Eastern Sierras

For a quick pre-birthday mini-vacation headed to the Eastern Sierras with my parents.

In my memory (which is very poor) I've never been here before, but wow, I definitely want to go back! It was so beautiful!

There's a surprising number of small lakes

Including the interesting, but kind of depressing Mono Lake.

Also caught Devil's Postpile

And the earthquake fault line.

I'm convinced I'm going going to die in an earthquake, but I imagine it in the unlikely situation of me falling into a divide down to the earth's core. Plate tectonics don't really work that way so guess I'll just never die! But this is pretty close to my theory where you can really see the divide in the earth, but too many rocks, not the free fall into the rabbit hole.

And thanks to the tip from photographer buddy, Nathan Yan (who captured great images of it, here) we  ventured to Hot Creek geothermal area.

Ended the evening heading through South Lake Tahoe. Spending a large part of my childhood in my mom's hometown of Truckee, I'm very familiar with the north side of Lake Tahoe but rarely find myself on the south side. Such a fun trip!

Bodie Ghost Town Photos

On my trip to the Eastern Sierras, stopped through Bodie, the best preserved ghost town in California.

According to history Bodie was a thriving boomtown in the 1800s after the discovery of gold led to a thriving mine supporting a population near 10,000 with 65 saloons in a community of "miners, storeowners, gunfighters, prostitutes, and people from every country of the world."

As the town declined, people just up and left, and in 1962 the California State Historic Park was able to preserve by far the coolest ghost town I've seen. And thanks to my mom's bizarre travels, that's actually quite a number of ghost towns.

It's so cool to see the different layers of wall paper peeling off the wall!

I think there's still some ghosts lingering around too, because right after this shot, the auto focus on my 16-35mm quit working at random... eerie!