Salt & Milk — Mono Lake South Tufa at Dawn

Milky Way and Dawn Over Mono Lake South Tufa

Mono Lake has no outlet. Every mineral carried in by the streams that feed it stays — the water evaporates, the minerals do not. Over millennia, the calcium carbonate columns of the tufa towers grew from underwater springs, only fully visible now because decades of Los Angeles water diversion lowered the lake dramatically — a fight that eventually ended in a court ruling that has, slowly, allowed the lake to recover. What remains is ancient and hyper-saline and, on this particular morning, lit by something that makes the geology seem almost incidental.

I have made images here in many conditions — the tufa and the stars, a blood moon, a supermoon. Each return finds something different. On this morning, just before dawn, it was the Milky Way still visible and fading, Jupiter and Mars rising in the east above the tufa columns, the first pale light beginning to separate sky from water. The title writes itself: the salt and the milk, the earth and the heavens, held for a moment in the same frame.

Fine Art Mono Lake Night Photography Print

The Milky Way, dawn, Jupiter and Mars rise over the South Tufa at Mono Lake.