Travelling Lore

Mono Lake in California, which is about a half an hour drive from the entrance of Yosemite National Park, is an incredibly unique area in North America.  Would you believe that it's at least 760,000 years old, possibly around one million years old, making it one of the oldest lakes in the western hemisphere?  Absolutely incredible! Scientists have been able to date the lake to at least 760,000 years ago by dating an ash layer to the Long Valley eruption .  However, sediments below the ash layer suggest that Mono Lake could actually be the remnant of a much older lake that also covered parts of Nevada and Utah.  At its height, Mono Lake was about 900 ft deep.  It sits in part of the Mono Basin, which was formed over the last five million years, and has no outlet to the ocean; this lack of an outlet causes high levels of salt to accumulate in the lake, making the water more alkaline . However, now the lake is about 158 ft deep at its deepest point and averages about 56

Initially, I was a little skeptical about going to a ghost town.  I'd never heard of Bodie before, it was a long drive away, I didn't think it would be that interesting (I'm not a gold rush history buff), and I thought that it might be too touristy.  Well, once we arrived and got past the initial sticker shock of the entrance fee (our Golden Poppy annual pass didn't cover this Bodie Historic State Park ), I quickly changed my mind about Bodie. Bodie, or "Boomtown Bodie," is a gold-mining ghost town in California that was named after William Bodey, who had discovered gold in 1859 (along with three other prospectors) in some hills north of Mono Lake.  Unfortunately, he froze to death in November of that year, before the town was named in his memory.  Mining started off slowly due to richer finds in other areas of the U.S.  However, the collapse of Bunker Hill Mine exposed a rich vein of silver and gold ore in 1875, which kicked off the boomtown.  Bod