The April 29 Andrea Lawrence Award Dinner will now be held in the Parallax Restaurant at McCoy Station, Mammoth Mountain Ski Area. It’s easy to find: just park at Main Lodge and take the gondola up to McCoy station, where you’ll be able to enjoy beautiful views of Banner Peak, Mt. Ritter, the Minarets, and Mt. Andrea Lawrence itself while you dine. The dinner will start at 6:00pm and the gondola will begin running at 5:30. Please reserve your seat by April 11; tickets are $50 and can be reserved by calling (760) 657-6595 or emailing Julia.

Please visit this page for more information about the event.

We hope we’ll see you there!

View of Mt. Andrea Lawrence from Mammoth Mountain Ski Area's Parallax Restaurant on May 20, 2010. Photo by Greg Reis.

Get your binoculars ready for the Tenth Annual Mono Basin Bird Chautauqua coming June 17–19, 2011!

A pair of Violet-green Swallows dance above tufa towers. Photo courtesy of Marie Read.

Join us to celebrate ten years of spectacular birding, support avian research and conservation work, and have a darn good time.

This year we’ll offer some brand-new events, including an all-day hike in the spectacular Bodie Hills, the latest news from Owens Lake, and a discussion about the (more…)

The Mono Lake Committee building buried under new snow.

Today is the first day of spring. You wouldn’t know it to look around Lee Vining, where a swift winter storm dumped over 18 inches of snow between the hours of 10:00pm and 9:00am. When I tried to leave my house this morning I was briefly stymied by the thigh-high drifts piled against my door—I have a broken right arm and wasn’t sure I’d be able to shovel myself out one-handed. Luckily I devised a system of using my cast as a fulcrum against the shovel’s handle, a trick that came in handy when I arrived at work and had to shovel my way in.

Those of you who have visited us know that (more…)

Tomorrow, March 22, California State Park supporters will be traveling to Sacramento to meet with state legislators urging them to support legislation that will help stabilize the future for our state parks system.

Even if you can’t be there in person, you can help by sending a quick letter of support to this email address, and copy in your legislator. These letters will be delivered along with the message that our 278 state parks in California are a resource to be protected, preserved, and funded.

Yes, the California state budget crisis poses challenges, but big challenges require creative solutions. Awareness of the importance of our state parks is a fundamental message that legislators will hear tomorrow from our Park Advocacy Day representatives. Let’s help them deliver the message by adding our voice to theirs!

Sometime during the night of March 15, during another Sierra winter storm, a large rock broke loose from the northern ridge above Lundy Canyon. The van-sized boulder tumbled down hundreds of feet before it found a new home along the southern shoulder of the Lundy Road. Jeffrey pines were the only witnesses to, and victims of, the boulder’s kinetic journey. The local Mono County/Lee Vining road crew discovered the chunk of granite the morning of March 16 as they returned to plow the road. The rock fall occurred along a stretch of road containing several day-use areas, about a half-mile below the Lundy Canyon campground. The accelerated expansion of the universe excepted, gravity always gets its way.

New, temporary addition to the Lundy Canyon Road.

More than just snow falls in Lundy Canyon. Notice small dent in road.

Bowling for Jeffreys. There must be a dead squirrel around here somewhere!

Yesterday I woke up to a Say’s Phoebe’s windy call outside my window. Today I went for a little cross-country ski at lunch. What does that mean? It’s time for the Winter & Spring 2011 Mono Lake Newsletter to sprout.

As snowflakes fell this winter the Mono Lake Committee staff wrote up a storm of their own. You’ll find great articles on GFAJ-1 (the infamous arsenic-eating bacteria), the unusual winter flows on Rush Creek, a status report on the California Gull colony, a fresh look at Mill Creek’s water, the Mono Lake Committee’s mission to balance the water (more…)

The Mono Lake Committee invites you to a special event…

the Andrea Lawrence Award Dinner
6:00pm on Friday, April 29, 2011
Mountainside Conference Center
Main Lodge, Mammoth Mountain Ski Area

The dinner will feature a keynote address by Ron Nichols, new General Manager of the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power, followed by the presentation of the Andrea Lawrence Award to an organization whose environmental work deserves special recognition. The evening promises to be one of good food, good friends, (more…)

California Gulls at their Mono Lake nesting grounds. Photo by Nora Livingston.

Last weekend, Mono Lake Volunteer Coordinator and avid Mono naturalist Janet Carle watched about 50 California Gulls arrive at South Tufa, flying in an organized V formation. Janet reports that once they were over the water, they began circling and calling; she says “It looked like they decided they had arrived at the right place!”

Red-winged Blackbird. Photo courtesy of Alan D. Wilson.

Last Tuesday morning I awoke in my Lee Vining house to the sound of Red-winged Blackbirds calling in the elm tree outside. Right on schedule, they seem to arrive back in the Mono Basin just about March 1 of each year, trilling their cheerful “o-ka-lee” calls throughout town. (more…)

Snow-covered hills above Highway 395.

As a Mono Lake Committee Project Specialist, my duties are many and varied. From working in the Information Center & Bookstore to drafting grant proposals to pulling invasive weeds, I never seem to be doing the same thing for more than a few hours at a time, and each new project is an exciting surprise.

Last week our communications team gave me an interesting assignment. Every issue of the Mono Lake Newsletter features a “benchmark”—a pair of photos, one old, one current, showing a before-and-after snapshot of a particular site in the Mono Basin. This time we had the “before” photo, a shot taken by Burton Frasher in 1938. But the “after” photo (more…)

Now available on the Mono Basin Clearinghouse are the 1996 restoration plans that have guided restoration in the Mono Basin since they were implemented under Water Rights Orders 98-05 and 98-07 in 1998. Not everything in these plans was ordered as written—to understand the current restoration requirements, a (more…)