Greetings from Lee Vining, CA. Today we are basking in the ancient glow of Mono Lake. A lake known to have held water for the last 760,000 years and exist in a basin around 3 million years old. It is a saline lake and doesn't support much life other than brine shrimp and flies, but this makes it an essential migratory bird haven. I was wrong yesterday when I wrote that we were leaving the Basin and Range. Mono Lake sits at the foot of the grand Sierra Nevadas, the final basin before the steep climb to the west. During the Pleistocene (around 20,000 years ago) it was named Russell Lake. Russell Lake was a contemporary of lakes Lahonton, Bonneville and Winnemucca in Nevada and Utah.
enormous tufa formed when the lake was much larger and deeper. In the early 1940s the tributary water to Mono was diverted to support L.A. water needs. Mono is part of the Great Basin, which means it has no outlet. If no water comes in, the levels drop dramatically and increase in salinity. Today, the water is being restored and there is hope that by 2014 these tufa will be back under water.
These cinder cones are young and exist alongside the ancient lake.
we climbed Panum Crater, only 600 years old!
inside the volcano plug the ground is littered with obsidian
and pumice
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