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…)