Sierra Vista byway a blissfully lonely loop

“In most tourists’ rush to get to Yosemite National Park, they overlook this beautiful drive that takes you through this gorgeous route just south of Yosemite,” writes reader Susanne Waite of Coarsegold, Calif., in nominating Sierra Vista Scenic Byway.

THE SETTING

There’s no way you’ve ever been on the Sierra Vista Scenic Byway because, quite frankly, almost no one has. OK, maybe Susanne. And the family of four, whom I saw only once (and fleetingly, as if they were on the lam from the Blair Witch), during this six-hour, deep-forest massage in the western Sierra.

So where is this drive? The seasonal loop swings within 20 miles of the southern entrance to Yosemite National Park -- which, admittedly, has more spectacular natural formations -- but you feel eons away from the hordes at Half Dome.

It starts on Forest Road 81 (a.k.a. Minarets Road) in the Sierra National Forest and continues on Forest Road 7 (a.k.a. Beasore Road), winding past hillside oaks at low elevation, and pine trees and granite boulders higher up. We started near the tiny town of North Fork, which is the last place to find food, gas, beer, water -- and someone to talk to.

THE VIBE

This route isn’t really on the way to anywhere, except for maybe Bass Lake, but as they say in the car commercials, the ride is the destination.

My husband, Tom, and I checked out the Yosemite Sierra Visitors Bureau in Oakhurst on California 41 in search of information and a map of the “scenic byway,” a designation bestowed by the U.S. Department of Transportation. Even with the handout map, I needed a full-time navigator (GPS users may fare better) to keep me on course. It looks simple enough on paper, but I found some of the intersections tricky and the road names variable.

The visitors bureau also sells $20 T-shirts with the route printed upside-down on the front for easy navigation. Ha ha ha.

Before starting the official loop, we took a recommended five-mile detour to the Exact Geographical Center of California. The metal marker sits on a dusty chaparral hillside that resembles a beat-up tombstone from the Old West.

But there’s something strangely alluring about standing on the precise point where the state of California would balance on the head of a pin.

An added bonus: You pass Spickets ranch, a kitschy roadside attraction with statues of pink flamingos, pelicans, wooden bears and, my favorite, ceramic frogs sunbathing in skimpy bathing suits. Really, how could any Sierra vista top that?

We backtracked to start at the official one-day route that covered about 70 miles. (You can lengthen the route by 15 miles with more stops, according to the byway’s website.) The first stop was an overlook of Redinger Lake, a fat ribbon of blue on the San Joaquin River where tiny boats created tiny white wakes on the water far below.

The second stop was my favorite: Jesse Ross Cabin, which was built in the late 1860s and once included an apple orchard. It’s an easy walk to the little log cabin that sits in a sweet, forest setting with a funky wooden gate and interior walls covered in peeling pages of the San Francisco Chronicle from the 1930s -- early wallpaper or insulation? A lovely trail leads deeper into the woods, but time was flying and I made myself get back into the car and continue the loop.

We climbed to about 6,500 feet and took a short walk to the gray speckled Arch Rock. It wasn’t as impressive as, say, Utah’s red sandstone arches, but the setting was tranquil. That’s when I realized we were about halfway through this trip and hadn’t seen a soul. Sweet.

When we got back on the road, I made another realization: I hadn’t noticed those little dashes on the map before. I clenched the wheel of our Prius along what turned into a narrow dirt track, Forest Road 7, which sometimes had a little pavement underneath, sometimes just rough terrain. (You don’t need a four-wheel-drive vehicle, but it wouldn’t hurt.)

The next few stops -- one to visit vast, peaceful Jackass Meadow, which must be gorgeous in wildflower season, and one to ogle granite spheres above Portuguese Overlook -- were pretty, but I was fretting about the rough road and the waning light.

That must be why I missed Globe Rock, which the brochure describes as a “geographical oddity” and whose picture resembles a lumpy rock ball of undetermined size. We passed the 7,308-foot Cold Springs Summit -- where we, gasp, briefly saw two men on motorcycles before they disappeared into the woods -- and pressed on to a vista of Fresno Dome.

By the end of the day, we had covered 70 of the sweetest but slowest miles we’d ever driven without being in a SigAlert.

OVERALL

So many trees, so little time. We ran out of daylight hours to continue on to the Nelder Grove of giant sequoias or Bass Lake, which promised amenities and swimming. And, truth be told, the hiker in me got antsy to get out from behind the wheel and just start walking through some of the stunning scenery.

Young kids and teens may find this drive too long between stops, or not enough “there there” when you do stop. For a family drive, you might just want to go as far as Arch Rock and then backtrack for a dip in Bass Lake.

Yosemite Sierra Visitors Bureau, 41969 Highway 41, Oakhurst, Calif.; (559) 683-4636. For a map and stop-by-stop breakdown of the byway, go to www.byways.org.