Mono Lake

This stretch of shore holds the lake’s strangest feature: pale, knobbed towers of stone standing in and just out of the water. They are tufa, a kind of limestone, and the odd thing about them is where they grew — entirely underwater. Freshwater springs seep up through the lake bed carrying dissolved calcium, and the moment that calcium meets the lake’s mineral-heavy, alkaline water, it hardens into rock, building slowly upward around each spring like a chimney. Every tower you see marks a spot where fresh water once welled up from below. They stand exposed now because the lake surface sits lower than it once did, leaving the towers stranded in the air, though they were made in water. Walk among them slowly. Their lumpy, cauliflower surfaces are the record of countless small mineral encrustations, laid down grain by grain. Nothing here was carved by hand or piled by wave; it accreted, the way a cave formation does, only out in the open beside a desert lake. This is the clearest place to see the idea behind this whole note — water that keeps what it is given, and turns some of it to stone.

From this point the whole basin opens up, and the thing to read is not one rock but the shape of the land itself. Mono Lake is a lake with no way out. Streams run in off the mountains, but no river runs out, so the water can only leave by evaporating — and the salt and minerals it carried stay behind, growing more concentrated over hundreds of thousands of years. That is why the water is salty and alkaline, why it feels slick between the fingers, and why so little can live in it. Look up at the surrounding hills and you may pick out faint horizontal lines or benches on the slopes, well above today’s shore. Those are old beaches. In colder times the lake stood far higher and wider than now, deep enough that glaciers reached down to its edge. Each stranded shoreline marks a level the water once held and later fell from. Standing here, you are at the bottom of a basin that has been filling and shrinking across a span longer than almost anything you can see, keeping a little more of the mountains with every cycle.

Black Point is a low, dark hill on the lake’s north shore, and it is made of what the basin produces best after minerals: volcanic rock. It rose as an eruption on the lake floor when the water stood far higher, its dark ash chilling and stacking underwater, and it stands above the surface now that the lake is lower. Along its flat top run narrow cracks — the fissures the place is named for — deep, straight-walled slots, in places just wide enough to step into, opened as the mound cooled and settled. From up here the two islands lie out in the lake to the south. The larger one rose from the basin’s own sediments, pushed up by eruptions only a few centuries ago and still warm with hot springs; the smaller, darker one is older lava. Together with Black Point under your feet, they make one point plain: the fire here is neither finished nor ancient. This lake sits over ground that has erupted well within the time people have lived beside it.

Return to the water’s edge and change what you are looking for: not stone now, but life making a living on salt. Where the lake meets the land, the ground can look like it is moving — dark bands of small flies covering the wet shore. These are alkali flies. They do not bite, and they part ahead of your feet and close behind you as you walk. Few creatures can live in water this salty, but the ones that can live in great supply, and that abundance is the reason this lake matters to birds. Gulls nest out on the islands, safe from anything that would reach a nest from shore. In migration, small shorebirds and diving birds stop here to fatten on the brine before moving on. Ospreys, big fish-hawks, build bulky stick nests on the tallest tufa towers, using the surrounding water as a moat against anything that might climb to their young. Harsh at first glance, this is in fact a crowded larder — proof that keeping everything the rivers bring also means keeping a strange, rich table set.

Come back to the lake’s edge as the light goes. This is high desert with dry air and little town glow, so once the sun is down the sky over the water fills with stars, and near a new moon the darkness runs deep enough to show the pale band of the Milky Way arched over the basin. The lake turns to a black mirror, and on a still night it doubles the sky above it. This is also a good hour for the birds. Many of the lake’s travelers move and call at dusk, and the flat water carries sound — gulls settling on the islands, the whir of wings over the shallows. Deep time and the present moment sit close together here. Overhead is light that left its stars long before this lake existed; underfoot is a basin that has been filling and drying for a span the mind can barely hold. Bring a warm layer, because even in the milder months the desert night drops cold fast once the sun is off the water.