Obsidian Dome (2022)
I discovered Obsidian Dome when my family and I were driving on our cross-country move to California in 2004. We were heading up Owens Valley, driving toward Yosemite, the last stop on our month-long trip. As we drove we passed a small brown sign saying “Obsidian Dome.” At the next turn, onto an unimproved road, we drove down to find a wall of broken rock, much of it black and glass-like. There was a wide trail, an old car path, steeply ramping up into it.
Obsidian Dome is volcanic but not a volcano in the normal sense. The Dome—and its two nearby sister domes--formed as magma rose to the surface. Before it got all the way there it hit the water table, heating the water explosively to steam, the expansion of the steam blowing the ground above to pieces and the cooling action of the water on the magma creating the obsidian and other rocks.
Researchers, using tree-ring data, have pinpointed the eruption to the late summer of 1350, just 674 years ago, which is a bit shocking when you realize that that implies that such eruptions are not things of the prehistoric past and could occur, here or elsewhere, just about any time.
Ever since that trip twenty years ago, Obsidian Dome has been in my head. The sharp, black glass (which sliced a four-inch gash through the side of my leather hiking boots on that first trip, without my realizing it), the pumice-like rocks that were so weirdly lightweight, the sense of utter destruction walking through the maze of jutting rocks at the top. Some day I would go back.
In 2022 I was starting a multi-week trip intending to photograph nuclear weapons and my first “target” was the Hawthorne Ordinance Museum in Nevada. A few months earlier my youngest daughter had participated in a dessert research project nearby and had discovered the museum and had sent me images. But upon arriving there I discovered a handwritten note taped to the glass saying they were closed for that day. Behind schedule already!
But looking at the map I saw that I was unexpectedly close to Mono Lake, and I remembered Obsidian Dome a few miles south of there and I knew it was just the right time to go back and make those photographs at long last.
