It's yesterday once more
By David Carle
Mono Lake is back to a level not seen since the 1970s. Today, as I write, waves lap at a 1975 shoreline, but by the time you read this the lake may rise on past the 6382 foot elevation. It was back in 1974 that Mono Lake dropped below that same point.
By mid-summer, when runoff has contributed its share of this winter's snow, we should be reliving the early 1970s.
The State Water Board decision to protect Mono Lake, by reducing stream diversions to Los Angeles, is now two-and-a-half years old. We have been blessed with three heavier than normal winters since that decision went into effect.
We watch the shoreline change, pull out flooded boardwalk sections, and keep rerouting the South Tufa area nature trail. The most common conversation topic at Mono Lake, lately, has been how fast the lake is moving. If you have not been here in awhile, consider a return visit. Be prepared for startling changes.
A new "reflecting pool" separates a peninsula of tufa towers from the "mainland" on the west side of the South Tufa Area. The landbridge that connected Negit Island to the north shore, allowing coyotes to disrupt the gull breeding colony, is now severed. In fact, two water channels, one close to Negit and another spanning the north end of the bridge, have created a "new," third big island in the lake: "Landbridge Island."
Suggestions for a better name for this new land mass are in order. Though it will shrink as the lake continues to rise, the feature will persist flat, featureless, no longer any help to invading predators, but there, nevertheless. Ideas, anyone?
While watching all the fascinating changes, the refrain from a song by the Carpenters has kept invading my mind:
"Just like before,
It's yesterday once more."
I had not thought of that song in ages. But there it was in my head, lyrics performed by Karen Carpenter, with her brother coming in with the backbeat, nonsense-word chorus, "Shooby-doo-lang-lang."
"Every Sha-la-la-la
Every Wo-o-wo-o
Still shines
(Only oldies but goodies)
"Every shing-aling-a-ling
That they're startin' to sing's
So fine."
It's yesterday, once more, at Mono Lake. In fact, it is fast approaching the early 1970s, the very time when, coincidentally, that Carpenters hit was being played on the radio.
Many things are different today, of course. Most of the students in the college biology class I now teach in Mammoth were not yet born. I was a seasonal park aid at San Onofre State Beach that summer, and had never visited Mono Lake (unless you count driving by on Highway 395 and taking a picture from the viewpoint at Conway Summit; after 15 years park rangering here, I now know that neither act qualifies as a visit to Mono Lake; until you get off the road and take a closer look you won't appreciate this amazing, one-of-a-kind, inland sea).
Though at the same elevation as in 1974, today's rising lake behaves differently than the falling lake did. Right now you can see piles of plants washed up like seaweed on an ocean beach. Yet only microscopic algae grows in Mono Lake. These plants once grew near the shore, were engulfed by the rising lake, killed by the alkaline saltwater and piled by the waves of winter windstorms.
Many more people come to see Mono Lake now then ever did a quarter decade ago. The Mono Lake Committee's efforts to build awareness, to build a caring constituency for this most unusual lake ecosystem, did not begin until the final years of the '70s. They had an uphill battle to convince the world that there were reasons to pull off of Highway 395; that there were amazing discoveries not immediately obvious from the west shore highway. They began a process that continues today. Well over a quarter million visitors came to the lakeshore in 1996.
The benefits of diluting the lake's concentrated salt solution back down to healthier, more productive levels for algae, brine shrimp, alkali flies, and birds are just beginning. Though the inland sea has risen 6 feet since the Water Board decision, it still has more than 10 feet to go to reach the "management level." That will still be 25 feet short of the pre-diversion lake level, but we hope it will be adequate to lower salinity, protect islands for nesting birds, mean fewer dust storms and--most of all--give a good buffer against fatally long droughts.
Come see, again, for yourself. It is 1975, today, while the years keep counting backwards.
It's yesterday, once more, at Mono Lake.
(Shooby-doo-lang-lang).
Dave Carle has been a ranger at the Mono Lake Tufa State Reserve since its establishment in 1982. He writes a weekly column for the local paper and is out and about at Mono Lake daily. See Lakewatch for more on Mono's current level.
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|