"We held a council and decided to make the best of our misfortune and enjoy a week's holiday on the borders of the curious Lake. Mono, it is sometimes called, and sometimes the "Dead Sea of California." It is one of the strangest freaks of Nature to be found in any land, but it is hardly ever mentioned in print and very seldom visited, because it lies away off the usual routes of travel and besides is so difficult to get at that only men content to endure the roughest life will consent to take upon themselves the discomforts of such a trip. ... Mono Lake lies in a lifeless, treeless, hideous desert, eight thousand feet above the level of the sea, and is guarded by mountains two thousand feet higher, whose summits are always clothed in clouds. This solemn, silent, sailless sea—this lonely tenant of the loneliest spot on earth—is little graced with the picturesque. It is an unpretending expanse of grayish water, about a hundred miles in circumference, with two islands in its centre, mere upheavals of rent and scorched and blistered lava, snowed over with gray banks and drifts of pumice stone and ashes, the winding sheet of the dead volcano, whose vast crater the lake has seized upon and occupied." -- excerpted from chapters 37 & 38 of Roughing It
Mark Twain and I clearly disagree as to the picturesque-ness of this place.
Look who else came along for some sunrise exercise...
And the dudes, too...
Brrrrrr ...
"Not graced with the picturesque"?!? Puh-lease...
Per usual, the dudes throw rocks ...
3 comments:
I wanted you to know how much I enjoy your blog! I've begun to narrow down the blogs I read because I have so many in my reader but yours is the first one I search out. The bible verses you choose, your eye for "the" moment are both so inspiring and emotional for me. Thank you so much for posting, you lift me up every morning!
Hope you also got to see and take photos at Bodie
Christy -
thank you for your kind words. you made my morning!
Mike -
I was chomping at the bit SO BADLY to go to Bodie. The littler dudes were decidedly unenthusiastic about the idea. So Big Dude promised to take me back there one day without the whining choir ;-).
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