The day is bright, with the sound and smell of snowmelt all around. Clouds snag on the high ridges of 11,000-foot Carson Peak, which is directly before me. As I travel deep into the glacial canyon at the base of the mountain, the half-frozen lakes I pass have a lost look, and I'm pretty sure I've missed my turn.

No, here's the turn. I rumble across a log bridge and arrive at the Double Eagle Resort and Spa, the most deluxe destination in the Eastern Sierra, which isn't saying much, necessarily. The June Lake Loop, the road I've been on, circles through forests and trailer parks and bungalow encampments built generations ago. The area has a certain charm, but it's the charm of the rustic hideaways where you went fishing as a kid with your Uncle George. The town of June Lake itself, at the south end of the loop, has cafés and some older motels, with bait shops prominent among the retail ventures. The town seems defiantly modest. We're not puttin' on any airs, it seems to say, so why should you?

The scenery, though, is immodest. On this spring day, Carson Peak presents a massive, looming face split by steep couloirs packed with creamy snow. Above the granite ridges, mare's tail clouds of the same creamy white streak a temperate sky. The developers of the Double Eagle Resort, who purchased the tumbledown property four years ago, designed the several new and renovated buildings to offer every possible view of the nearby mountain. Each time you look up, from a French-inspired dinner in the restaurant or from your guest cabin door or from the indoor/outdoor pool building with its glass walls and gables, you see the peak from another aspect and in another mood.

At an elevation of 7,500 feet, I am well into the High Sierra, and could hike my way straight from my cabin to the top of Carson Peak and on into a true wilderness. Rock climbing, ice climbing, cross-country skiing, snowmobiling, and horse-packing trips are available in season, and the resort also offers fly-fishing classes and guided fishing trips to nearby lakes and streams, though I forget about strenuous action and head straight for the spa. Even without aching muscles and a hard-won exhaustion, I'm in the mood for one of the spa's 11 kinds of massages (traditional Swedish, deep tissue, sports specific, etc.), some exotic body therapy (salt polish, grape-seed exfoliation, seaweed therm), and maybe a bit of hydrotherapy, too, in the serious-looking Hydrotone tub with its 144 nozzles.

Like the famous resorts that inspired it -- The Oaks, La Quinta, and The Golden Door, which the spa's owners have carefully studied -- the Double Eagle delivers personal indulgence of a high order. The ruggedness of the setting adds something new, and the resort architecture acknowledges both the granite of the peaks and local history, with old sluice boxes, mine shaft bratticing, and rusted rolling stock displayed on the grounds. Some of the buildings incorporate antique timbers and glass salvaged from local mines, as if to recall the period in the1870s and 1880s when the Eastern Sierra was economically vibrant. The Standard Mine, in the nearby town of Bodie, was once California's largest gold ore producer.

Guests at the Double Eagle stay in two-bedroom cabins that are more like dream getaways at Snowbird than humble cottages. Accommodations also are available in a recently built luxury lodge built around a pond. Cabin 112 -- where I spent a lot of time staring straight up, mesmerized at the north face of Carson Peak that seemed about to avalanche right into my living room -- is typical in being arranged for a perfect weekend with or without children, with or without plans for lots of hardy skiing and hiking and mountaineering. In other words, it was private and charming enough to make me hang around for many comfortable hours, only venturing out for short walks and some Hydrotoning and a few meals.