Mono Lake: From Dead Sea to Environmental Treasure

1: The Changing Perceptions of Mono Lake

1 CH A PTER 1 The Changing Perceptions of Mono Lake T he American Indians of the Eastern Sierra knew of Mono Lake and made use of its resources. The name Mono derives from the Shoshonean term for fly larvae—a basic food source the Mono Paiute Indians obtained by harvesting brine-fly larvae at the shores of Mono Lake. To other tribes the Mono were the “fly people,” a description that comes to us from the studies of anthropologists. As the first occupants of the region, these native peoples left no written records. Recorded observations of the lake begin with the people who came to the Mono Basin as explorers and prospectors, followed by reporters, scientists, tourists, and the settlers who made the region their home and came to appreciate its scenic values and economic possibilities. Perhaps the most famous description, and certainly the best known, comes from Samuel Clemens, writing under his pen name of Mark Twain. In the early 1860s Clemens traveled out to the West, observing with a jaundiced eye the silver rushes, wild boomtowns, and frontier life of California and Nevada and settling in for a stint as a reporter on the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. Out of his experiences Clemens wrote Roughing It, a broadly humorous account of life on the mining frontier. In chapter 38 Clemens gives a detailed description of Mono Lake, “an unpretending expanse of grayish water, about a hundred miles in circumference, with two islands in its center, mere upheavals of rent and scorched and blistered lava, snowed over with great banks and drifts of pumice-stone and ashes, the winding sheet of the dead volcano, whose vast crater the lake has seized upon and occupied.” Combining a literary style of awe and sarcasm, Clemens described this “loneliest spot on earth,” its highly alkaline waters without fish, frogs, 2 Chapter 1 Map of Mono Basin region. Courtesy of the Mono Lake Committee. The Changing Perceptions of Mono Lake 3 snakes, or polliwogs—“nothing, in fact, that goes to make life desirable.” He noted the vast numbers of wild ducks and gulls, erroneously believed the brine-fly larvae were worms, and saw the ecosystem of Mono Lake as an ironic kind of food chain. “The ducks eat the flies—the flies eat the worms—the Indians eat all three—the wildcats eat the Indians—the white folks eat the wildcats—and thus all things are lovely.” Clemens could not resist inventing or passing on some tall tales. Thus he wrote of Samuel Clemens labeled Mono Lake “the Dead Sea of the West.” Courtesy of the California State Library. 4 Chapter 1 his barking dog, which, having jumped into the lake to escape the swarms of flies, lost its bark because “the alkali water had cleaned the bark all out of his outside, and he probably wished he had never embarked in any such enterprise.” Noting the plentiful supply of sea gull eggs, Clemens claimed there were boiling springs on the islands where the eggs could be hard-boiled in four minutes. He observed that weather conditions around the lake were so extreme that in summer a lady had to take both fan and snowshoes when making social calls. He also insisted that he had seen it snow on the Fourth of July. Clemens took time out from the tall tales to note that Mono Lake had no outlet. “It neither rises nor falls,” he said, “and what it does with its surplus water is a dark and bloody mystery.” Samuel Clemens’s comments on Mono Lake have enjoyed enduring notoriety, and a later generation in Mono County would commemorate his visit to the lake by holding an annual Mark Twain Days celebration. But his published remarks were not the first observations on Mono Lake. Other visitors to the Mono Basin wrote of their impressions, perhaps with less humor but more fidelity to actual details. The first recorded description of Mono Lake came possibly from Zenas Leonard, clerk of the Joseph Reddeford Walker expedition that crossed the Sierra Nevada Range in 1833. Although much is uncertain about the westward trek of the Walker expedition—its greatest claim to fame would come with its discovery of Yosemite Valley—Leonard did describe a lake that “has no outlet for the water, except that which sinks into the ground. The water in this lake is similar to lie [sic] and tastes much like...