Mono Lake / Lee Vining

We left Mammoth Lakes, after almost a week, and drove over to Mono (apparently it's pronounced "muh-no") Lake, right by the tiny town of Lee Vining.  (We did stop at Obsidian Dome on the way, that was fun.)  We found a nice spot off of the main road a bit, on some kinda public land, we never found out what it was exactly.

Our spot

The first night that we were there, we were hanging out in the trailer, eating dinner.  (It was totally dark outside)  Then, suddenly, there were all these red lights flashing outside our window!  We peeked out the window, and there were a bunch of fire trucks outside!  The only reason that we could think of for them to come all the way out here was that maybe there was a fire, and we had to leave, or we just weren't supposed to be there anyway.  My dad went out to talk to them, and then they drove away.  They said that someone had called in, and said that there was a fire, somewhere out here.  But we were fine, so they left, and we didn't see anybody else for the rest of the night.

The next morning, we hopped in the truck, and drove over a little trail by the lake.  The water level is slowly getting lower, but when the water is high enough, there are enough of certain chemicals present for tufa to grow.  So as the water recedes, there's a bunch of tufa left over!  There was a little trail that went down to the water, so we did that.

The water is really green right by the shore, then it gets bluer

After that, we drove up to what we were pretty sure was Panum Crater.  There was a bunch of volcanic activity around here a long time ago, and so it formed a bunch of craters/rock piles, called the Mono Craters.  We had some lunch, and some of us climbed up the crater/pile a bit.

Next, we drove over to check out the tiny of Lee Vining.  We stopped at the visitor center, (where we learned that what we climbed was one of the Mono Craters, not THE Panum Creater) then went over to the library, (which had REALLY fast Internet!) and then back to the trailer for the rest of the afternoon.

The next morning, we drove over to the REAL Panum Crater, and climbed around that a bit.  Then we got the trailer and drove into town to get a few things, and we were off further north!