Lakewatch

In mid-November I spent a day watching the streams and the lake. I visited the mouth of Lee Vining Creek, where there are cottonwood trees being flooded and killed by the rising lake. The largest are about 8–12 inches in diameter and 25 feet high. It is a very unusual scene, considering the last time big trees were flooded from a rising Mono Lake was early in the 20th century. But in wet areas where salts have been leached out of the soil, vegetation has grown rapidly. Just look at how big the willows are in recent shots of the “Benchmark Tufa” (see Benchmarks)—growth that has taken place in the last 30 years of extremely low lake levels.

At the lake level gauge I saw that the lake now stood at an elevation of 6,384.2 feet above the sea, an elevation identical to the same time last year. This only leaves three tenths of a foot that the lake can drop before DWP would have to install a new lower gauge to measure the lake level. We’ve been so focused on a rising lake lately that we’ll have to start getting used to the lake rising much more slowly, and even dropping a bit like it has this fall. In fact, it is almost a foot lower than its highpoint this summer. This is due to the lower runoff this summer and a warm and dry fall—and to the larger surface area of the higher lake allowing additional evaporation.

After four years of above-normal runoff we finally had a below-normal year. DWP forecasted 97,000 acre-feet of runoff for the April 1 to September 30, 1999 runoff period, or 94% of normal. In fact, actual runoff turned out to be 91,500 acre-feet from April to September, or 88% of normal. Since 1935, this period has been drier in 29 years and wetter in 36 years, so this runoff season was slightly drier than the median year. Of this amount, 21,600 acre-feet was stored in Edison reservoirs and about 3,770 acre-feet was exported, so less than 66,130 acre-feet reached Mono Lake—about 64% of a normal natural flow. Under natural conditions, only 13 years since 1935 would have provided less water during the summer.

While at the dock, I took in the view of countless eared grebes on Mono Lake—their most important fall staging site in North America, and “one of the most impressive concentrations of a single bird species in North America,” according to researcher Dr. Joseph Jehl.

Down on Rush Creek, I visited a channel that was rewatered in mid-October. This is the first channel to be rewatered since Channel 10 was rewatered three years ago. This channel does not have a name, but is referred to most simply as “the former main channel of Rush Creek between elevations 6881 and 6862.” The most vivid names for places along the streams aren’t the official names such as “Channel 10” or “A-4,” but “The Duck Pond,” and the “Yellowbird Reach.” In keeping with using evocative names, I propose we call this channel the “Water Ouzel Wash.”

“Water Ouzel” because when I went to take a look at it on that November day, an American dipper, or “Water Ouzel,” as John Muir liked to call his favorite bird, was exploring this newly restored habitat. “Wash” because right now, it has upland shrubs in it and looks like a wash. However, already, only a month after rewatering, grass is sprouting everywhere. In spring I imagine it will look like Channel 10 did its first spring, with the high water table causing an incredible growth of grass underneath the dying sagebrush. This will kill a few of the pines we planted here in 1997, but the value of the additional stream habitat is worth it, as the Water Ouzel seems to think.

Bird and stream are inseperable, songful and wild, gentle, and strong, the bird ever in danger in the midst of the stream’s mad whirlpools, yet seemingly immortal.  And so I might go on, writing words, words, words, but to what purpose? Go see him and love him, and through him as through a window look into nature’s warm heart. 

—John Muir on the American dipper, 1898