Undaunted by menacing storm clouds, a group of ten volunteers from Patagonia’s Reno store spent Friday afternoon uprooting invasive plants from sites along the Lee Vining Creek Trail. The task seemed pretty hopeless at first, but we removed a whopping sixty-six pounds of bouncing bet and cleared large sections of the trail. Thank you Patagonia!

Bouncing Bet -- before. Photo by Julia Runcie.

Bouncing Bet -- after! Photo by Julia Runcie.

There’s still a lot of work to be done, and we’ll be holding further “pulling parties” on three Wednesday mornings during the summer: July 28th, August 18th, and September 1st. Pulling Party Number 1 will take place from 9am to 12pm on Wednesday, July 28th at the Mill Creek culvert on Cemetery Road. Meet at the Mono Lake Committee at 9am to carpool to Mill Creek, or join us whenever you can at the culvert. Every little bit counts — stay for twenty minutes, an hour, or the whole morning! Email me with any questions. Watch out weeds!

Patagonia volunteers with 66 lbs of uprooted bouncing bet. Photo by Arya Degenhardt.

by Julia Runcie and Hannah Doherty

Normally when the two of us head down to Rush Creek on Tuesday afternoons it’s an easy wade through ankle-deep water to reach the eastern bank. We hike through a willow thicket to a very old and overgrown utility road, and then the hunt begins for the six piezometers, or groundwater gauges, that hide in the brush on either side of the trail. At each piezometer we extend a tape measure deep into the throat of a PVC pipe until it hits water, and we record the depth. It’s often a struggle even to catch sight of the pool at the base of each pipe. But last week was different. (more…)