Tufa at Mono Lake

Jill's Journal: The starkly beautiful Mono Lake, nearly three times saltier than the ocean and 100 times more alkaline than the ocean, is visually distinctive for its unusual tufa towers. More on those in a minute.

Doesn’t this look like an oasis in the desert? From a mountain miles and miles away, the massive Mono Lake doesn’t even fully fit in the camera lens.

And yet, it used to be bigger. Much bigger. Mono Lake has dropped more than 45 vertical feet since 1941. The culprit? The city of Los Angeles diverts water from the streams that feed Mono Lake. The entire area in this picture was once under water, once part of the lake.

Millions of migratory birds use Mono Lake as a pit stop to rest and refuel on their journeys both north and south. It’s been dubbed an “avian gas station.” The shrinking lake was affecting their migration, which in turn impacted food chains and so much more. Something had to be done. So, since 1994, California has been decreasing the diversion of water from the streams around Mono Lake. Eventually the water’s edge will be lapping at this panel. That’s still far lower than it was originally, but it helps.

We took the short, one mile South Tufa Nature Trail to get up close and personal with this unique body of water. It’s too salty for fish to survive, but tiny brine shrimp and alkali flies thrive here. They provide food for the millions of birds which visit.

Mono Lake is best known for its tufa towers, those unusual islands of sorts in and near the water. Tufa is a complicated mineral structure which is formed when fresh water springs bubble up through the alkaline waters. These were all under water at one time, but when the lake level dropped and they were exposed to air, tufa stopped growing.

Tufa is bigger than it looks, as shown by the girls in this photo. It’s not unusual to see tufa more than 30 feet tall here.

Water that settles in Mono Lake never flows to the ocean. With its salt and alkaline makeup, this lake is very similar to the better-known Great Salt Lake in Utah.

Lots of lakes and even oceans sometimes look “sudsy” at the edge, but Mono Lake’s “suds” were especially big and prolific. Does anyone have any idea what the foam is? We’d love to know.

Mark Twain spent some time at Mono Lake in the 1800s (lately it has felt like we’ve been tracing his footsteps). He has some humorous and non-flattering things to say about the lake and the area in his Roughing It:

“Mono Lake lies in a lifeless, treeless, hideous desert, eight thousand feet above the level of the sea, and is guarded by mountains two thousand feet higher, whose summits are always clothed in clouds. This solemn, silent, sailless sea—this lonely tenant of the loneliest spot on earth—is little graced with the picturesque. It is an unpretending expanse of grayish water, about a hundred miles in circumference…

“The lake is two hundred feet deep, and its sluggish waters are so strong with alkali that if you only dip the most hopelessly soiled garment into them once or twice, and wring it out, it will be found as clean as if it had been through the ablest of washerwomen's hands…

“Mono Lake is a hundred and fifty miles in a straight line from the ocean—and between it and the ocean are one or two ranges of mountains —yet thousands of sea-gulls go there every season to lay their eggs and rear their young. One would as soon expect to find sea-gulls in Kansas…

“Half a dozen little mountain brooks flow into Mono Lake, but not a stream of any kind flows out of it. It neither rises nor falls, apparently, and what it does with its surplus water is a dark and bloody mystery.

“There are only two seasons in the region round about Mono Lake—and these are, the breaking up of one winter and the beginning of the next… So uncertain is the climate in summer that a lady who goes out visiting cannot hope to be prepared for all emergencies unless she takes her fan under one arm and her snow shoes under the other…”