Still trying to play catch-up with the summer photos... When my dad was in town this summer we also stopped by Mono Lake right before we headed to Bodie. I thought this was just a beautiful spot and so interesting.
We had been doing a lot of driving that day and the girls were worn out from their colds and being on the road. Anna opted to stay in the car with GG but Lauren roused herself enough to accompany Daddy, Elaine, and me down the boardwalk to see the tufa.
When she got there and realized there were bugs, she was immediately engaged. She loved walking through the alkali flies to make them scatter.
The flies lay their eggs in the tufa and the birds come to eat the flies and their larvae.
Mono Lake is one of the oldest lakes in North America and dates back at least 760,000 years. The lake takes its name from the Native Americans who lived in the basin. The Kutzadika'a people collected the abundant alkali fly pupae found on the tufa as a main food source. As a result the Kutzadika'a were called Monache, meaning fly-eaters. Monache was shortened to Mono and was applied to the region and the people living there in the 1800s.
The strange spires and knobs you see are tufa (too-fah), formed when fresh water springs containing calcium bubbled up through carbonate-rich lake water. The combination formed calcium carbonate, a whitish limestone deposit that formed the basis of the tufa formations.
These formations continue to grow only while underwater. We're able to see the majority of the formations we see today due to the fact that in 1941, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power began diverting Mono Lake's tributary streams 350 miles south to meet the growing water demands of Los Angeles. Deprived of its freshwater sources, the volume of Mono Lake halved, while its salinity doubled. Unable to adapt to these changing conditions within such a short period of time, the ecosystem began to collapse. We were told that water levels dropped between 40-50 feet before laws were put in place to protect the lake.
