Mono County California covers a large area between the Nevada border and Yosemite National Park. We stayed in Mammoth Hot Springs which is a winter resort town that has plenty to do in the summer as well. This is Devil's Postpile National Monument. Strange name, yes. To reach it, you take a shuttle from Mammoth Hot Springs that stops at many locations within the monument, so it's sort of a built-in hiking shuttle as well. Technically, Devil's Postpile is not actually in Mono County but the parking lot is, so we're counting it.

Devil's postpile has some nice meadows full of wildlife and connects to many of the long distance trails in the area, but the centerpiece is really these columns of basalt. This is an area where they have folded and distorted due to other geological forces over time.

Columnar basalt occurs around the world, maybe most famously at Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland but this is the same basic concept. Lava cooling relatively quickly can form these structures and this one is quite young. Less than 100,000 years old. The hiking trail skirts many of these formations before climbing up the hill to the top of it all.

This is the top of it all. A bunch of polygons because these are the ends of the columns (you can see them vertically aligned in the first picture above). Elsewhere at the National Monument there is an impressive waterfall (Rainbow Falls) and campgrounds.

Here we are at Mono Lake. If you take the Tioga Pass out of Yosemite then you'll end up looking at this lake as you descend from the pass. Mono Lake has no natural outlet so it becomes extremely salty and thus alkaline and thus weird things like this happen.

The rock here is called tufa, a type of limestone. It makes these structures creatively called tufa towers. These form mostly below the surface of the lake and so a drop in water levels has exposed them. Now you can hike amongst them.

The lake is home to brine shrimp that don't mind the excessively salty water and there are a lot of bird species in the area that feed on them. The more notable wildlife, at least on our visit, were the thousands of tiny black alkali flies that cluster on the shoreline. They're not bothersome but wow are there are a lot of them.

Just on the west shore of the lake is the town of Lee Vining. There are restaurants here and if you're out here driving around you should probably eat here because it's a long way to anything else.

The next stop for us was just a little north of Mono Lake at Bodie State Park. This is a very unusual State Park in that it was created to preserve Bodie - now a ghost town. A gold rush in the 1870s made this a booming town of 8000 people. By the 1910s, it was a ghost town.

The gold mining operation dominates town from atop the hill. This was really a fascinating place to stop as you can wander freely throughout the town (not so much the mine, which has other dangers).

The buildings are all labeled on a map available from the visitor center. Some of them you can go inside, others are left as intact as possible and you can look inside through windows and doors. It all gives the impression of sudden disaster but the town actually emptied slowly over the years.

The climate out here has helped preserve the town, which has only 3 residents left by 1942. It had its own Chinatown area, a red-light district (of course) and a dance/meeting hall.

We came across the rattlesnake walking back along the road in Bodie. There are warning signs about them throughout the area and apparently with good reason.