a few more photos

[nibot]

Here are a few more photos from the trip I took a few weeks ago. On the third day, we hiked up out of the Fish Creek valley (where we were at the trip's lowest elevation, 6340 feet), a thousand feet up onto a sort of ridge on the side of the valley of the middle fork of the San Joaquin river. In this first picture we see the middle fork of the San Joaquin river leaving out to the West:



From the same point looking North, we see Mammoth Mountain (bald in the upper right of the photo) in the distance. Our destination, Devil's Postpile / Red's Meadow, is just under Mammoth mountain:



We camped somewhere near the trees seen after the prominant outcropping in this photo, just after crossing Cold Creek, in an overused but very convenient campsite. We heard what might have been a bear come crashing through the woods around midnight. I yelled at it and we didn't hear from it again. Bear or isolated tree falling down?

Along the way, we saw rock formations looking more and more postpile-esque; the rock formed from lava that cooled into hexagonal columns:



(Procrastination project: write a program to simulate cooling lava / evaporating mud and see if hexagonal jointing arises.)

Click on the 'Current Location' for this entry, and choose "Terrain" view in Google Maps to get an awesome view of the topography of the place; you'll understand immediately what you're looking at in the first two photos. To the south you'll find a long east-west valley with Iva Bell hotsprings at its eastern end; and north of that you'll find Duck Lake.

Comments

[indomitability.livejournal.com]

I so so so love the eastern Sierras. Incidentally, when I die, I want to be scattered right here (http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=june+lake,+ca&ie=UTF8&ll=37.730267,-119.136815&spn=0.016665,0.038624&t=p&z=15), which isn't too much farther north from your link above. Found a pic of the spot here (http://www.flickr.com/photos/melonman/1000635685/sizes/o/in/set-72157601198857414/)... I stayed here when I worked at the pack station in college and loved it.

[rosiedee.livejournal.com]

Procrastination project: write a program to simulate cooling lava / evaporating mud and see if hexagonal jointing arises.

I can't find a citation off the top of my head, but yes! (Or at least, I would imagine the answer for that case is yes. But I do know that hexagonal columns show up in some 3-D models of Rayleigh-Bénard convection.)