On November 12th, 2009, at approximately 5:30 pm, the roar of hail on metal roofs resounded throughout the town of Lee Vining. It hailed really hard for about an hour, followed by a transition from 1/4 inch hail to smaller and smaller hail until it turned to snow by 8:00 pm. The snow continued until around 9pm. The next morning we measured about (more…)

The Fall 2009 edition of the Mono Lake Newsletter is now available online and in color. Can you find yourself in the crowd on the cover? Want to know the status of Willow Flycatchers on Rush Creek? … see the interview with (more…)

WEATHER
Typical early October weather is to have highs near 70 and lows near freezing, however this unseasonably warm weather prevailed during the first week in November. The average November high is in the low 50s and the average low is in the upper 20s, and starting this weekend the weather is back to normal. Clear, sunny days are expected to continue (more…)

Photo by Robert Glenn Ketchum.

For those of you in the Sacramento area, a treat is coming your way on Friday, November 13 from 5:30 pm to 9:30 pm. That evening, the Viewpoint Photographic Art Center will be opening a new photographic exhibit by artist Robert Glenn Ketchum. The new show, titled “Southwest Alaska and Bristol Bay: A World of Parks and Wildlife Refuges at the Crossroads,” will be on display until (more…)

The Los Angeles Times is running a great profile of Eastern Sierra bird experts extraordinaire Tom and Jo Heindel! Read it here:

They’re really and truly for the birds

One of the units with a new roof on the left. An example of the old roof on the right.

This past month roofers finished installing a new roof on the Mono Basin Field Station. The old roof was well past its prime, decaying and losing shingles with each puff of wind. The new roof is metal and will withstand all the wind and snow the Mono Basin can deliver.

The new roof is the latest physical improvement to this local research station that has been continually hosting research projects since 2004. In 2009 (more…)

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 (more…)

The International Symposium on Terminus Lakes has a subtitle on the program: “preserving endangered lakes through research.” Gathering reliable information really is the first step in saving a lake—with Mono Lake, the 1976 ecological study laid the groundwork for the formation of the Mono Lake Committee and its early work, and the fight to save the lake over the years benefited from the many other studies of the ecosystem.

With the Walker Lake watershed north of Mono Lake, (more…)

“We must prepare for a change toward dryness” said Wally Broecker in his keynote address Warming Planet, Shifting Rainfall, Lessons from the Past.

Broecker, from Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and well-known in the climate science field, was Tuesday’s keynote speaker at the International Symposium on Terminus Lakes. He first visited (more…)

I arrived in Reno, Nevada on Monday, about two and a half hours after leaving Mono Lake. The best year ever for fall color was moving downhill, and while the Mono Basin still held pockets of intensely colored leaves, Topaz was now the epicenter of the color with the beautiful giant cottonwoods along the highway blazing with color and dropping many yellow leaves on Highway 395.

I checked in to the International Symposium on Terminus Lakes at the (more…)