turquoise colored Sierra Nevada lakes

[SSSdave]

SH-turquoise-lakes.jpg

(mouse select to enlarge)

Last week, August 9>14, 2022 backpacked from the Lake Sabrina Campground trailhead into the upper Middle Fork Bishop Creek areas including Moonlight Lake that receives flows from the enormous Mt. Powell Rock Glacier. I'd backpacked up there 3 times before, but during the last visit in 2015 wildfire smoke arose.

There are a few lakes in the range with unique for photographer interests, milky turquoise lake hues due to glacially ground up rock flour that continues to seep out of remaining rock glaciers. Most actually also have residual ice glaciers that provides the necessary summer late season water flows to rinse out flour from rock glaciers beyond the main clear water snow melt periods. Granite geologies being mostly white provides the better fine rock flour suspended sediments, (SS) for creating such color. Some of these lakes are noticeably more turquoise late season versus early summer when there is more clear snow melt water mixing in. An example is Topsy Turvy Lake along with Hungry Packer Lake that during my visit were modestly teal colored but barely show such on the satellite capture I used. Very significantly, even a lake with much SS looks better from late morning through early afternoon because that is when sunlight maximally penetrates down into water to reflect scattering light off the SS though note the direction one views versus sun position can also affects the color.

This morning, casually surveyed what the Sentinel Hub satellite showed for the August 14, 2022 date, looking for turquoise lakes, screen capturing the main ones and note some are small no-name tarns. Then added them to the above Photoshop composite of those lakes for the sake of easy comparison.

The best known such lakes in our range are in the Big Pine Lakes basin below the Palisade Glacier, the largest active glacier in the range with Second Lake the one most photographed. Some such lakes are more teal to yellowish green, for example Deadhorse Lake and Center Basin lakes. The most vivid turquoise waters was Wishbone Lake below Mt. Lamarck. Oddly, there is one of the yellowish green lakes at the top of its rock glacier. Nearby Sky High Lake has normal blue color despite a rock glacier above it so what really matters is if there is a seeping out source of glacial rock flour within a rock glacier, most of which in the range of which do not. Note one can see all 3 of these Lamarck basin lakes if one easily ventures a short distance north from Lamarck Col to the top of chutes looking down that also has an abundance of sky pilot and alpine gold wildflowers.

The Moonlight Lake image at page was captured August 13, 2022 at 11:25am PDT. A single frame 4000 by 6000 pixel focus stack stitch of 7 shots. The water color along that shore was vastly more turquoise then versus 9am when I first hiked by on my way to the inlet end of the lake which is also due to the physics phenomenon of total internal reflection that air to water is 48.6 degrees. Not only are some lakes and tarn turquoise but also streams flowing into such lakes and that is the case at the Moonlight inlet I captured more images that still need post processing. The peakbagger's summit at right is Donkey Peak. On my hike in on 8/10/22 Bob Burd and over a dozen other peakbaggers participating in his High Sierra Challenge passed me on the way to that summit they accessed from Baboon Lakes on the other side.

[Daymoth]

Been to rock creek so many times and didnt know there was a turquoise lake. On the to do list!