A few Monday Mono pics: the east side of the Sierra

 Traipsed to the east side this weekend.

Didn't take a lot of photos, as it was rainy or sleety, much of the time.

However, I did get a decent shot of Black Point, one of my favorite Mono Lake features.

The cloudiness softened the lighting, in a place that, when sunny, can be BLINDING.

We'd planned on photographing golden aspens,

but they were not yet golden.

So, hung out at Mono Lake instead.

This is the sort of weird, beautiful view of Mono-Inyo craters that you get around here.

Which makes me inordinately happy.

However, I also have to STARE at the beautiful cattails and tule

in the peri-Mono Lake environment.

So gorgeous!

Oh, and earlier this summer we were here,

and some power birders (w/spotting scope) showed me

the osprey nest, which you can still see

on the little island in the middle of this photo.

(hm... blogger is making this very purple. Ah, well.)

Can you imagine being born, and THIS is the first scenery you behold?

Wow.

And to the left a wee bit, a pretty little squall across the lake.

Driving to Mammoth Lakes, this was the car's view at a rest stop.

I love the tiny, upside down forest vignettes in the water droplets.

So, before we left, we jammed to Minaret View,

a place with one of my favorite views of all time...

Which was totally socked in. =)

But, you can sort of imagine it via what is, no joke,

one of my favorite interpretive displays EVER.

Just a metal cut out, mirroring the amazing craggy skyline here,

labeling each little peak & naming it.

A simple, accurate and durable display.

Show me the data. Love it.

Last: where is the snow line?

If you turn your back on the view of the Minarets, you can see this. Pretty nice. =)

K. That's it.

Hope your week is a delight. =)

xobb

Friday Foto Fling

and Happy Flehmen Response Friday!*

Ridiculously beautiful day at Mono Lake. Kinda stormy.

Driving home. Road trips are ROUGH when there's nothing to look at... =)

View during (brief) traffic stop at Yosemite. Again, hard to bear. =)

Note debris on road at right. Brief, intense rainstorm washed stuff onto the road, hence road work.

Finally landed on a term for dahlias: absurdly beautiful.

iPhoto plot: it opened onto May 22, 2014 & I saw this guy. HAD to re-post. Cute little hopper!

 LOVE those eyes...

I added mulch one day and I SWEAR the NEXT DAY everyone looked happier.

Gaillardia infront of chrysanthemum. 

Perusing lovely images of gardens (& listening to gardening podcasts)

it occurs to me that many people don't have the

gophers, rabbits, deer, bears, etc. that we have.

Their plants are just OUT THERE, and all's well.

Can't. Even. Imagine.

Here's the deer's eye view of our dahlias:

Looks like flower prison. For the criminally gorgeous. And tasty.

Moby trying to figure out how to GET to those tomato plants.

Nevertheless, I still enjoy gardening; miracles abound.

Soaked these pups 1.5 days, and they had ALREADY started to germinate.

Which may be why this happened 5 days later:

=) Hard to see, as I MUST disguise baby bean plants so birds don't get them all. 

Next day:

SO amazingly fast. SUPER gratifying.

They're scarlet runner beans, so when they mature,

not only will they be beautiful and shade-making,

but also I'll finally have something for the hummingbirds. Hooray!

K. THASSIT!

Have a fabulous weekend, cherished peeps.

xoxobb

*To perk up your Friday, just google image search Flehmen response.

It's PG rated, a real biological thing, and SUPER entertaining. =) Plus, tapirs!

aspen attack

Yesterday afternoon we scoped out the aspen action

in the Mono Lake area in eastern California.

Today I walked into the above aspen forest,

surrounded by possibly the most beauty

I've ever experienced in one place at one time.

I took 6 big steps forward,

then lay on the dirt & leaves,

and stared up.

gah!

[ed: bb left unexpectedly before completing this post. We assure you that she will post more aspen photos (accompanied by the usual blather) once she has recovered her faculties. We apologize for any inconvenience, and for her lapse in professional conduct.]

because I'm a snob

Mono Lake, October.

And because I can't look at those tomato slices one more second.

This is not a produce stand.

This is a place for nature to quit being demure, and shake it.

'Cause that's what we like around here.

We like it a lot.

xoxoxobb

CRAZY lightning + Mumday interpreted

 
1. We had SUCH a crazy lightning storm night before last. Bear woke me up at 1 a.m. (HOW was I sleeping through it?!?) saying (Mr. Understatement) "There's quite a show, here."

This map is from an amazing program that is only available to folks involved in fire management, but I just grabbed a screen capture from a friend to SHOW it to you. SOOOO cool they can map these strikes. So, here's the storm:

Each tiny blue "-" or red "+" is a strike (with different charges). Normally there's space between the dots. Not this storm. CRAZY intense lightning. And this only measures GROUND strikes. All that cloud-to-cloud action is not recorded (I believe). As you might imagine, these data are SUPER helpful to fire folks as lightning starts are a pretty key ingredient in wildfire.

Just so you know I think about you, during the storm I tried to figure out (without a video camera (DRAT!)) how I could possibly convey the intensity of this lightning show. So, I started counting (biobabbler? counting?!?), e.g. "one thousand one, one thousand two..." etc. in between strikes.

A "!" means a single lightning bolt has flashed.

This is pretty much how it went:
"One th (!!!), one thou(!), one (!), o(!!), one thousand (!), one thousand one, o(!! !), o(!!), one th(!)" etc. I think I got to one thousand two maybe TWICE in 5 minutes. INSANE!!!! But it had very little thunder (maybe that's what you get with ground strikes, and this was cloud-to-cloud, mostly).

Talk about a workout for your pupils--blinding flashes of light interspersed with black night. Yow.

2. Mumday interpreted:

I like what the movement of Tenaya Lake did to the reflection of the clouds.

Blueberry plants (these), huckleberry plants (Mt. Rainier, e.g.) turn the MOST amazing colors in fall. Truly a spectacle. (sigh)

More fun cloud reflections. This cloud looks like it wants to take over the world.

Looks better big (vs. the "blog friendly" size here), but MAN is this landscape heaven to my eyes. I love rock and water. We spent probably 20 minutes here on our way through the park, headed toward the East Side, and at the end of this little side trip I announced "From here on out, everything else is gravy." SO happy here. Again: (sigh)

To get a sense for the SCALE of this place, the eastward descent toward 395, click on the picture, and see the TINY speck on the road? That's a CAR. I cannot IMAGINE building this road on what is basically a HUGE, temporarily withheld rock slide.

This picture barely captures it, but the clouds made the MOST amazing patterns of light and dark on the landscape. Just SO yummy.

I like clouds. And stormy clouds are so dynamic. Wonderful entertainment.

Don't know what this red plant is, but loved it on the WHITE tufa with the nutty stormy clouds behind. My kinda red white and blue. =)

xobb

High country & east side Mumday: Tenaya + Mono Lakes

 

 

bb

Mono Mumday + Tuolumne (Yosemite) + Lukens Lake

 

 

 

 

 

  

    

bb