An Astonishing Lake, Hot Springs and Creek Along Hwy 395

Our first stop along the highway 395 was Mono Lake. It’s a strange, but very interesting and astonishing place. Because of the lack of an outlet, the lake water is extremely salty, so that no fish can survive. Basically, the only creatures adapted to that environment are brine shrimp and alkali flies. In the visitor centre, you can watch the tiny brine shrimp in an aquarium. They look somehow cute and funny as they float around in the water (watch the video!). The alkali flies are also crazy creatures. Believe it or not, they can “dive” under water! We saw so many of them at the lakeshore, that the white stones looked rather black. Fortunately, they don’t bother humans at all. We could also admire another unique feature of Mono Lake – lots of limestone tufas. They initially formed underwater, because of a chemical reaction when fresh water got in contact with the salty lake water. As the water level dropped, the tufas became visible at the shore as fragile limestone towers. At the South Tufa area, they are higher and more abundant than we imagined. We walked further to Navy Beach, where we could see sandstone tufas - some really cool geological structures as well, and even more fragile.

Next, we were boondocking at the Travertine Hot Springs and took a very relaxing bath in the morning. While cold outside, the spring water had such a pleasant, warm temperature, it really felt like a bathtub inside. Seriously, we even had breakfast in there and we probably could have stayed for some hours more.

However, we drove further south to the Devil’s Postpile National Monument, some imposing basalt columns. At the top they’re polished by glaciers, so that they look like floor tiles. We also hiked to the beautiful Rainbow Falls. After that, we took a look at Hot Creek, another very interesting geological sight with bright blue pools, steaming from the hot water coming out of the middle of the earth. Plus, it’s bubbling at the river bed and smells like sulfur. On the drive there, suddenly a bird, black and white, appeared and ran across the road right in front of us at a breath-taking speed. We wondered what it was, when Philipp remembered a comic from his childhood called roadrunner. We looked it up and indeed, it was a roadrunner! Such a cool bird.