In the last post, I talked about a hike up the Yosemite Falls trail. Yosemite is a very large park so it’s impossible to see the whole thing in one weekend. We decided to drive through the park, take a couple of stops on the way, and make a quick visit to Mono Lake on the other side.
Our first stop past the village was at Olmstead Point. This boulder is glacial till – a stone deposited when the glacier that polished these granite mountains retreated.
This small tree seems to grow right out of the surface of the rock. The granite here has fracture joints that are wide enough for roots to take hold. In the distance you can see the other side of Half Dome.
The next stop was a Tenaya Lake. The water here was amazingly blue and clear – the lake is over 8000 feet above sea level and is fed by snowmelt from the surrounding mountains.
Here I am on the shore. You can see there’s still some snow patches in the mountains behind me.
Our next stop (after lunch) was at Mono Lake. It’s a salt lake on the other side of the Sierras in the dry Mono Basin. This is the closest I’ve ever been to a real desert. You can see the Sierras in the distance in this photo.
The strange limestone rock formation you see here is called tufa. Mono Lake is famous for the bizarre landscape created by the tufa.
Tufa on the edge of the lake. They formed when fresh groundwater seeped up through the salty, alkaline lake. Minerals in the freshwater reacted with the salt water to form calcium carbonate. These rocks grew from the bottom up.
Mono Lake is really amazing – the tufa form really improbable, Suessian shapes.
You can see a male egret in this photo (click to see larger versions). There are no fish in Mono Lake, but it’s a great place to keep a nest away from predators. This egret flies miles each day to catch fish and bring them back.
Here we are in a famous spot where a photo from one of Pink Floyd’s albums was shot.
A little ways down the beach is another spot with sand tufa. These are formed the same way as the other tufa but in sandier areas of the lake.
They aren’t as tall, but the sand tufa form these cathedral-like shapes on the shore.
You can see the cannels where the freshwater traveled up, forming the tufa. These are extremely fragile and will be inundated as the lake level beings to rise.
There are many more photos of tufa in the photoset on Flickr.