Tufa and Flowers

The weather forecast for this past weekend said there might be storms on the eastern side of the Sierras, so I headed over there early Saturday morning with the idea of trying to get some interesting shots of Mono Lake.

 

By about noon on Saturday I had my tent set up at the Silver Lake campground just south of Lee Vining. The sky wasn’t doing anything interesting so I hiked up to Gem Lake and then headed back down as the weather began to pick up. When I arrived at Mono Lake the clouds started a show that lasted until sunset, giving me a few solid hours to experiment with different combinations of tufa, sky, wildflowers, and lake.

 

I hadn’t been there in a while and was surprised to find that the water level has dropped noticeably. I’m not sure how much of that is seasonal and how much is part of the lowering that’s been going on for years now.

 

I always leave Mono Lake thinking I got some good shots, but then I make the mistake of looking at other Mono photos here on Flickr and quickly realize how poor my stuff looks by comparison. If you haven’t tried this already, do a general Flickr search on “Mono Lake” and sort the results by interestingness. There’s some truly amazing work out there.

Done