Postcard from Mono Lake

The journey continues…

The Old Tioga Pass Road in the 1950’s was, at most, one lane wide. But one day, many summers ago when I was maybe 9 or 10, my father, mother and little brother climbed into our family Buick at our campsite in Yosemite’s High Country and headed east on that old road…destination Mono Lake.

In those day, one drove that road extremely carefully. When approaching a blind curve, and there were plenty of them, you honked your horn to warn possible oncoming cars that you were there. If you were going uphill and met another car coming down, you pulled as far to the right as you could. Downhill cars had the right of way. When you pulled off the road to make way, you were way off the road…so one had to be doubly careful.

It was always an interesting ride on that old road. We actually did that road a few times, but only once to the far off destination of Mono Lake. To get there you leave Yosemite at the Tioga Ranger Station, elevation 9,700 ft. Then you drop down to Mono Lake, elevation 6,379 ft.…in 14.5 miles.

As you can imagine, it was a steep drop on that old road. Even today, it is a steep road. But back in the 1950’s, one had to worry about brake overheating going down, and engine overheating going up. Every time I think about that drive, I have nothing but admiration for my father and his accomplishments of driving the Old Tioga Pass Road.

By the way, if you are ever hiking up in the Yosemite High Country, you will probably run into sections of the old road. A few years ago, I ran into one piece of the road near Tenaya  Lake…it was smaller than I remembered.

The Mono Lake I saw that day in the 1950’s is vastly different than the one I saw this day. Back then, the elevation of the lake was 6,417 feet. Today, the elevation is 6,379 feet, a difference of 38 feet. That doesn’t sound like much, but it made a huge difference in the way the lake appears.

The tufa's you see in this photo were underwater back in the ‘50’s. I won’t go into the process of how they form, but they are made up the minerals found in the lake (mostly limestone). Mono Lake is an alkaline lake…no fish. The only inhabitants of the lake are the tiny brine shrimp, about 4-6 trillion of them. Its not human food, but the migratory birds who stop there on their journey north and south, just love them. 

In 1941, the city of Los Angeles decided to divert the water in Owens Creek for their own use. The remaining creeks that fed the lake were not enough to keep it at its old elevation. So, gradually the lake dropped, exposing the tufa’s.

In 1994, the State of California stopped LA from its water diversions, after an in-depth study showed the devastating effects it was having on the ecology of the entire area. Since then, the lake has been slowly rising again. Eventually, the tufa’s will be back underwater.

I visited Mono Lake early in the morning, before sunrise to catch the great light that sunrise offers. Sadly, it was not a great sunrise and there were no clouds, so most of my photos of that day were not all that good.  But I must say, I found it all quite interesting and definitely worth the visit.

When you walk down the path from the parking lot to the Tufa’s, there are markers along the way showing how high the lake was in various years. Then you really see first hand how far the lake dropped.

After leaving Mono Lake, I spent the rest of the day photographing the glorious Autumn colors of the the Inyo National Forest, about halfway up the road to Yosemite.

Then I spent another uncomfortable night in my tent in the National Forest Campground.

When I set out on this journey, I mentioned on day one that this was a journey of discovery about the West and about myself and my new life as a single man. Well, here is one of the things I discovered:

I may be too old to be camping out. I cannot get from a horizontal position, such as being in a sleeping bag, to a vertical position as easily as I used to. In fact it is damn hard. An being almost a senior citizen, I cannot stay in a sleeping bag all night without having to get up at least once. I will leave it at that, other than to say it was damned difficult and I almost collapsed the tent a couple of times.

Be that as it may, I do not regret one minute of my time on this journey. The next day, my plan was to head up into Yosemite’s high country and visit some of my most favorite spots on the planet.

Stay tuned for more…