Off Hours

Off
Hours

A device-free lodge in the Owens Valley. Three days of hot water, cold air, and hard light. Your phone waits in a canvas pouch at the front desk. It will cope.

36.8°N 118.2°W4,300 ft0 bars

Scroll. The sun knows what to do.

01The premise

No screens. Not as a theme. As a rule.

At check-in your phone goes into a numbered canvas pouch, the kind banks use for coin. The pouch goes into a cabinet behind the front desk with a brass lock and a logbook. You keep the claim stub. This is not a metaphor. It is a cabinet.

There is no Wi-Fi. There has never been cell service; the Inyos stand between the lodge and the nearest tower, and we have declined, in writing, to fix that. The lodge keeps one landline for emergencies and a typed list, taped beside it, of what has historically counted as one. In nine years: a birth, two brush fires, and a forgotten insulin kit.

Watches are welcome. The kind that tick.

Rooms
14
Landlines
1
Bars of signal
0
At the source
104°F
Adobe lodge at golden hour, low sun raking across mud walls and sagebrush, the dark Sierra crest rising behind.
The lodge from the east fence line, 7:40 AM. Adobe holds the night's cold well into lunch.

02The days

The schedule is short. The days are not.

Day One Arrival 4:00 PM to 10:30 PM
  • 4:00 PM

    Check-in. Pouches, claim stubs, room keys on leather fobs.

  • 4:30 PM

    The tour. Springs, kitchen, woodshed, the one phone.

  • 6:15 PM

    The sun drops behind the crest. Alpenglow on the Inyos, roughly eleven minutes of it.

  • 7:00 PM

    Dinner. One table, twenty chairs, no menu choices. Tonight it is lamb birria and flour tortillas.

  • 9:30 PM

    First soak. 102°F water, 44°F air. Steam does the talking.

  • 10:30 PM

    Quiet hours. The dark here is a fact, not a setting.

Day Two The whole point 5:45 AM to late
  • 5:45 AM

    Coffee on the porch rail. Enamel cups. It is 38°F. Bring the blanket off your bed; everyone does.

  • 6:58 AM

    Sunrise over the Inyos. No one photographs it. It goes fine.

  • 7:30 AM

    Breakfast. Eggs, trout hash, toast off the wood stove.

  • 9:00 AM

    The creek walk. 4.6 miles out along the old flume. Flat, loud with water.

  • 1:00 PM

    Dead hours. Nap, read, stare at the ridge. This is the part guests write to us about later.

  • 4:45 PM

    The light gets serious. Photographers call it alpenglow. You will just have to remember it.

  • 6:30 PM

    Dinner. Short ribs, white beans, a pie whose contents depend on the orchard.

  • 9:00 PM

    Night soak. Bortle 2 sky. On a clear night the Milky Way is bright enough to argue about.

Day Three Re-entry 6:00 AM to 2:00 PM
  • 6:00 AM

    Coffee. Nobody talks much on the last morning. Correct.

  • 7:00 AM

    Last soak. The water is the same. You are slightly different.

  • 8:30 AM

    Breakfast. Packed lunches lined up on the counter.

  • 11:00 AM

    The pouches come out of the cabinet. Take your time. Most people wait until the county road.

  • 2:00 PM

    Out by two. The speed limit on the ranch road is 15. Hold onto that pace as long as you can.

03The rooms

Fourteen rooms. Three kinds. One rule.

$420per person, two nights

Six oak bunks in the old tack room, each with a curtain, a shelf, a hook, and a reading lamp the size of a bar of soap. Wool blankets from the mill in town. If you snore, the Cabin is sixty yards away and takes exactly one hint.

Sleeps
6, curtained
Window
east, one, long
Heat
radiator
Soak
shared pools

$780per room, two nights

Adobe walls two feet thick, which is why it is 61°F in here at noon in July without a machine trying. A queen under a wool blanket, a chair worth the name, and an east window that will wake you at 6:58 whether you agreed to that or not.

Sleeps
2
Window
east, sunrise
Heat
radiator, thick mud
Soak
shared pools

$1,150per cabin, two nights

Sixty yards from the lodge behind a stand of rabbitbrush. Wood stove, split juniper stacked to the lintel, and a cedar tub on the porch fed by the same 104°F line as the main pools. The tub fits two people, or one person and a real thought.

Sleeps
2
Window
west, toward the crest
Heat
wood stove
Soak
private, on the porch
A small bedroom in morning light: white bedding under a wool blanket, plaster walls, a wooden chair by the window.
The Bunk, 7:05 AM. Curtains do more than you'd think.
Room 9, 7:12 AM. The sun does the decorating.
The Cabin porch, first light. The tub steams all night.

04The land

High desert. Hard light.

A lone juniper on a rocky ridge under hard midday light, the pale valley floor stretching out far below.
The east ridge juniper. Somewhere past 900 years old. It has never once checked anything.

The lodge sits at 4,300 feet on the floor of the deepest valley in the country. The Sierra crest stands ten thousand feet over the west fence. The Inyos hold the east. Between them: sagebrush, rabbitbrush, one very old juniper, and light with no opinion of you whatsoever.

Summer days run 97°F and dry. October mornings start at 38°F and apologize by ten. Winter puts snow on the crest and keeps the pools at 102°F anyway. There is no season when the sky is small.

Sunrise, Oct
6:58 AM
Sunset, Oct
6:14 PM
Night low
31°F
Humidity
18%
A stone-lined hot spring pool steaming at dusk, terracotta sky fading over the dark Sierra silhouette.

05The water

104°F at the source. 102°F where you sit. 38°F everywhere else.

The spring predates the lodge by ten thousand years and the notification by slightly more. Three pools, stone lined, drained and scrubbed every morning at 4:30. Soaking hours run 5:30 AM to 11:00 PM. The stars take the late shift.

Source
104°F
Pools
102°F
Silica
41 ppm
Sky
Bortle 2

06Provisions

Pack the night before.
Pack light.

Bring

  • A book you have been lying about reading.
  • Wool socks. Two pairs more than seems reasonable.
  • A jacket that has seen things.
  • Boots that already know your feet.
  • A headlamp with a red setting. Your night vision is worth protecting.
  • A swimsuit, technically.

Leave

  • The phone. Obviously. The pouch is lined. It will be cozy.
  • The laptop. There is no version of this where the laptop helps.
  • The watch that buzzes. The ticking kind is welcome.
  • The drone. We will simply say no at the gate.
  • The book you think you should read. Bring the one you want.

07Inquire

Write to us. Paper works too.

Opens your mail app and nothing else.