Travel Photography > Great Basin > Mono Lake, California

The fear of environmentalists is a world biology which will one day need to be micromanaged, like East Germany's factory outputs, like North Korea's rations. Saving swarms of Tuna despite a hundred species of wrasses; cows at the expense of the lily. If the Mono Lakes of the world need to be regulated, who has the balls to say we will be able to master the balance of ecology with the precision of its creator?

All that dies in Mono Lake ends up like the calcified tufa columns; the Phalaropes who die here plunge into the depth, and slowly, like everything else, are consumed by calcification.

I finally reach the famed Tufas of Mono Lake; the monoliths which one day were preserved under water. They are twisted, trollish, ungodly, like a woman turned to stone at Gomorrah. They are beautiful and obscure; the pale gray-white of un-uniform columns springing out of the shore, out of the lake. Monolithic calcification brought into the dry world by the California Pipeline. I can only see them with my head-lamp, and from the light of the stars, which makes them appear much larger than they are.

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