Mono Basin

This weekend was our annual trip to the Mono Basin where there are volcanic craters, an inland sea, beautiful valleys, creek trout fishing, and great hiking.

We arrived late on Friday night to a beautiful moon over the mountains:
...and incredible views of the Milky Way:
We camped at our favorite campground in Lundy Canyon. Then, we hiked up to Gibbs Lake and fished for beautiful golden trout.
At night, we watched the sunset over Mono Lake and then had dinner with our friends Bartshe and Kelly in Lee Vining, the town associated with Mono Lake.


On Sunday, we explored an area we'd never visited before - the lakes above an old, abandoned mining town called Bennettville...


Andrew spent some time fishing for brook trout for dinner, while I soaked up the mountain air, fished a little, and played with the camera and the frogs. . .
We enjoyed a view of Mount Dana for most of our walk:
This is an example of the a medium-sized brook trout found in the creeks and lakes of the area. This is smaller than most that we took, but believe it or not, the 7-9 inch brookies taste much better than the larger ones :
...one of the creeks we walked along and fished in:

some nice tree roots and branches:

Thes are photos of a tiny frog species we saw near the creek. We found light-colored and darker-colored frogs, but we think they are the same species? There were thousands of these 1/2" frogs:

We ate our brookies near Mono Lake and watched the sun set from South Tufa:



On our last day, we traipsed up Lundy Canyon. We saw tons of unidentified birds, which we labeled SSB's, for "sparrow-sized birds".