Play: Explore the Eastern Sierra with its otherworldly treasures and ancient lakes.
JUST EAST OF THE SIERRA NEVADA, THIS ANCIENT BODY OF WATER IS A DESTINATION FOR LOVERS OF ITS UNIQUE GEOLOGY AND NATURAL AND CULTURAL HISTORY
Like many Bay Area residents, I’ve spent plenty of time on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada. But my husband and I recently took the plunge behind the “Granite Curtain,” dropping 5 miles and 3,000 feet from Yosemite National Park’s 9,941-foot Tioga Pass into the Eastern Sierra.
John Muir described this spectacular stretch of North America as “hot desert bounded by snow-laden mountains … frost and fire working together in the making of beauty.”
Set against this “frost and fire” landscape is Mono Lake, an ancient body of water that’s probably best known for its tufa towers, limestone formations that rise from the water, creating an otherworldly tableau.
I had long been curious to visit Mono Lake. It’s often referred to as California’s “Dead Sea.” Water flows in but it doesn’t flow out, leaving the lake saltier than the Pacific Ocean and too harsh for most species, except for rare types of shrimp and alkali flies.
Mark Twain described Mono Lake as a “solemn, silent, sailless sea,” while Pink Floyd was so inspired by those tufa towers that the band featured them on the sleeve of its “Wish You Were Here” album.
“If you stand (by the lake) and be still, it reaches right into your soul,” says Phil Gordon, a bird lover and retired Hayward science teacher we met while visiting the tufa towers on the lake’s south shore.
Gordon was at Mono Lake because it’s a major stop for millions of gulls and other migratory shorebirds making their annual round trips along the Western Hemisphere’s Pacific Flyway.
We first glimpsed Mono Lake as we wound our way into Lee Vining, a former mining camp that’s home now to an eclectic community of ranchers, artists and nature lovers. The lake, which covers more than 70 square miles in a basin of volcanic craters and sagebrush, was likely formed between 1 million and 3 million years ago.
In Lee Vining, we started at the well-organized bookstore and information center run by the Mono Lake Committee, the nonprofit that has spent the last 40 years saving the lake from extinction. The committee and affiliated groups lead sunset tufa walks, weekend canoe tours and other programs that illustrate why Mono Lake is “this secret beautiful place hiding right here behind the Granite Curtain,” says Robert DiPaolo, the committee’s restoration field technician.
DiPaolo said the fall is an especially lovely time to visit, adding there is nothing like a nighttime swim in Mono Lake, where one can float “effortlessly” in its salty water and look up at an explosion of stars. “It’s like floating in space,” he said.
At the bookstore, you can also learn how Mono Lake occupies a significant place in the history of the same 20th-century water wars that sent Jack Nicholson sleuthing for killers in 1974’s “Chinatown.”
In 1941, Los Angeles began diverting water from Mono Lake’s tributary creeks. By the 1960s, the volume of the lake had been halved and its ecosystem was on the verge of collapse. Not wanting California to lose this natural
treasure, scientists and conservationists formed the nearly 20,000-member Mono Lake Committee, scoring a landmark legal victory in 1994 that limited water diversions to Los Angeles.
In the years since, Mono Lake has become a destination for researchers studying its bird migrations, geology, riparian creek habitats and rare alkali flies. The pupae of those flies were an important source of protein and fat for the Kutzadika’a people who lived along the lake for centuries.
And on the south shore on this particular day, Gordon, a longtime volunteer with the Ohlone Audubon Society, was photographing
a violet and green swallow, nesting in one of the tufa towers. Up close, the tufa towers stand like giant drip sandcastles, formed over millennia by freshwater from underground springs interacting with the lake’s alkaline waters.
The air was scented by sage, utterly quiet until a larger bird began an extended song from atop one of the towers, breaking the silence in the most uplifting way possible.
“That’s a sage thrasher,” Gordon says. “That’s one of the best I’ve ever heard.”
Potential mates, he adds, could probably hear its song for miles, echoing over this strange and beautiful landscape.