Living in Bishop and the Eastern Sierra for 21 years, I have had a lot of time to observe, think about, and question the behavior of that special group of humans known as Tourist. I’ve decided to create a few posts about them and share with you the information I’ve obtained over the years. Now if these observations are a little uncomfortable to you, if they sound a little to much like your own behavior when your in the Sierra, don’t be upset with me. I’m just trying to have a little fun

So here we go,
Observations and facts about tourist:

- If you are a photographer and you pull into a turn out to take a picture on a busy tourist road, within 60 seconds of setting up your tripod you will be surrounded by tourist, parking at the strangest angles and all pointing their cameras in the same direction that yours is pointing.

- If there is wildlife in the area, they will try to feed it and want to touch it, all the while exclaiming, “Oh look how cute it is.”. And if the wildlife is something big, like a deer or bear, they will form a wall and and advance on the poor animal with their camera flashes popping all around. Oh, and most of them will have the red eye reduction on too.

- Here is one that’s particular to what I call “Tourist Fishermen”.
If there is a bridge with a sign nearby that reads “No Fishing From Bridge”, there will be at least one Tourist Fisherman fishing from it. If there are fish visible in the crystal clear water below the bridge, then there will be a major swarm of Tourist Fishermen plunking their Power Bait into the water and all of them asking “Why won’t they bite?”.

- This one happens in the winter when it’s snowing and chains are required. It may happen in all mountain resort areas in the country, but I know it happens with the Southern California skier tourist.
At the chain up area there will be one person trying to put on the chains while five or six more stand around freezing their butts off watching and offering no help to the poor person fighting with the chains. And also, at least one person will have shorts on! This one use to crack Tammy up. She would even take pictures of them and send to her friends

- To finish off this first installment of tourist observations, I will share with you a quote by John Muir that he wrote in the 19th century.
“The average tourist just loves to be told what to look at.”

So there you have it. I hope I didn’t offend to many of you out there. I don’t think I did because I know SierraVisions readers are smarter than the average tourist.