4—
The Streams Go South
"How did you go bankrupt?" Bill asked. "Two ways," Mike said. "Gradually and then suddenly."
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
Early in 1941 a young fisheries biologist sat down in his cabin near June Lake and wrote a letter to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. "On March 10," Elden Vestal reported, "I examined Rush Creek below the new Grant Lake dam and was dismayed to find that no flow, whatsoever, was occurring in the stream." The streambed had been dry most of the time since the previous October. Vestal made a modest request: "I would greatly appreciate the Department turning in and maintaining a flow at all times of not less than five cubic feet per second." This tiny flow, Vestal thought, would serve to keep the fine trout stream minimally healthy while he sought advice from his superiors.
The answer came quickly, and it came from the top. "Dear Sir," wrote H. A. Van Norman, Mulholland's successor in Los Angeles. "The Division of Fish and Game of the State of California and the Department of Water and Power of the City of Los Angeles have entered into an agreement relative to the operation of the Grant Lake and Long Valley Reservoirs, and it is suggested that you contact your central office to make yourself familiar with the terms of the agreement."
Vestal did check with his boss, chief of the Bureau of Fish Conservation. "The reply was a thinly veiled warning to stop my investigations into what was apparently a very sensitive political question," says Vestal. And so he learned that Rush Creek had been sold, so to speak, down the river. He also learned, as he put it later, that "the City of Los Angeles was God Almighty."
Image not available.
Elden Vestal of the Department
of Fish and Game. His protest
against the drying-up of Rush
Creek earned him a sharp
reprimand.
(Photo by Gerda S. Mathan)
Vestal, one of the first professional biologists ever to work for California Fish and Game, had been in the region off and on since 1938. He had walked and fished the local waters—"One of the tools of the trade is a fly rod"—and knew lower Rush Creek as an extraordinary trout water, a place to catch fourteen-inch German browns. He was, of course, aware of the Los Angeles project—the region was swarming with construction workers, and the higher Grant Lake dam was taking shape upstream. But he had had no idea of how much water would be taken.
The initial alarm came to seem overblown. Once Grant Lake was filled, Los Angeles extracted less water than it was physically capable of taking. The early 1940s were wet years; there was flow to spare. Though Rush Creek below the dam suffered, the stretch farthest downstream, the three miles between the narrows and the lake, did not. Irrigation continued on the porous fiats above the creek, and the springs near the narrows continued to flow, adding cold, clear water to the diminished main stream. The watercress beds continued to provide food and shelter. The spawning gravels, the multiple channels, the undercut banks, remained. It was still a good place for fish.
In 1946, rather daringly in view of the prospects, Fish and Game chose lower Rush Creek for an experiment in the planting of rainbow trout. Elden Vestal, back in the region after a stint in the army, supervised the Rush Creek test stream. He arrived in time to see the respite end.
The years from 1947 to 1951 were dry. Los Angeles exported all available water, shutting down local irrigation. Little or no water came down the channel from Grant Lake, and the springs, too, began to dwindle. During 1951, the mean summer flow was down
to 2.5 cubic feet per second. Fishermen were complaining. The stream and the fish were barely surviving. The "vital thread," as Vestal calls it, was not yet snapped but was stretched to the limit. At the same time, down on the Rush Creek delta, the marshes and Walter Dombrowski's duck ponds were going dry.
Elden Vestal was not there to see the thread snap. In 1950 he left the region for another Fish and Game post, taking with him his copious notes.
The second major stream that Los Angeles tapped, Lee Vining Creek, was in many respects a scaled-down version of Rush. It had the same narrow, brimming channels, the same streamside gallery forest. But lower Lee Vining Creek had no significant springs. Except for a stretch immediately below the diversion dam, and occasional wetyear spills over it, the more northerly creek saw no water after the spring of 1947. Pines, cottonwoods, and willows died. In the early 1950s a fire completed the destruction of the riparian woodland. The creek became a desert gulch, littered with old tires sent bouncing down the embankment from Lee Vining above.
The Lake Withdraws
The effects on Mono Lake itself were delayed rather longer. In 1941, Mono's surface stood at 6,417 feet above sea level, well down from a historic high of 6,428 in 1919. Without diversion, the lake would now have begun rising; even with diversion, for several years it almost held its own. Even after it began to drop, in 1947, the recession seemed without practical consequence. Until the middle 1950s, in fact, Mono Lake was still within the range of recent natural fluctuations, no lower than it had been in 1861.
Then, in 1955, the water surface dropped below the 6,405-foot elevation mark, and in rapid succession several types of degradation set in.
At higher levels, the lake had lapped at hillsides; now increasingly its margins lay on gentle plains. At higher levels, the shore was sandy; now the adjacent sediments were finer, and mudflats formed. In the higher lake, currents had carried sand along the shore, building beaches and bars with brackish lagoons behind them; these wetlands, found especially on the northeast shore, were important duck habitats. As the lake sank below 6,402 feet, the sand sources were left behind. Moreover, shallows north of Negit Island began to block the "longshore" currents. The old lakeside lagoons drained, becoming dry bowls, and no new ones formed. On Paoha Island, several interior salt ponds (two of them named Heart Lake and Dollar Lake) dried up also.
