Tufa Towers, Mono Lake, Dawn. Mono Lake, California. June 7, 2009. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Mono Lake and shoreline tufa towers are illuminated by dawn light.

I more or less accidentally ended up at Mono Lake early on the second morning of my early June “Yosemite trip.” My plans are often somewhat flexible when I’m out doing photography, but they were very flexible this time. My original plan had been to try to grab a last-minute campsite in Yosemite Valley and shoot there for the better part of two days, but when my position on the campsite waiting list made this option look less than certain I decided to instead head up to Tuolumne Meadows, over Tioga Pass, and get a camp site on the east side. Being only a 15 minute drive from the iconic South Tufa location at Mono Lake it was hard not to head over there before dawn.

The dawn light can be truly stunning at this location if you hit it just right. Ideal conditions might include glass smooth water on the lake, some clouds over the Sierra crest and perhaps directly overhead, but clear sky to the east so that the first sun can hit the towers without obstruction. When I arrived at Mono before sunrise it did not look like it would end up being quite that “ideal” day. A fairly solid overcast filled the sky to the east, with just a few small holes in the clouds that might allow some beams of light to pass through. But since I was there – and since I’ve learned that conditions can evolve in interesting and surprising ways – I wandered on out to the water’s edge and set up for a first shot in a small bay-like spot. After shooting the very first light hitting some towers out in the water I decided to move a bit to my right and into a more jumbled area of the tufa where I found this composition looking out between towers toward the lake and the nearly clear sky to the north.

This photograph is not in the public domain. It may not be used on websites, blogs, or in any other media without explicit advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

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