Land of Water
Water. Shimmering silver stretching to the horizon. Cold and flowing across white granite cobbles. Indigo in the sunrise, broken by Mono's islands. Frozen and slow, grinding paths through granite, carving cirques and leaving peaks. Freshly melted, leaving snowbanks behind, rushing down streams. Violent, carving away shoreline, cutting away its own streambed. Frothy on wave tops, invisible in the air, then appearing like gray sheets hanging from thunderclouds. Trapped in the concrete tubing of aqueducts, draining to far away. Turned loose again down its old trails.
Much more than we usually think, and much more than casual observation shows, the Mono Basin tells a story of water over time. A story that, through glaciers and Pleistocene lakes and aqueducts and Water Boards, continues onward today. Indeed, today's Mono Basin is the legacy of water.
Walk the basin floor-so dry, so full of sagebrush, rabbitbrush, bitterbrush, and desert peach-and such an assertion seems fantastic. Where is the water? What significant difference can it make in such an arid land?
The answers lie hidden in the geography, the history-not where is the water, but where was it and what did it do-and, unavoidably, the politics of the Mono Basin.
As you walk the landscape, almost every natural landform, every hill, rill, canyon, and berm has been built, carved, or marked by water. The ice age was a major force here: massive glaciers scoured the likes of Lee Vining Canyon, and expansive Lake Russell-Mono's ice age forbear-put the future townsite of Lee Vining deep under water. Vast plains of sediment were deposited, then rearranged by longshore currents. Deltas built out into the ice age lake and now, in drier days, dictate the flow of highways. The berms that snake across the basin floor today, the ancient lake terraces high on pinyon covered hills, the strange V-shaped cuts in the middle of nowhere, even the distribution of the basin's trees and plants are all the work of water.
These water-sculpted landforms remain, sometimes hidden beneath the sage, shaping the reality of the basin with which we must work, affecting our experience of the lake without our knowing. Stream incision, the unfortunate result of 50 years of water diversions, happens because of the stairstep-like basin structure created by the recession of the ice age lake. Waterfowl habitat, both extant and lost, depends on the embayments and springs put into place by the lake thousands of years ago.
Not to be forgotten, of course, is the aqueduct. Built of steel and concrete, buried and hidden, it drew Mono's waters away, changed the water balance of the entire basin.
But the lake and its tributary streams have many values of their own: avian habitat, riparian corridors, aquatic life, recreation, aesthetic values, ecological values. The list goes on. And so here the removal of water spawned political action: locals, the Mono Lake Committee, the courts, the Department of Water and Power, and ultimately the State Water Resources Control Board.
Now there is water returning to the lake again and it is time to look beyond the damage the aqueduct did and to ask: what could be? The answers frequently involve water, but they don't always include the aqueduct. Mill Creek, for example, is a Mono Lake tributary that was never put into the aqueduct but still suffers from over a century of irrigation and hydropower diversions. Can water be returned to its lower reaches? Can its dry channels be reopened, its dusty cobbles covered with water? Could its once-rich bottomland habitat-so rare, and thus valuable, in the Great Basin-be brought back? Could its delta be rejuvenated; might waterfowl return to the freshwater skims of the delta region; might these habitats compensate for those permanently lost at other locations due to diversions? In the specifics, it's all a question of water: where it is now, how much there is, and how it might be returned.
And the specifics are part of a larger story: the long, ongoing tale of water in the Mono Basin. For water continues to shape the basin. And us. And our actions. No doubt it always will.
Return to Fall 96 Newsletter
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