mono lake 13 comments
As mentioned in previous posts, during this trip, I rarely spent more than a couple of nights at one campsite. Although I kept the distance of hops between sites down to a minimum, my restlessness kept me on the move most of the time. However, once in awhile, I’d land in a place that was so tranquil that I’d feel able to kick back and stay awhile. It should come as no surprise that most of these were places where I could find solitude.
When traveling in the western U.S., I often stop at Forest Services ranger stations or BLM (Bureau of Land Management) offices, to ask for info on road conditions, hiking trails, campgrounds and dispersed campsites. Rangers are almost always a good source when looking for a dispersed site. I just tell them that I don’t mind roughing it or a bit of back-roading, and most can point me in the right direction. The dispersed site at Mono Lake was a ranger recommendation — a ranger met up at Bodie. He got a map out of his truck and pointed out a site overlooking Mono Lake while commenting, “Have I got a place for YOU!!” He was so right. It was a wonderful campsite from which to view the lake and the sky in perfect peace.
A photographer friend whom I’ve traveled with several times over the years, joined our little caravan for a couple of weeks. Days were spent studying maps, snoozing, or wandering about shooting photos. We explored the Mono Lake area, stocked up on supplies (mainly fresh fruit, vegetables and tofu) at the great little store in Lee Vining, and even made a precarious trip up and back into Yosemite (the brakes on my van overheated on the way back down, so it was something of a tense excursion).
From our campsite, Mono Lake lay before us. Moment to moment, its waters were transformed by the skies above – now pink, now blue, now silver, now gold. Each morning, I would lie in my bed in the back of the van, waiting for the first glow of sunrise to ignite the surface of the lake, creating one vast pool of molten bronze (top photo – click on all photos for larger versions).
Leaving Sabrina stretched out deep in slumber, I would take Sage for a long walk, surveying the landscape as the sunlight slowly spread across the sagebrush to illuminate the snowy peaks of the Sierras to the west. This was our time – really, the first quality time that we had spent together since her arrival in my life. It was good to get out wandering about with her, seeing how she behaved when on her own away from Sabrina. As she matures, I believe she’s going to be a great companion.
Most afternoons, we took both dogs and tripped around the area. Of course, we visited the tufa towers, a striking geological feature peculiar to Mono Lake. The chemistry of the lake is highly alkaline, creating conditions which allow the towers to form where calcium-rich underwater springs come in contact with the lake water.
Seen from a distance, the tufa towers rise from the water like the spires of some magical city. Drawing closer to the lake, we found that there were clusters of the towers along and even above the shoreline. On this day, sunlight breaking through the cloud cover, dramatically lit the formations.
Some of the shapes were fantastic, like great hulking creatures – particularly those lurking among the sagebrush.
In the evening, I would cook dinner for all of us using the propane gas stove. I’ve always enjoyed camp cooking, and on this trip, evenings spent cooking for the dogs and myself turned out to be one of the best times of my day. I do all of the sous-chef work while it’s light, then fire up the stove and start cooking as the sun goes down.
The dogs usually lie somewhere around my work space. A few weeks into my trip, Sage took to curling up on a camp chair if there happened to be one around. I think she enjoyed having a vantage point from which to watch me work. One thing I sometimes like to do when camp cooking is to try to make something that seems a little impossible given the equipment. On this trip, it was making a batch of baklava over the propane stove. Earlier in the day, I ground up walnuts and almonds in a large bowl, employing a tall can of iced tea as a pestle. Using sheets of phyllo I’d had in the cooler for a couple of days, I put the baklava together on foil trays on my improvised counter top (the hood of my friend’s Toyota). Then I baked the pastry over the grille end of the propane stove by covering the trays with a doubled layer of foil and “baking” them by flipping them every few minutes. Apart from the odd burnt spot where the butter overheated, it actually worked out quite well. I drenched the trays of pastry with blackberry honey that I’d bought while in Oregon a couple of weeks before. We dined on baklava for days – it makes great way-food for hungry travelers and their dogs.
One of the nicest things about camp cooking is the sound. My friend commented on how the very distinctive sound of the propane camp stove burners brought back vivid memories of his mom cooking dinners when his family spent summers at campgrounds all over the state of California. For me, the memories are different — of the many nights spent with my dogs cooking dinner at campsites scattered over a continent.
If the sunrises at Mono Lake could be described as amazing, many of the sunsets were spectacular. Strange swirling clouds often formed above the lake, while to the west, the sinking sun would set the sky ablaze over the Sierras. Nights were dark and beautiful – true, not without the odd man-made light here or there on the horizon – but if you chose just the right direction to face, you could imagine a world without people – one with just the night sounds of the high desert.
13 Responses to 'mono lake'
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Bev, those skies are magnificent, especially where the clouds have painted magical patterns all over them. The photo of you and Sage as shadows is another one I found particularly appealing.
Your posts are always so informative and usually send me on a scouting expedition to discover more. I’d never heard of the tufa towers and was fascinated because the middle photo looks so much like castles huddled at the edge of a Scottish cliff.
I was interested to read that you use a Canon D10 because it was one that I had checked out when I bought my new point-and-shoot at the end of December. I ended up getting a Canon PowerShot SX200 IS to replace my six-year old PowerShot A95 as I figured it was time. I’ve dropped the latter on the road a few times, and that comes from shooting through an open car window and then forgetting the camera is on my lap when I exit the vehicle. It still works, but after taking over 7,000 photos with it, I figure it owes me nothing, plus I really like the lithium battery and the huge LCD monitor with the new camera. My DSLR is a Canon Rebel XSi, but I think that I won’t be using it much as I prefer a smaller camera that I can stick in my pocket. I always have my camera with me, even when I know the likelihood of taking a photo is virtually non-existent.
