Mono Lake Tufa State Reserve

If you could take just one photo: Mono Lake

US 395 is among California’s most spectacular roads, rivaled in beauty only by coastal Hwy 1. As the road wends south along the Walker River, your eye grows accustomed to whitewater, tall pines, and narrow mountain passes. Everything rises so high around you that you forget you’re at elevation. Then suddenly the sky opens up and the Mono Basin unfurls a thousand feet below in eerie vastness. At the South Tufa Trail, you can sit on this bench and apprehend space in ways not possible in the city.

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Most Americans will recognize Mono Lake. Ansel Adams loved this landscape, creating photographs that populate nature calendars tacked to walls around the country. Everything in this salt lake seems hypersaturated: the blue bellied sagebrush lizards, the unreal hue of the lake's water, the surreal tufa towers that rise from the water like upside-down coral... and as we now know, even the bacteria breaks the rules. Hypersaline lakes are known for their bizarre ecosystems and oddly adapted species. Like a mini Galapagos, life here evolves differently. In Mono Lake, scientists discovered the first organism to replace one of the six building blocks of all known life—carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorus—with another element, in this case, phosphorous swapped for poisonous arsenic. Oddly enough, arsenic is only a trace element here and the lake is full of other phosphorous-friendly life (like brine shrimp and algae) that share our same evolutionary trajectory.

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Surrounded by the majestic peaks of the Sierra Nevada on one side and the arid empty expanse of the Great Basin on the other—Mono Lake is a strange and unique geological wonder nestled between desert and the great snowy peaks of the Sierra. Bizarre rock formations called Tufas rise almost creepily from the blue-green waters of this ancient, saline lake and dazzle and baffle the eye. Underwater springs mix with lake water and cause a chemical reaction resulting in the unusually formed limestone towers. Canoe, kayak, or wade through the waters to get an up close view of these odd natural sculptures.

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