The boys slept in until 8:30am! Small victories.
After our departure from Reno, we drove about three hours to arrive at Mono Lake, CA. We checked out the Visitors Centre and ate a quick lunch in the parking lot. We were excited to see the lake!
Mono Lake is a really special area. It is a spring fed, highly saline, high alkaline lake with no outlet, just evaporation. The salt levels are 2.5 times higher than ocean water and the mineral levels make it as basic as bleach on the PH scale! The mineral levels are so high that they have resulted in petrified springs - calcium carbonate deposits on areas where fresh water springs are/used to be - as the fresh water reacts with the lake water. These deposits are called tufa. They look amazingly cool, a bit like bleached coral reefs if they were outside of the water, though the tufa are actually present all underneath the lake’s surface too (we just can’t see them!)
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| Touching the water. So slippery. |
The lake is a unique ecosystem in which brine shrimp and alkaliphilic flies thrive. These little fellas feed migratory birds. The flies were crazy. They form a black strip along the water’s edge and scatter when you walk near them. They are completely uninterested in humans, which is a nice change from mosquitoes.
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| Flies, flies everywhere. |
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| The black on the ground is millions of flies that move when you walk through them. |
We had initially read about people swimming in Mono Lake but upon doing additional research, we learned that you can’t get the water in your eyes, nose or mouth or on any cuts or scratches and you need to rinse off in fresh water immediately afterwards or risk skin irritation and itching. We pivoted from swimming to wading instead. Our skin felt super slippery in the water, kind of like we were wading in dishwater. We rinsed off afterwards with no adverse effects.
Next we added a new activity that was right in the same area, exploring Panum Crater. This is the youngest volcano (at 600 years since its last eruption) of this volcanic range - the youngest range in North America. We hiked both the lava plug trail (Panum is a plug-dome volcano) and the rim trail. Remember how Devil’s Tower was the lava plug of a volcano? The plug at Panum was obsidian (lava glass), with a pumice rim. It was incredibly neat to see up close. Did you know that pumice and obsidian have exactly the same chemical composition but pumice is full of air and so formed a lattice like structure when it cooled? Neat huh?
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| Obsidian. It was everywhere! |
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| Ali at the top! |
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| Hiking the rim. The crater is on the left. |
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| View of mono lake from the rim. |
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| Lava bomb! |
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| Where’s Seamus and Krystal? Look hard! |
Our dinner and sleeping spot tonight is on public land right between the volcanic range and mono lake. We had a superb view for the sunset, though it continues to be cold. It was 10 degrees at supper time and will be going down to 3 degrees tonight. It is almost a full moon, so not great for stargazing, but beautiful to watch the moonrise.
