Here at the Mono Lake Committee we are collectors of lake level stories. They help us paint a picture of this place informed by more than just our own experiences. They’re benchmarks, data points of a different variety. Of course, we can crunch numbers and come up with an accurate answer to the question of what a drop of a foot and a half will look like, but in some ways, an exact measurement is not exactly what we’re looking for.
The Committee recently received a generous gift along these lines—eight photo albums filled with beautiful, and meticulously dated, photographs of Mono Lake by the late Jay More, donated, and hand-delivered to Lee Vining, by his granddaughter and her family. For this issue’s benchmark photos (page 13), I took copies of some of Mr. More’s photos down to South Tufa to re-photograph them.
It’s hard to see the lake so low. You almost feel like you should look away, but the landscape left behind is oddly fascinating. It feels like progress lost. But as I navigated the freshly-abandoned mud flats, I began to see the silver lining in this landscape of lake level stories. It is the lake level story that we know so well: People made the lake level drop, but people also made the lake level rise. All of us—students, birders, lawyers, politicians, toilet flushers, engineers, lawn-ripper-uppers, anglers, photographers, paddlers….
Just about every article in this issue of the Mono Lake Newsletter hits on this theme: make the most of the water you have. This is the lake level story that Mono Lake tells us. Conserve, plan ahead, use good data, get creative, don’t become complacent, and take care of your water. I hope you find this in the pages that follow. And as hard as it may be to see, I hope that you get a chance to see Mono Lake for yourself this summer.