From hyperthermia to thermal underwear

Patagonia and other outdoor-gear purveyors might consider the untapped market niche of visitors to the Eastern Sierra region, where the adjoining counties of Inyo and Mono logged the extreme high and low temperatures for the Lower 48 states more than a dozen times this summer, according to National Weather Service reports. In the same summer day, travelers may swelter in over-100-degree heat at Inyo’s Death Valley National Park only to risk frostbite in below-freezing cold at Mono’s Bodie State Historic Park a mere 200-ish miles away.

“Bodie is in a bowl, and that cold air just sits in there,” says Howard Sheckter, a radio and television weather forecaster in Mammoth Lakes since 1980. “It is repeatedly one of the coldest places in the country, along with Bridgeport in Mono County. There’s no moisture and the dew point is low. You can go 30 below zero in the winter. With Death Valley, it’s generally the hottest temp in the country. The lower you go, the hotter it gets.”

Certainly Bodie’s 8,375-foot elevation greatly exceeds the position of Death Valley, the lowest point in the Western Hemisphere at 282 feet below sea level, though elevation interacts with other factors to produce the extreme mercury readings, says James Murakami, staff meteorologist at the UCLA Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences. “Cloud cover acts as a blanket. The best condition for cooling in the mountains is if the air is dry and calm. In California, we don’t get storms that much, so we get radiational cooling in Bodie. Death Valley, you tend to get the highest temperatures.”

And not every trekker follows the Boy Scout motto, says Rebecca Scott, an office assistant at Bodie State Historic Park. “I’ve been up here when it’s below zero. On one Labor Day weekend it was 7 degrees at night. This is tourist season for Europeans, mostly Germans. They go to Death Valley and then come here in shorts and flip-flops. They have to wrap their legs with newspapers.”