Mono Lake showing toll of L.A.'s thirst for water

Efforts to raise the saline oasis to a healthy level have fallen short. A hearing on a rule change and another campaign to save it are afoot.

- IAN JAMES

TOUR participants mix together calcium and carbonate, which form the craggy structures called tufa.

At a trailhead surrounded by sagebrush, a naturalist welcomes a group of visitors to Mono Lake beside a sign that reads "Oasis in the Desert.

Guide Ryan Garrett, his face alight, greets the group of vacationers and entreats them to see the value in the saline lake — it teems with migrating birds, it's around a million years old, and it's affected by water use in Southern California more than 300 miles away.

In the early 20th century, Los Angeles built a massive aqueduct to take water from the Owens Valley and soon dried up Owens Lake. Reaching for even more water, L.A. leaders pushed farther and began tapping water from the mountain streams that feed Mono Lake.

"Are they still taking water?" one woman asks.

"Yes, they are still diverting water," Garrett replies.

As they continue, Garrett explains how Mono Lake rapidly declined from the 1940s to the 1980s. They pass interpretive signs showing how much the water level dropped: 7 feet by 1951, 25 feet by 1963.

By 1982, the lake had fallen 45 feet from the natural level local people had once known.

Starved of inflows, the lake lost about half its volume and became twice as salty.