The road to Bodie State Historic Park opened yesterday at noon, just in time for the holiday weekend. Bodie’s museum is not yet open (opening May 1), but you can visit the park during their open hours of 9:00am–3:00pm.

As you travel to Mono Lake this weekend be sure to stop by Bodie as well—you won’t be disappointed!

Calling all saline lake fans…. Register now for the 2012 Great Salt Lake Issues Forum, May 10 & 11 at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

Great Salt Lake. Photo by Charles Uibel.

Hosted by our sister organization, Friends of Great Salt Lake, the forum will examine “Changing Conditions and the Future of Salt Lakes” this year. This year the program will include speakers from Owens (dry) Lake, the Salton Sea, the Dead Sea, and—of course—Mono (more…)

For a beautiful break in your workday, take a look at this moving slideshow about the “magnificent 70″—those state parks on the closure list. See if you can recognize those that have been removed….

Saddleback Butte State Park in Antelope Valley.

Morro Strand State Beach on the Central Coast.

Grizzly Creek Redwoods State Park in Northern California.

Castle Rock State Park. Photo by Karen T. Borchers.

THE ENCOURAGING: Today is Park Advocacy Day at the state capitol in Sacramento. Please take a moment to tell policymakers that state parks should be defended from park closures. The successes of the ten state parks to come off the closure list show that your voice makes a huge difference!

THE GOOD: Castle Rock State Park, located along the crest of the Santa Cruz Mountains, is the tenth California state park to be removed from the closure list! Congratulations to all who (more…)

Come on out to the Mono Basin National Forest Scenic Area Visitor Center next Thursday, March 22 for a fun day of sprucing up the building and grounds in preparation for season opening!

The Mono Basin Visitor Center. Photo by Arya Degenhardt.

Volunteers are needed starting at 9:00am, and the Eastern Sierra Interpretive Association will provide lunch for everyone. Wear work clothes and bring gloves if you’d prefer to do outside clean-up work. Call the Visitor Center at (760) 647-3042 with any questions. We look forward to seeing you there!

Congratulations to friends and supporters of South Yuba River State Park—on Wednesday, February 8 it joined eight other state parks that have come off the closure list!

The South Yuba River.

Similarly to the effort that removed Mono Lake’s state park from the closure list, South Yuba River State Park’s allies collected 10,000 letters of support for the park, got the Nevada County Board of Supervisors unanimously on board, and are working on a parking fee collection strategy to bring funding to the park. Grassroots organizing, practical solutions, and making our voices heard is working—save our state parks!

In December of 2010 NASA researchers announced that they had found bacteria in Mono Lake that could subsist on arsenic instead of phosphorus. The study prompted much discussion on the web and in the scientific community, and raised welcome awareness for Mono Lake’s unique and exciting ecosystem as well as the ongoing research in the area.

Recently, Nature published the news that a team of researchers at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada have been trying to reproduce the results of the original study without success.

Since the January 20 post the web has been buzzing with fresh debate about the original study, the refutation of it, and the further research that is surely to come. Those of us at the shores of Mono Lake look forward to hearing and reading about GFAJ-1 for a long time. And the bottom line? Mono Lake—the source of the bacteria in question—is definitely worth protecting for many, many reasons, including the fact that there is value in looking deeper into research like this.

Registration opened today for all the 2012 Field Seminars. The great selection of classes include birding, photography, kayaking, natural history, pastel painting, botany, geology, basket making, and much more! Check out the seminars and sign up today—spaces are filling quickly.

Just up the road from Mono Lake, Bodie State Historic Park is an incredible place to visit. Bodie’s cemetery is full of monuments, but park staff have always known that there are many more graves than those that are still marked. The Bodie Foundation recently brought forensically-trained dogs to Bodie to find unmarked remains, as shown in this short Animal Planet video.

The dogs are trained to sniff for human remains and indicate the locations of those remains to their handlers. After the dogs have done a search the sagebrush landscape near Bodie’s cemetery is dotted with small flags. As ranger Terri Geissinger says, “Those people matter. They matter just like we do today.”

The Bodie Foundation is the partner non-profit for state parks at Bodie, Mono Lake, and Grover Hot Springs. They recently stepped up to implement a fee collection strategy at Mono Lake’s Old Marina, which helped get Mono Lake’s state park off the closure list!

The complete list of all the Mono Lake Committee’s 2012 Field Seminars is now available online here.

Take a look at the offerings, read up on the expert instructors, and plan your summer schedule. Then be ready to sign up at 9:00am on Wednesday, February 1!

Any questions? Call (760) 647-6595.