the way to Death Valley and a place to be in its own right.

Plans include walking, biking and horse-back riding trails along the corridor as well as way-finding signs to local attractions and recreational opportunities.

Sierrawave.net August 30, 2019

The project has certainly gotten off to a rocky start, no pun intended, and CalTrans will be plowing through millions of years of granite rubble and boulders piled along the base of the Sierra Nevadas.

While construction continues, the Bishop Paiute Tribe is monitoring the project for any evidence of uncovered artifacts or burial sites as well as preventing artifact hunters from scouring the area.

Pictured below is the construction equipment and preparations for an overpass crossing the LADWP canal last July. Just last month, this particular section was in the news after the flooding washed out the backside of the canal causing it to collapse for approximately 120 feet.

The canal was repaired quickly by LADWP and we’re guessing that CalTrans was cooperating with LADWP by providing the heavy equipment already on site. We’re also hopeful that CalTrans and LADWP are negotiating cost sharing for the job instead of suing each other and making the attorneys filthier and richer.

Bishop has another problem that’s been getting worse as truck traffic from Reno and Amazon flow into the southland. The City has spent more than a few bucks on planning for a truck bypass route on Highway 6 to Highway 395 for the traffic traveling to and from Nevada. We hear it’s almost $10 million, and the ever-present environmental attorneys protecting Owens River have won out so far.

The City of Bishop will welcome Tesla’s virtue-signaling climate-alarmists by consigning them to a back lot near downtown while their hive-minds stare smugly at their I-phones waiting for a “supercharge”. There’s no reason for them to stop on the trip back from Mammoth other than to catch up with Tik Tok or Rachel Maddow’s latest bombshells about bad orange man.

All the delaying tactics serve the same people who hire the environmental attorneys to muck things up in the first place, so let them do their dirty work in the meantime. CalTrans is too busy with rock-slides and road closures in the Sierras to notice.

Here’s a picture of the road leading into King’s Canyon National Park on State Route 180 east of Fresno.

Highway 180 from Grant Grove to Cedar Grove (Sequoia National Forest, King’s Canyon National Park)

This road is open seasonally, generally beginning the fourth Friday in April and closing mid-November. When closed for the season, CalTrans will close Highway 180 just beyond the junction with Hume Lake Road, 6 miles northeast of Grant Grove Village. This is due to rockfall from the cliffs, which is common once temperatures fall below freezing at night. Hume Lake remains accessible year-round. Much of Highway 180 is in Sequoia National Forest-national forest updates may be available online, or call (800) 427-7623.

We’ll try to get a comment from someone in Bishop regarding the impasse on the Owen’s River overpass but anticipate that the City will neither confirm or deny the project even exists.

We doubt that the Woke ultra-rich who fled LA to buy second homes in Bishop during the Covid-19 plandemic are expressing any concern over the environmental impacts of the bypass project and we also have even more doubts that they’ll ever admit that EV isn’t “green”or the jab isn’t “safe and effective”, while we continue to point out that they aren’t saving the planet but actually destroying humanity.

We also believe that those stinking diesel trucks are filled with Chinese-made N-95 masks and Pfizer mRNA “vaccines”, and they’re ruining the peaceful tranquility on mainstreet. Therefore, combustion engines must be banned from driving through their safe space.

We’re also curious as to what “they” will do with all those empty campgrounds when the proles can’t afford to take the family camping?

That’s what we think, but we’re also prone to conspiracy theories, so don’t pay attention to this messenger or the facts.We can go on and on, as you know:

We don’t think that Tesla will become mainstream any more than Elon Musk will make wine out of water or fly himself on a mission to Mars. We also know that Gavin Newsom doesn’t give a shit about your freedom to travel or saving the planet and will force you buy a friggin EV anyway. You can take that to the bank. Silicon Valley Bank that is:

California Gov. Gavin Newsom lobbied the White House and the Department of the Treasury about the pending bailout of Silicon Valley Bank, even as three of his private wineries had apparently been among the bank’s clients, according to a Tuesday report by Ken Klippenstein of the Intercept.

According to Klippenstein’s reporting, Newsom’s personal relationship with SVB went beyond the wineries. One anonymous former employee who handled Newsom’s finances told Klippenstein that Newsom “maintained personal accounts at SVB for years.”

Business Insider