Mono Lake Study
Mono County, California
“I never beheld a place where beauty was written in plainer characters or where the tender fostering hand of the Great Gardener was more directly visible.”
– John Muir, on Mono Lake
On the same camping trip to June Lake, my friends and I took a day trip out to Mono Lake and kayaked out to the massive tufa formations dotted across the lake. The tufas are towers of calcium carbonate limestone formed over decades or centuries by underwater springs. When lake levels dropped, they emerged as the strange, craggy pillars that now rise above the surface. Paddling among them feels almost otherworldly, like drifting through the ruins of some ancient alien landscape. Mono Lake itself is surreal – no fish save for brine shrimp, impossibly salty, ringed by desert and the Eastern Sierra – yet impressively beautiful in its starkness.
Asahi Pentax Spotmatic SPII w/ Super-Multi-Coated (SMC) Takumar 55mm f/1.8 using Kodak Ektar 100
