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.

Water cascades over the Lundy Lake Reservoir spillway on its way down Mill Creek to Mono Lake. Photo by Sarah Melcher.

I grabbed the flow meter and eagerly drove out to Lundy Canyon, where our beloved Mill Creek runs in its complicated course to Mono Lake. As the intern assigned to monitor Mill Creek this summer, I got to be one of the first people to see Lundy Lake Reservoir spill into the usually less-than-full creek bed.

Typically, Mill Creek is diverted at Lundy Lake to the SCE power plant. Some of that water is then diverted for delivery to water rights holders, but (more…)