Mono Lake
Interesting facts
- In 2010 a lake-bed bacterium, GFAJ-1, was claimed to use arsenic in place of phosphorus; independent labs refuted this in 2012 and the paper was retracted in 2025.
- Each summer the lake teems with an estimated 4 to 6 trillion brine shrimp of Artemia monica, a species found nowhere else.
- Alkali flies feed on the lake bed by crawling underwater wrapped in a small bubble of air that keeps them dry.
- A nematode of the genus Auanema discovered here tolerates arsenic at roughly 500 times the dose a human could survive.
- Paoha Island, the larger of the lake's two islands, was raised by volcanic activity only about 350 years ago.
- Pink Floyd's 1975 album Wish You Were Here includes a photograph of a diver taken among the lake's tufa towers.
- Mark Twain wrote about the lake in Roughing It (1872), calling its desert setting the loneliest place on earth.
- As the water fell, Negit Island became linked to the shore, letting coyotes reach the island's California gull nesting colony.
- During the last ice age its predecessor, Lake Russell, stood about 1,100 feet higher than Mono Lake does today.
Why it is worth it
Mono Lake is older than the Sierra Nevada range towering beside it — geologists estimate it at more than 760,000 years old, making it one of the oldest lakes in North America. It has no outlet, only inflow from Sierra snowmelt streams, so every mineral that has ever washed into it over three-quarters of a million years is still in there, concentrated rather than flushed to the sea.
The tufa towers people come to photograph are essentially frozen plumbing. Underwater springs rich in calcium bubble up through the lake's carbonate-heavy water, and where the two meet, calcium carbonate precipitates and slowly builds columns over centuries. The ones you see standing in open air today aren't new — they only became visible once the lake dropped low enough to expose formations that grew fully submerged. In a very literal sense, the tufa towers are a measuring stick for how much water has been taken from the lake.
That drop has a specific culprit: in 1941 the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power extended its aqueduct into the Mono Basin and began diverting the streams that fed the lake, 350 miles south to the city. By the early 1980s the lake had fallen 45 vertical feet and doubled in salinity, collapsing the food web of brine shrimp and alkali flies that nearly two million migratory birds — California gulls, eared grebes, Wilson's and red-necked phalaropes — depend on each year. A citizen campaign led by the Mono Lake Committee won a landmark 1994 California State Water Board ruling requiring minimum lake levels to protect the ecosystem — one of the first major U.S. legal precedents treating an ecosystem's water needs as a right on par with a city's, and it's still cited in water-law disputes today.
Good to know
No fish live in the lake — it's too alkaline — but the trillions of brine shrimp and alkali flies it does support were historically harvested by the Kutzadika'a Paiute people as a food source, drying the flies' pupae ('kutsavi') for winter use.
Best time to visit
Calm, still mornings give the clearest tufa reflections; late summer (around August) brings the largest concentrations of migratory grebes and phalaropes.
Getting there
133 km from South Lake Tahoe. Mammoth Yosemite Airport (MMH) is about 46 km away.
Plan your visit
We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.
Nearby places
- Bodie 21.7 km · ghost-town
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Mono Lake is a saline soda lake in Mono County, California, formed at least 760,000 years ago as a terminal lake in an endorheic basin. The lack of an outlet causes high levels of salts to accumulate in the lake which make its water alkaline.
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