Oh Mono Lake, East of the Sierras

Sunrise at Mono Lake.  Just so you know - it is pronounced like OH-No, according to the Roadside Heritage CD we picked up at the Mono Lake/Lee Vinning Visitors Center – you can download wild west Eastern Sierra stories on their site.

I haven’t seen a sunrise since a really bad national sales meeting team building exercise over a year ago. It hurts to get up that early in the morning. That must be why most of the other photographers were dressed in performance wear:

After the sunrise sesh, we had breakfast at Nicely’s (we ranked it number one restaurant in Lee Vinning) and went north to Bodie, a genuine California gold-mining ghost-town! It is a magnificent abandoned wooden boom town standing in a state of preserved arrested decay. All of the two travel articles I read about it end with a line like, “…and if you listen hard enough you can feel the presence of the Bodie Bad boys ghosts walking down the wooden porches…” or something to that generic effect. However, I was too tired to hear anything past the personal-space-challenged German tourists jibber-jabbering up in my ears every time I tried to ask serious prospecting questions. I kept waiting for people dressed in 19th century garb to offer to show me how they used to bake pies with a wood oven or something. I’d recommend this attraction for the off-season when it is more likely to be a ghost town.

I do enjoy dusty old roulette wheels. (Fast fact: Bodie had FIFTY saloons for a town of 10,000 people):

When I was walking around taking pictures I kept thinking of the amateur photos (of different areas of Bodie) for sale at Nicely’s Restaurant – every photo was titled “RUSTY MEMORIES”. Pretty catchy, right? So every time I saw something metal I thought; rusty memories.

I call these, “Faded Dreams” and “Dusty Bottoms”.