Sunrise light on a grove of tufa towers emerging from the water of Mono Lake with soft green and dusty-red wild grasses in the foreground, Canada geese in the shallow water with reflections of the rocky towers, and desert hills in the distance.

Terminus Lakes Symposium Part 4: Mono Lake’s far flung friends and lake-effect snow and mergansers

At lunch on Tuesday I sat with Lynn de Frietas, Executive Director of the Friends of Great Salt Lake, Wayne Martinson, Utah’s Important Bird Area Coordinator for Audubon, Bob Jellison, and Kim Rose. We talked about a proposed potash extraction project threatening Great Salt Lake that would remove 365,000 acre-feet of water, which might cause the lake to drop about 2 feet. The Army Corps of Engineers is currently conducting an Environmental Impact Statement on the project, but there seems to be little will in many agencies to say no to the project. Wayne kept bringing our discussion back to a good question: “If Mono Lake is a model, how do we replicate the success elsewhere?”

At the end of the day, I was walking upstairs to the poster session as snow fell outside the large windows in the student union, and I introduced myself to Sudeep Chandra. It is a small world—he knows my friend Mike Klapp (who I was staying with), and Sarah Null from UC Davis, who used to work for the Forest Service in the Mono Basin and now is doing hydrologic modeling, including work on a model of restoring Hetch Hetchy. Sudeep has been studying Great Basin terminal lakes since 2003 at the University of Nevada, Reno and clearly has a love for these unique and interesting ecosystems.

After the poster session, I walked back in the snow, wind, and darkness—as dark as the “Biggest Little City in the World” gets. At the time I was walking back, the National Weather Service in Reno was capturing lake-effect snow on radar coming from Pyramid, Walker, and Mono Lakes. One more example of why Walker Lake must be saved—because not saving it will change the climate around the lake, which will have repercussions on the terrestrial ecosystem. Everything is interconnected. Even the Chinese monsoon and our beloved Great Basin lakes.

The next morning at dawn, I walked back to the symposium along the misty Truckee River and watched three Mergansers float through the whitewater park downtown. I thought of the beauty of the Truckee River, and the beauty of the lakes discussed at the symposium. The urgency of saving Walker Lake contrasted with the economic and social disruption of retiring 100-year-old irrigated farmland in the Walker Basin—which is necessary to save it. The desperate looking woman asking for a dollar outside a casino, and the desperation of our climate change predicament.

We humans have trouble seeing past our own short term interests—but we also like beauty, stability, and fairness. And if we pause long enough to be inspired by the possibilities, and gather good information and have a well-informed, honest discussion, working with representatives from all the interested parties about creative solutions that can meet most of everyone’s needs, and hopefully some of our wants, and is fair and just—then I believe, in spite of pessimistic predictions and gargantuan efforts required of us, that there is definitely hope for us, for the ecosystems with which we are intertwined, and for the terminal lakes that depend upon our smart decision-making, generosity, and love. We are doing it at Mono Lake. We can and must do it elsewhere. I have hope—hope that can be replenished by a walk along a river or along Mono Lake’s shore. There is too much at stake to give up. Long Live Mono Lake—and other terminus lakes!