After seeing those many photos of Bodie yesterday, do you wish I’d stop posting for awhile?
Don’t answer that.
After Bodie, we stopped for ice cream at a wildly popular Mobil gas station/convenience store/deli where the Tioga Pass Road intersects 395 (the highway that runs North-South along the East Side of the Sierra Nevada.) Its big claim to fame is the chef from LA who has turned the deli into a great place to eat.
Mono Lake is weirdly wonderful. For many years, the LA Dept. of Water and Power has been using water from the 4 main streams that fill Mono Lake. The lake was dying, and after a long legal battle, an understanding was reached in 1994. The LADWP has to reduce the amount of water it takes until the lake reaches a certain level, something that will take a few more years. (Ten? I don’t actually know.)
Who cares? It is a bizarre body of water, and it certainly isn’t potable with 2.5 times the salinity of the ocean.
Well, it is the largest lake in all of California (Tahoe doesn’t count because we share it with Nevada). It is an important stop for migrating birds. It is where most of the sea gulls hatch. It might be the only place in the world with brine shrimp, so if they all die, I’m sure there will be some horrific chain reaction which eventually will come down to no more ice cream or some other unimaginable catastrophe.
Stop talking, Central California Artist, and show us some photos!
I wasn’t ready to return to our vacation rental in June Lake, so we stopped by Silver Lake on the way back. The light was too low for good photos, so I deleted all of mine except this one.
Tomorrow we will see new weird sights. The East Side of the Sierra Nevada is certainly full of peculiarities of nature.