Tenaya Lake.
Tuolumne Meadow.
Tioga Lake.
We left the eastern end of the park to visit nearby Mono Lake, which Mark Twain visited in the 1860s and wrote about in Roughing It.
Mono Lake is all that is left of an inland sea--salty like the Great Salt Lake, but also alkaline from mineral deposits. The concentration of minerals has resulted in tufa formations, some as tall as 30 feet, that crystallize under water and have become visible with the drop in water level.
Sand tufa formed in the sandy bottom of the lake.
During the warm summer months, the color of Mono Lake changes from green to blue because tiny brine shrimp hatch and consume huge amounts of algae.
Some of the nearby volcanoes have erupted as recently as 250 years ago.
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