SOUTH BISHOP CREEK – I came to see the fall colors on the moon.

Only a five-hour drive from Sacramento, the landscape here appears all out of scale – huge and dramatic, rocky, steep, almost barren, sometimes foreboding and always spectacular. The colors are not everywhere, but when you find them, they're spectacular, too.

The moon is what the eastern Sierra seems like to us western slopers. Our green side of the Sierra has its cliffs and vistas, but it rises slowly, relatively gently, through woodlands, dales and meadows, along rivers and streams. The western Sierra is a sea of trees. The eastern is a fortress of cliffs.

Driving southwest out of Bishop, the biggest town along Highway 395 and roughly 135 miles south of Lake Tahoe, the mountains ahead loom dark, sheer, immense and daunting. This could be the evil mountains of Mordor from "The Lord of the Rings."

It's dazzling, tactile, almost frightening, and mesmerizing. There are few trees, nothing to block the view, and the Owens Valley is suddenly 2,000, then 3,000 feet below. And more sharp, gray rock walls, or giant, brawny rolls of brown stone and gray-green chaparral, rise a thousand feet off the sides of the road.

Then you see it. Boom. An explosion of color. Vivid, almost radiant – a thousand-foot, Day-Glo waterfall of orange, yellow, gold and bright green. A creek flows between cliffs, and aspens grow along the water. Surely, someone spilled enormous paint cans on those trees, dyeing the mountainside in kinetic, luminescent color.

The two canyons along the south fork and north fork of Bishop Creek are like long tines on a fork, splitting apart 15 miles southwest of Bishop, both reaching up to blue, perfect mountain lakes and surrounded by such preposterous towers of rock that they may have been designed on a Hollywood backlot.

The colors, too, seem like special effects.

"You darn near have to wear sunglasses at times," Gary Olson told me one morning last week. He owns Bishop Creek Lodge in the south canyon with his wife, Suzie. "And we have all those rocks and cliffs, so you really get some contrast."

These majestic canyons are in the Inyo National Forest and up against the John Muir Wilderness. They are fishing country. You know that because the lodges have signs that say "no fish cleaning in your room."

As you get higher and closer to the lakes, that moonscape gives way to more vegetation, more pines and aspens – the source of the color – though you never lose the feel of towering rock.

And though the eastern Sierra is hailed as one of California's special stretches for the blaze of fall, almost everyone who visits still seems stunned by the dazzle.

'Here for the fishing'

Chris Hummel lives in Montara Beach near Half Moon Bay. He was visiting with a gang of friends who were, let's just say, making the most of their guys' weekend away.

"There's fishing, and there's catching fish," he told me. We were sitting in the small bar at Bishop Creek Lodge in the early evening. "We're here for the fishing."

His group had fished on Sabrina Lake at the end of the north canyon that day. They were astounded by the aspens.

"My buddies are regulars up here," Hummel said, "and their mouths were gaping at how bright it was."

The other great reasons to come to this area are to hike and climb. Hiking at the moment also means getting blasted by the color. That's what happened to Carl Rossi and Ruth Ann Henry. They came from Huntington Beach to, as Rossi said "get a dose of the mountains."

He's 76, she's 64. They've seen the foliage many times. Still, it floored them.

"It took us a couple hours to walk two miles," Henry said. "We had to keep stopping to take pictures. You'll go a little ways, and there's nothing, then you turn a corner, and it's like you found an extra-intense patch of sunlight. It's so bright, it's almost spiritual."

There's still time

This is all, remember, early in the color-watching season. The brightest time here is generally the last week of September into mid-October. Most of the color was still high up last weekend, close to the 9,000- foot line. (Sabrina Lake is at 9,100 feet; South Lake is at 10,300.)

Call The Bee's Rick Kushman, (916) 321-1187. Listen to him Tuesdays at 8:40 a.m. on NewsTalk 1530 (KFBK).