After such a fabulous day up at Bodie Ghost Town, I was pretty excited to get some sunrise photos at Mono Lake the very next day.
That is, I was excited, right up until moment my alarm went off at 5:30am.
Okay, maybe not that exact moment. But definitely the moment I realized I’d have to get out of my down sleeping bag. The elevation at Lee Vining is over 6,700 feet, and that’s a lot higher (and therefore a lot colder!) than Death Valley.
Good thing I’ve lived in places with an actual winter season for just about all my life. I pulled on ALL my layers. And once I got them all on, I really wasn’t that cold. My wool mittens were a lifesaver!
It was still very dark when I arrived at the South Tufa Reserve at 6am and there were only 3 other cars in the lot. Many more followed, though. I would guess that I saw about thirty other photographers – once it got light enough to see them, anyway.
The morning turned out all right… but I started off with a big mistake, and that made editing most of my photos a lot more frustrating.
My big mistake? I didn’t pre-set the focus on my camera the day before. That might not sound like much, but when it’s too dark, the auto-focus on my camera doesn’t work. When I take starry-night photos I’m out there setting up right before the sun sets.
What I do is turn on the “live view” on my camera. Then I find the first star of the evening. (In a pinch, I’ve used ground lights that are at least 30 feet away). With the live view, and with the camera on a tripod,I then manually focus as best I can (it’s never perfect). Once I’m happy with the focus I put a piece of black gaffer’s tape on the side of the lens, so I can’t accidentally change the focus.
Since I didn’t do any of that the night before, I was standing in the dark at Mono Lake trying to manually focus. (It was too dark for the “live view” to work.) And, well… my eyes aren’t quite what they used to be. I deleted most of what I took in the early morning. It was a shame. There were some blurry stars behind the blurry tufa towers in a couple of my photos. Could have been amazing. But no amount of Photoshop’s sharpen tool can make up for an out-of-focus photo.
Eventually it got light enough that my auto-focus could work.
I found great sights everywhere I looked.
And once the sun came up, everything around me just lit up. It sounds silly (yes, of course it lit up, the sun came up over the horizon) but for about 15 minutes there everything around me changed constantly. I took a ton of photos.
Mono Lake was very much worth it.
But after an early, cold start, I wanted a hot meal. And coffee. Lots of coffee. It was still early out. (I finished shooting at around 7:30am.) It was also still cold out. I could have headed back to Bishop, but instead I headed north, to Bridgeport.
I’d passed through Bridgeport last year with Michael, and I remember it being a small but nice town. Surely there’d be a coffee shop there?
*crickets*
No. Bridgeport does not, in fact, have a coffee shop. But they do have a Mexican restaurant called Three 95 Mexican Cafe. And they were open.
It was reasonably warm inside and the coffee was hot. As I was digging into my chorizo and eggs with extra crispy hash browns (so good!), the other patron inside got up to pay his bill and commented to the woman there, “Hey, you guys have been here about a year, right?”
“It’s exactly one year,” she said. “One year today.”
Congratulations, Three 95. And keep on making your own chorizo because it was awesome.
After breakfast and coffee I was still cold. I guess I could have gone for a hike or something, get moving to warm up. But there was a much simpler solution:
Travertine Hot Springs. It’s right outside of Bridgeport, a short drive up a dirt road. Apparently there’s a map of all the pools at Travertine, but I just walked around until I found this one. It was about 2 feet deep and large enough for me and the nice couple, Kim and Gwen, that were already soaking in it when I arrived.
We talked about photography and the fall color and the cut on my finger (I held my arm up out of the water the entire time – after all the work I’d done, there was no way I was getting it wet). Kim and Gwen suggested I check out Lundy Canyon on my way back to Lee Vining.
It was still early in the day. The clouds were growing but it was still pretty pleasant out. So up to Lundy Canyon I went.
I was not sorry. Earlier on this drive, closer to the highway, I passed Lundy Lake, which was also quite pretty. But above the lake is a series of meadows, wetlands, and beaver dams. Maybe the aspen trees weren’t quite peaking, as a random photographer this morning suggested, but it sure was gorgeous up there.
There is actually a hike at the end of this road. The Lundy Canyon trail goes up to a waterfall, which sounded cool… but I was tired. Getting up at 5:30 when you’re not used to it can be rough.
Maybe next time.
I was happy with my day, except for the fact that I was ready for bed at 5pm, of course. That’s okay. I guess. The weather got cloudier with occasional rain sprinkles, so I was just fine with crawling into the truck when it got dark, watching a movie on the Chrome Book, and falling asleep at 9pm.
The next day I was going to drive Tioga Pass.