Oct 29 2008

Mono Lake

Published by at 2:00 pm under California,Western U.S.

After leaving Death Valley, we traveled north on the eastern side of the Sierras. It’s a beautiful drive. We made a short stop in Bishop mid-day to see the Galen Rowell’s gallery called Mountain Light. Some truly amazing photographs – highly recommended if you’re in the area. That night we set up camp at our site in Lee Vining, CA, the town closest to Mono Lake and the main town on the eastern entrance to Yosemite. We spent the next two sunsets and sunrises at Mono Lake. The Lake is a well known destination for photographers for two reasons: the high salinity of the water gives it a very viscous look that makes for good reflections and the “tufa towers” which are fragile formations caused by freshwater springs entering the lake from below and reacting with the highly salty water.

After setting up our tent, we drove down to the area of the lake with the tufa towers to “scout it out.” I wanted to see what it was like so that I knew where to go for sunrise the next morning. When we showed up, it was just after sunset and twilight was just starting to show a pink cloud from one edge of the sky to the other. I walked down to the lake without my camera because mentally I was in “scouting” mode. After the 10 minute walk down to the shoreline though, the pink cloud was now intensely red. It made the tufa towers and the shore glow pink and also the water was perfectly still like a mirror. I had seen so many pictures of Mono Lake looking like this that I figured it would look like this the whole time we were there so I didn’t go back to the car to get my camera. Big mistake. Several of the shots I thought would be great just didn’t exist for the rest of the time we were there. I think I made the best of it while we were there (and that’s not to say that conditions weren’t pretty good most of the time) but lesson learned: always be prepared to take a shot at the moment. Here are a few shots from various sunrises/sunsets at Mono Lake:

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Above: A tufa tower at sunrise

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Above: tufa formations and Mono Lake at sunrise

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Above: twilight after sunset at Mono Lake with tufa towers in the foreground and the Eastern Sierras behind them.

– Dave

One response so far

One Response to “Mono Lake”

  1. Mom and Dad says:

    Thanks for sharing the photos.

    Russ