Thursday, July 19, 2012

Day 319 - Road Trip, Day 5 - Hetch Hetchy and Mono Lake




Perfect timing—it started raining just as we were breaking camp. This morning we checked out the Hetch Hetchy region and the O'Shaughnessy Dam, which flooded that entire valley in the mid-1910s in order to create a drinking water reservoir for San Francisco.

Even though we were only in Yosemite for about three and a half days, we visited all the different sections and worked in a lot of awesome stuff. I'm so glad I got to see it before leaving California.

On our drive to Vegas, we stopped at Mono Lake, which was unexpectedly fascinating. It's a lake without an outlet, so it's extremely salty and home to a lot of brine shrimp, which in turn makes is an important breeding/feeding ground for seagulls (it's freaking hell and gone from the ocean). And, once LA started diverting some of the water, the lake level dropped significantly, exposing these cool limestone tufas. I'm especially pleased with the clouds and moody lighting in the third shot.

Tonight we stayed in a hotel in Vegas and I got to take a shower for the first time on this trip. Yay!

2 comments:

  1. Oooh, those bottom two photos came out beautiful! Nice shots! That was an unexpectedly cool stop.

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  2. Dude. I really like the framing with the background on the third one. Sweet.

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