“…something by which both travelers and locals orient themselves.”

“A lone peak of high point is a natural focal point in the landscape, something by which both travelers and locals orient themselves. In the continuum of landscape, mountains are discontinuity—culminating in high points, natural barriers, unearthly earth.”
—Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

The improvements to the Mono Lake Committee Information Center & Bookstore storefront continue to take shape … and actually, one piece is taking a very beautiful, and familiar, shape right at this very moment. Just north of the front steps and the concrete map of Mono Lake is a shaded seating area with a short retaining wall to help block highway noise. Currently the wall matches the newly-stuccoed storefront—but our friend and neighbor Dave Dore is working on a unique capstone: a 13-foot silhouette of the profile of the Sierra as seen from the east shore of Mono Lake—from Mt. Ritter to Dunderberg Peak—created in wood.

Dave has been hard at work engineering the Sierra crest so that it is accurate, strong, and beautiful. After coming up with a structural plan he enlarged a stitched-together photo he took from the east shore and began bringing it to life.

This is where the artistry really comes in—instead of carving from a single piece of wood, he is fitting boards together so that the wood grain accentuates the mountain forms. From here he will carve the precise skyline of each of the peaks and passes which will eventually be labeled so people can learn about the high points of the Mono Basin watershed.

We talked to Dave about the idea for the wall because we’ve worked with him on projects, such as the brine shrimp tank in the bookstore, that involve skill, artistry, and a knack for things that are structurally “bomber” (as he would say) as well as creatively beautiful. We hope, as Rebecca Solnit so eloquently put it, that Dave’s artwork will become one of the pieces of the storefront that will help people orient themselves in the Mono Basin for many years to come.