Our "Day Off"

The Fourth (maybe fifth?) day was our "day off" so to speak. I think we got more done on our day off than any other day we were there (mostly due to rain). We saw a bunch of road cuts, hiked through the Bishop Tuff, stopped by Mammoth ski resort, hiked two craters and toured Mono Lake.


The Bishop Tuff was deposited when a volcano erupted creating Long Valley Caldera. It covers 2,200 square kilometers of area, which is a big bada boom.


We hiked down this really long road (yes paved road, leading to water treatment plant I think)



The tuff is really cool because it is very colorful (making it easy to identify) and we found this columnar jointing. This happens at a certain specific temperature and pressure thresh hold creating hexagonal columns in the tuff. The most famous example being the Devil's Postpile.

Mammoth was a bummer. We were supposed to take a gondola ride to see everything, but the resort was closed. So this is the only picture we got.


A two hour drive for a statue of a mammoth. Excellent.

Then we went to Two Craters on the way down from Mammoth, all discouraged, but happy we didnt have to pay $30 to take the ride (I know more than a few classmates were planning to skip it).



The lovely Nicole with one of the two craters behind her.



It wouldn't be worth seeing if we didnt have to hike to get there.



Or crutch to get there.



Here is everybody looking out at the lake at the bottom. It was a very peculiar shade of green. After a while, we started throwing rocks at it to see whose could splash the most. Geologists will be geologists after all...

I will save Mono Lake for its own post because it is just that cool. And come to think of it, maybe we didn't do all that in one day. That would just have been crazy for a day off :)