“Early Light, Mono Craters” — First morning sunlight on the slopes of Mono Craters.
Mono Basin is a fine place to contemplate geology and immense spans of time. Mono Lake itself is an ancient body of water, and one that has not always looked like it does today. The lake is probably 3/4 of a million years old, and its ancestor lake was, at times, much deeper and larger than it is today. At times its waters rose high enough to overcome its current landlocked state and drain either north or south. (To really bend your mind, its waters may have drained to ancient Lake Manly in Death Valley.) Today, as large as the lake is, it is greatly diminished in size and depth by comparison.
Speaking as a complete non-expert, I think that what we’re looking at here is a boundary between the low point of a small playa-like section of dried earth and a slightly higher area with black pebbles. The pebbles appear to be volcanic material from a nearby eruption that took place hundreds or thousands of years ago. (The particular feature may have erupted as recently as 800 years, though it has also possibly been longer.)
Distant desert mountains stand in morning light beyond Mono Lake and Paoha Island.
Mono Lake is known for a few particular things: the picturesque tufa towers along its shoreline and its extremely salty water. (It is landlocked, so all water — except that stolen by LA — leaves the lake by means of evaporation.) But other things that characterize the Mono Basin for me, too. One is the surprising juxtaposition of essentially high desert and the vast surface of this lake. Another is the huge expanse of sky. And at times, the area can be as still and silent as almost any place I’ve been.
This time I went in the morning, primarily to visit two places. One, seen in some other photographs that I’ll share from this visit, is an old ponderosa pine forest that was consumed by wildfire. The other is the spot in this photograph, on a ridge along a roadway, where I can look across hills and the periphery of a volcanic crater toward the lake, its own volcanic islands, and desert mountains in the far distance.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.
“Basalt Columns and Lichen” — Yellow lichen growing on the basalt columns of Devils Postpile National Monument
This is the second of two photographs that “reemerged” from a recent look back to raw files from a trip to Devil’s Postpile National Monument a few years ago. The first was, in essence, a “new” photograph in that I had not taken it through my post-processing workflow back when I first captured the image. At the time I was more interested in one or two other photographs from the session, so I left it behind. But when I went back and looked again this year I “discovered” it anew, and now it did not seem a like file to simply archive! This one has a different story. I did finalize a photograph of this image shortly after I made the exposure. But now, some years later, I see it differently than I did originally… so here is a new interpretation of the subject.
To rehash the old story in brief, we ended up at Devil’s Postpile essentially by accident… after sleeping in and enjoying a leisurely breakfast rather than heading out into the pre-dawn cold as I usually do. And when we got to Devil’s Postpile, at first I wasn’t even going to photograph! The geometric forms of the “post pile” are fascinating, and they are even more interesting in soft light and when sections of the formation are isolated, here with a long lens. The pattern of columns in this scene reminds me of various things — the pipes of an organ, some sort of stairway, and so forth.
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Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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