Eastern Sierra Nevada and The Great Basin: Mono Craters, Jeffrey Pine forest, and Benton

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Mono Craters, Jeffrey Pine forest, and Benton

Nice partly cloudy day yesterday to shoot photos. These are the Mono Craters, just south of Mono Lake. This is one of my favorite places in the world and is a great place to explore when the Sierras are ten feet deep in snow. Especially the pine forest on beautiful white volcanic ash. Plenty of obsidian in the area also.

This is the largest stand of Jeffrey Pine in the world. Easily accessible by CA 120.....starting at the craters......one of the most beautiful roads in the area if not the country. These pines are very nice smelling......vanilla or butterscotch....today it smelled like butterscotch.

Benton has hot springs and sits in the shadow of Boundary and Montgomery peaks of the White Mountains.

Remnants of the old days in Benton Hot Springs:

This lava is beautiful along a stretch of 120

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Welcome to all!!

I hope you find some useful information here about this beautiful, rugged and historic part of the world, the Sierra Nevada and Great Basin where I am lucky to be stationed. I have fallen in love with this land where I spend a lot of time exploring, as I have done for the past 25 years or so. I have now started to post photos and descriptions here, mostly of my own writing and shooting. Sometimes I post interesting tidbits that I come across that are relative to our favorite subjects. As this site grows, please consider donating or by buying one of the books chosen by me that are listed below or by visiting the advertisers to help fund these field trips, so I can pass them along to you, as best I can. If you have any questions, comments, complaints or suggestions, please leave a comment and I will reply. May your explorations and discoveries be many and memorable!!

Trying to define the undefineable!!!!

The Sierra Nevada (Spanish: [ˈsjera neˈβaða], snowy mountain range is a mountain range in the U.S. states of California and Nevada, between the California Central Valley and the Basin and Range Province. The Sierra run 400 miles (640 km) north-to-south, and are approximately 70 miles (110 km) across east-to-west. Notable Sierra features include Lake Tahoe, the largest alpine lake in North America; Mount Whitney at 14,505 feet (4,421 m),[2] the highest point in the contiguous United States; and Yosemite Valley sculpted by glaciers out of 100-million-year-old granite. The Sierra is home to three parks, 20 wilderness areas, and a national monument. These areas include Yosemite and Sequoia, and Kings Canyon National Parks.

The Great Basin is the largest area of contiguous endorheic watersheds of North America and is noted for its arid conditions and Basin and Range topography that varies from the North American lowpoint at Badwater Basin to—less than 100 miles away—the contiguous United States highpoint at the Mount Whitney summit. The watershed spans several physiographic divisions, biomes/ecoregions, deserts, and metropolitan areas and, in addition to being the ancestral homeland of the Great Basin tribes, was the 1849 location of the provisional State of Deseret.