Mono Lake

Jedediah Smith, the trapper and explorer, visited here in 1825. John Fremont and Kit Carson came nearby in 1825. LeRoy Vining, a prospector led a party into the area in 1852. That year a Lt Tredwell Moore and fellow soldiers chased a group of Indians around the lake and found gold. The lake has changed greatly since those days.

Mono Lake was once the sight of an inland sea and the last remnants of that sea is Mono Lake, the oldest continuously existing body of water in North America.

Mono Lake is today at the center of one of the largest fought environmental wars of the century, a political hot potato, pitting Los Angeles water consumers against the lovers of the land an landowners of the eastern Sierra Nevadas.

Since water was first diverted from the lake's inflow streams in 1940, the lake has shrunk in size and has become highly saline, a result which threatens to decimate the gull population by killing the brine shrimp and flies on which the birds feed. 85% of the total California gull population and some 300 other bird species, including migrants like phalaropes and eared grebes breed. (The word mono means "fly" in Yokut. The Kutsadika Paiutes who lived neat Mono Lake harvested the brine fly grubs, a protein rich delicacy, and traded them to the Yokuts for acorns.)

To make matters worse, even moderate winds carry corrosive sediments from the exposed lakebed into the homes - and lungs - of local residents. Conservationists claim that even a minimal water conservation effort in Los Angeles would end the need for Mono diversions; the city argues, in essence, that the lake isn't worth saving anyway.

Central to the Mono Lake saga is the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. "If we don't get the water," said engineer and water czar William Mulholland in 1907, "we won't need it." And to get water to the LA desert (to fulfill his vision of a lush southstate paradise, only incidentally profitable to real estate interests secretly connected to the plan) Mulholland and his DWP proposed an aqueduct that would carry the eastern Sierra Nevada's water south from the Owens Valley (and the towns of Bishop, Big Pine, Independence, and Lone Pine).

To gain support (and municipal funding) for "Mulholland's Ditch," even the Los Angeles Times helped fudge on the facts, convincing the public in the early 1900s that a drought existed, a deception unchallenged until the 1950s.

After buying up nearly all private land in the Owens Valley (usually dishonestly, by condemning the land and water rights by lawsuit to drive down prices), Mulholland and his water people had their finest hour in November of 1913, when the first Owens River Valley water flowed into the aqueduct: 30,000 people showed up for the event.

As LA's population grew, so did its thirst and violence over eastern Sierra Nevada water rights became commonplace. Denied use of the land as abruptly as their forbearers had denied the native Paiutes, outraged ranchers "captured" and controlled the aqueduct on many occasions, and dynamited it 17 times. But urban growth was seemingly unstoppable, and in 1930 LA voters approved another bond issue - to extend the aqueduct north into the Mono Lake Basin.

Following completion of this northern stretch in 1941, runoff from Rush, Lee Vining, Walker and Parker creeks was diverted into the ditch tunnel drilled under the Mono Craters and into the Owens River and aqueduct. even worse for Mono Lake - with its water levels dropping and its delicate aquatic ecology suffering almost instantaneously - Los Angeles completed a second aqueduct in 1970, to "salvage" runoff otherwise lost to the lake. Mono Lake had been shrinking ever since. As of 1990, it is estimated that about 17% of Los Angeles' water comes from Mono Lake.