BISHOP, Calif. _ This is a time of year that many rural towns in the Owens Valley usually celebrate _ rodeo and fishing season.
Normally, tourists from Southern California would be swarming into the eastern Sierra Nevada range, streaming into Old West facades and making cash registers sing.
But the deadly virus that locals have come to call "The Big Weird" has changed all that.
Today, the towns of Lone Pine, Independence, Big Pine and Bishop are silent except for the rumbling of passing trucks on U.S. Highway 395. Nearly everything is closed: tackle shops, art galleries, restaurants and saloons with swinging doors.
Two of the biggest social events of the year _ Mule Days and the California high school state rodeo finals _ were canceled. The annual ritual known as "Fishmas," opening day for trout fishing, was pushed back a month to May 31.
In a landscape of stunning contrasts _ blue-ribbon trout streams, meadows resplendent with wild iris, cattle ranches and desert plains flanked by lava flows _ there is no camping, no rock climbing, and no bagging 14,505-foot Mount Whitney, the tallest mountain in the contiguous U.S., because the road that hikers use to reach the trailhead is closed.
When it comes to containing the coronavirus, Inyo County is a success story: 19 cases and one death reported in an 18,000-square-mile district that is home to 17,000 people.
But Inyo County is also a place where that seemingly good news threatens to upset the symbiotic relationship between its isolated towns and tourism.
"We haven't had a new case reported in 31 days," said Leslie Chapman, assistant county administrator. "But when the economy reopens, our tourists will be coming from coronavirus hot spots."
"That's scary," she added, "and weird."
Inyo is also a place where the concept of essential business is, as County Supervisor Dan Totheroh put it, "bogus."
"Food, medicine and guns, for example, are classified as essential," he said. "So, if you have any of those things in your store, you can remain open."
Confusing guidance from officials on what counts as safe in towns with economies based almost entirely on tourism has triggered complaints that the lockdown is not justified in Inyo County. At the same time, business owners are under the gun to repay the bank loans they took out when it seemed the boom times would never end.
"The painful lesson in all this," Inyo County Supervisor Matt Kingsley said, "is that we should be diversifying because the tourism-based economy is not as stable as we had come to believe over the decades."
