After we left Yosemite and I stopped weeping, we went to Mono Lake.
Mono Lake is weird.
I’m not going to go into the complicated process that made Mono Lake because frankly I don’t remember much more than the word “alkaline.” What I will say is that visiting Mono Lake is sort of like walking through a coral reef that’s above water. Or maybe it’s more like walking on a beach covered with stalagmites. You decide.
I do know that the stuff sticking out everywhere is called “tufa,” and I only remember that because it sounded to me like an insult in another language. Like, “Hey, don’t throw your candy wrapper on the ground, you dumb tufa.”
Tufa makes pretty shapes. For some reason, a lot of those shapes looked like someone giving me the finger.
Because we were there in the middle of the day, when the light is bad (according to B.; I thought it was awesome), we weren’t able to make any of those cool tufa-silhouette-against-the-sunset pictures. So, I tried to get creative.
It helped that there were snowy mountains just in the background.
The weirdest thing about Mono Lake? The shore is covered with shaving foam and red beard hair.
Seriously, what the hell is that stuff?
all other priorities rescinded 