Thanks for sharing.
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Stunning and magnificent skies. Makes me want to drive to Mono Lake right this very minute. Your photos capture the wide-open expansiveness of the place.
I love your inventiveness on the camp stove.
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Stunning, beautiful pictures.
There’s something about the way a collie leans… and I’m most impressed with baking baklava on a camping stove!
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Being a passionate devotee of skies, particularly and dawn and dusk skies… all I can say is WOW. The sky photos are magnificent, and the colors are dazzling. The Sierras and the lake are not too shabby either, and it me a world of good to sit here, look at the photos and read about your travels. This is a trip I would love to make, and thank you for taking me along with you.
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John – Sometimes a motel room is the best place to be when the driving is crappy. I moteled-it a couple of nights on my way across Canada this autumn. But yes, spending time at a great campsite and cooking over the old campstove is the best way to spend an evening – or a whole week.
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Marni – The tufa at Mono Lake is quite fantastic – from a distance, the spires seem to hover above the water. Fascinating place. I think the science behind their existence is one of those “truth is stranger than fiction” things. Your choice of P&S cameras seems quite good to me. I chose the D10 more for its waterproof capabilities. I have to say that it has turned out to be a very nice camera for all-round shooting as well, although I don’t feel it handles light quite so well as the G10, and definitely not as well as the G11. I love how it captures colour though. It’s the camera I used for this year’s shots at Bodie – mainly because it’s a bit smaller than the G10, so it fits in a pocket a bit better. The one thing I *really* like about it is that it has an interesting style of adjustable wrist strap which I like for one-handed shooting in precarious situations where I could possibly drop the camera.
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robin – Isn’t Mono Lake a beautiful spot? I know how stark it can look from a distance, but when you’re right down there among the sagebrush…well.. it’s a wonderful place to be.
You would have laughed if you’d seen me baking baklava atop a propane stove – it was quite a trick!
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Lucy – Thanks! The collies are certainly a different kind of dog. They sure like to kick back and relax. (-:
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Cate – The skies at Mono Lake were extraordinary. Photos just can’t do justice to how the skies looked sometimes. At sunset, sometimes the whole area glowed with pink light. I don’t think I’ve been in a place that has such astounding light. I’m glad that you enjoyed the photos and can get a sense of “coming along” with us. -
Like everyone else, I was struck by how well this sequence captures how unique this area must be.
I was fascinated by the tufa towers. Very interesting about the towers forming after lake water was diverted in 1941.
Had to look up Mono Lake – 760,000 years old! I didn’t see how it might have gotten the name, but the area is referred to as the Mono area. It’s odd how often western names are so stark.
I see that it’s home to a unique species of brine shrimp, and important for migratory birds. After nearly a million years, I’d guess they got into the habit.
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Wayne – It’s a very unique place – for many reasons. I wish we had have been through the area just a little earlier in the autumn as we definitely would have seen more migratory birds. Things were slowing down for the season when we passed through. However, I’ve been at other lakes where birds stop over in the west – the Malheur, and Klamath and Tule Lakes and others, so I can’t complain.
I think the towers were there before, but were formed and existed underwater, but then became visible after lake levels dropped after water diversion beginning in 1941 (at least, that’s my understanding). I believe levels are now somewhere between 35 to 40 feet below where they were around 1940 because so much water was removed for a couple of decades. Now, the goal seems to be to stabilize the level somewhere around where it is now, or perhap a bit higher. There’s some info on the lake levels on this page.
Yes, strange names. I’m not sure about Mono, but some of the other area names are also short – such as Inyo, and have native origins.
Lots of interesting geology all through the region. The next couple of posts will help to illustrate that. -
I imagine that the baklava tasted very good. Just hearing about it made me hungry. I could smell it cooking as I was reading!
Especially like the photo of you and Sabrina making morning shadows in the golden light and the one of Sabrina resting on the boulder and in the chair. I like that this series of photos shows how remarkably changeable the Mono Lake light is over the course of a day and the course of a week.
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In addition to your always-beautiful words and photos, I enjoyed your observation about the sound of a camp stove. I agree, it’s so evocative of so many good times I’ve had over the years. Were there still a lot of alkali flies around the lake, or was it too late in the year? I have visited Mono Lake during September, and was very impressed with the diversity of grasshoppers around the lake.
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am – The baklava was great. I’ve really gotten my recipe down over the past few months! I like the shadow photo too. There was actually a series of them and they are fun to see together.
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Doug – Yes, isn’t that camp stove sound very evocative – there’s nothing quite like it and it does bring back so many memories. Regarding insects, we were there pretty late in the year – we really missed the end of the bird migration and it was getting quite cold at night. In fact, we had to move on after about 5 nights as there was a snow storm blowing in. I did look around for insects, but did not see much, although did hear a few chirps that must have been some species of crickets. So many times on this trip, I was wishing I could have been there a few weeks earlier. Hopefully there will be a chance to return! -
Such beautiful photographs, especially that first one of Mono Lake.
I know what you mean about the sound of camp cooking and as soon as I read that paragraph, I found myself remembering many a wonderful camp meal.
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[…] spending the better part of a week camped at Mono Lake it was time to move on. Once again, the late autumn weather pushed us further south. Snow was […]
This post, more than most others…for some reason, really connected with me. I could see the place and FEEL the sunrises and sunsets. Cooking on the camp stove really brought me to the campsite. While baklava isn’t my favorite, I think tasting some you cooked on a campstove would be a delight!
I’m on the road tonight. A short trip from Dallas to Houston turned long when I left too late and the rain became too heavy. Rain and darkness conspired to make me stop in Huntsville, at a motel. I’d MUCH rather be camping in the environment you described and showed in your post. You have the right idea, Bev.