Flutterby™! : Mono Lake

East of Yosemite, at the junction where plate that is Nevada and points east is pushed towards the center of the earth and California is pushed high in the air to become the Sierra, is Mono Lake. There are hot springs all along this fault line, and near Mono Lake a few hills that are only a couple of hundred years old, and where these vents bubbled up underneath the lake they left deposits of the various minerals the water from them carried. When Los Angeles sucked the water out of the lake in the excesses of the last centuries, these tufa towers became visible. Now that there's a slow reclamation of Mono Lake, and it's gradually filling back in, they'll be obscured in a few years.