“In the middle distance there rests upon the desert plain what appears to be a wide sheet of burnished metal, so even and brilliant is its surface. It is Lake Mono.” So wrote Israel C. Russell in the “Quaternary History of the Mono Valley” in 1889. Much of the ancient saline lake hasn’t changed. Mono Lake, which covers more than 70 square miles, has no fish. It is believed the lake could be 1 million to 3 million years old, and it is among the oldest lakes in North America. One thing that has changed here as the landscape makes the transition from the Sierra Nevada Mountains to the Great Basin Desert is the appearance of tufa, unusual rock formations that crowd the shore. The tufa towers are limestone and grow underwater; they are exposed because the lake grew more shallow when water diversions started in 1941.
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