Have Diapers, Will Travel, Part II: Mono Lake

About 24 hours after Susannah and I returned to San Francisco, we all packed up the car and headed to the other side of the Sierras for some family R&R, or at least as much R&R as one can do with a very energetic, crawling (and now standing up!) little girl. After a brief overnight stop at South Lake Tahoe, we headed south to Mono Lake, a hypersaline and alkaline lake just east of Yosemite. An interesting place, indeed…….
Due to its high salt concentration and alkalinity, not much survives in the water except algae, and a tiny species of brine shrimp unique to Mono Lake that feed on the algae. The shrimp attract alkali flies, which produce fly larvae, which in turn attract lots of birds. Lured by bountiful fly larvae to munch on, birds come to Mono Lake by the thousands. In fact, Mono Lake is major stopping-off point for a number of migratory shorebird species, including killdeer, sandpipers, and avocets. Seagulls also make Mono Lake their home for a significant part of the year, and it is thought that most of the California seagull population is actually born here.
Mono Lake is also interesting because it has been the focus of a major environmental controversy. In the early 1900s, the city of Los Angeles bought water rights in the Mono Basin and diverted water from the streams that feed into the lake. As a result, the water level dropped significantly over the course of several decades. In the late 1970s, environmental activists worked to turn the tide in the other direction, and the water level is now on the rise. But there’s still much less water in Mono Lake than there used to be. As a result, there is extensive exposure of calcium carbonate formations called “tufa” above the water surface. Despite the fact that without human interference in the first place, these formations would remain hidden beneath the surface, they still look really cool! We took lots of pictures of these at the South Tufa Reserve.