We left Enterprise Rental at 9:00 am to head for Yosemite. Well, we got going the wrong direction and had to get turned around and once we were headed in the right direction we crossed the Oakland Bay Bridge. We passed through a lot of farmland - peach trees, grapes, almond trees, walnut trees and others we couldn't identify, before getting to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. We stopped in Tracy, CA at Walmart to buy some food for lunches, drinks and a cooler. Since it was noon and there was a Five Guys Burger place in the parking lot, we decided to eat lunch.
Highway 120 to Yosemite
You can see how badly they need rain here.
The Don Pedro Reservoir was formed by the construction of
the New Don Pedro Dam across the Tuolumne River.
You can see a "strip" down the side of this mountain.
It is the Hetch Hetchy aqueduct that runs from Hetch Hetchy
Reservoir in the north part of Yosemite to San Francisco.
It provides 80% of the water to San Francisco.
Entering Yosemite National Park
The road in Yosemite
We made a few stops between here and Mammoth Lakes, where we stayed for 2 nights. The views were amazing but I'm saving those pictures for our trip back over the mountain. We finally made it to Mono Lake on the east side of the mountains. The first stop here was at South Tufa. We had heard of tufa but had never seen it.
Mono Lake with the tufa in front
Some of the tufa is really tall!
The lack of an outlet in this lake causes high levels of salts to accumulate in the lake. Calcium-bearing freshwater springs well up through the carbonate-rich lake water causing a chemical reaction that forms solid limestone, of tufa. Over many years, a tower forms around a spring. Tufa continues to form today where freshwater and lake water meet. To compare, Lake Tahoe is 0.001% salt, the Pacific Ocean is 3.5% salt and Mono Lake is 10% salt.
By the time we finally pulled ourselves away from this beautiful spot, it was beginning to get dark and we still had a 25 minute drive to the Cinnamon Bear Inn, a bed and breakfast in Mammoth Lakes. It was a nice place and the breakfasts were really good. We had dinner at a Mexican restaurant then back to the room to get ready for tomorrow. We were anxious to see this place in the daylight. We didn't realize that we were near Mammoth Mountain, one of the popular ski resorts in California! The guy who cooked our breakfast came out and talked to us for awhile and he was telling us about the area during ski season. He said our room would go for double the rate between Thanksgiving and New Years Day and that there was a nearby Motel 6 that goes for $299. during that same time - about triple what we had to pay! It's a beautiful area there!
So, tomorrow we'll head out and explore several areas.
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