Mono Lake

Mono Lake has held water for at least 760,000 years, which makes it one of the oldest lakes in North America, and it has no outlet, so everything the streams carry in stays. The result is water about three times saltier than the ocean and strongly alkaline, supporting a food web of exactly two abundant animals: brine shrimp and alkali flies, in numbers that feed millions of migratory birds. Roughly eighty percent of California's nesting California gulls hatch here. The tufa towers along the south shore are limestone, grown underwater where calcium-rich springs met the alkaline lake, and they are visible only because the lake dropped.

The Kootzaduka'a have lived in this basin since time immemorial. Their name comes from kootzabe, the alkali fly pupae they harvested from these shores, and the tribe is still seeking federal recognition and a land base in its own homeland.

Los Angeles began diverting the lake's tributary streams in 1941. Over the next four decades the lake fell forty-five vertical feet, lost half its volume, doubled in salinity, and exposed a land bridge that let coyotes reach the gull nesting islands. What stopped it was law: the California Supreme Court applied the public trust doctrine to the lake in 1983, and the State Water Board set a target level of 6,392 feet in 1994. The lake is rising, slowly, and still has not reached it.

Start at South Tufa off CA-120.