At the mouths of the major creeks, additional lagoons and wetlands were lost. Here the retreating lake had steadily been exposing the underwater deltas, big fan-like deposits where the streams had dropped their sediments. In this same period of the late 1950s, the lake margin reached the abrupt outward edges of these fans. As it continued to drop, groundwater drained from the abandoned flats above, and large areas went dry.
In other areas around the shore, marshland and wet meadow actually expanded as
the lake retreated. In some of these stretches—along the west shore, for instance—the green mat widened as the water's edge shifted; but in other and far vaster reaches, an alkali flat came to occupy the immediate shoreline. Separated from the shore, the wetlands lost much of their habitat value. Though springs tended to migrate downslope as well, they moved less far than the lake; there were fewer spots where fresh water pooled on top of the brine.
These shoreline changes affected the ducks most of all. There would still be waterfowl at Mono Lake, but at a fraction of the old numbers.
For people, too, the Mono shorelands became less pleasant, less useful. Miles of sandy beaches gave way to miles of sticky mud. In the early 1960s, a marina opened just north of Lee Vining. Water-skiing competitions were held there. By the end of the decade, though, the adjacent waters were too shallow and hazardous for boating. The place became known as "the Old Marina" or "Sneaker Flat" (for the guck that would suck off your tennis shoes). It was at this time that the Department of Water and Power opened its Grant Lake reservoir to recreation.
Not every change was a scenic loss. As the lake fell, the tufa displays were transformed. Tufa "groves" that had stood at water's edge were left high and dry and became less interesting. But new and more spectacular stands were exposed. Today's most extensive tufa displays, South Tufa and Lee Vining Tufa, were uncovered at this time.
Also revealed were the bizarre natural sculptures known as sand tufas. These form beneath the shifting lake margin, where sand is permeated alternately by salt water and fresh. When the waters mix, tufa precipitates, cementing the sand in intricate tubes and layers. By nature these structures are buried and hidden, but the prolonged modern regression of the lake exposed them. Some were displayed in cross-section in eroded banks; the most spectacular stood free. Here wind and gravity, removing the sand particles not bound by tufa, left fantastic chambered monuments up to six feet high. Sand tufas came to be sentimentalized as fairy castles, but that does not do justice to their weirdness: they seem, rather, the hives of some unearthly insect with an exquisite sense of form.
And what about the living things of the lake itself? Just what was happening to them during the years of recession is harder to estimate. We really don't know what, besides brine shrimp and alkali flies, lived in the pre-diversion lake, so we don't know what may have ceased to live there. There were apparently several water plants that vanished as the lake grew saltier. Old-timers recall drifts of an ivory-colored alga: "That's what your ducks really went to town on." There were certainly several types of microscopic animals now gone.
High salinities seem to reduce the crop of the lake's basic foodstuff, algae. Flies and shrimp had to spend more of their energy keeping their tissues free of excessive salt. Brine shrimp apparently became smaller, though not less numerous. Alkali flies grew
Image not available.
Portrait of decline: tufa towers at the northwest
corner of the lake as seen in 1962 (top),
1968 (center), and 1982.
(Photos courtesy Mono Lake Committee)
both smaller and somewhat fewer; the shoreline windrows of dislodged pupae, favored food of birds and Paiutes, grew less lavish. In the late 1950s, the Kuzedika stopped visiting the shores to gather kutsavi . Red-necked phalaropes, which subsist entirely on flies, later began to feel the effects of lessened food supply.
There was no collapse of the web of life at Mono Lake, no sudden die-off. In Hemingway's terms, it had not yet reached the sudden phase of bankruptcy. But there was a clear impoverishment, a definite loss of vigor.
Alkali and Dust Storms
As its surface fell further below 6,400 feet, Mono Lake began, for the first time, to appear distinctly shrunken, too small for its bed. On the north and east, the rim of exposed alkali, narrow at first, grew ever more broad. This strip is a chemical wasteland that plants are very slow to colonize. Sparse local rainfall might leach the surface in time, but the poison is constantly renewed from below. A few feet down lies groundwater even saltier than the lake; as capillary action draws it toward the surface it evaporates, leaving a salt crust that replaces itself as fast as it is blown or washed away.
As early as 1965, the expanding alkali band gave rise to something new in Mono Basin weather: the dust storm. This is windy country, especially in the spring and fall, and now the winds had long expanses of alkali to work on. They picked up the microscopic
Image not available.
Blowing dust on the east shore, seen from the old Clover Ranch.
(Photo © Jim Stimson)
salt particles by the ton and built great clouds of them. The first storms were small, but within a few years they became immense. At times the eastern two-thirds of the lake, including the islands, would disappear in the gray-brown cloud. An airline pilot once mistook dust swirling off Paoha Island for a volcanic eruption.
Very fine dust, we now know, is particularly nasty stuff to breathe. Human nasal passages have defenses, mucus and traps of hair, to screen out larger motes and grains before they reach the lungs, but Mono-type dust particles are so minute that they slip right through. Being in the middle of an eastern Sierra dust storm subjects the lungs to more ultra-fine particles than being in the middle of a forest fire. You could think of alkali dust as albino soot.
In the short term, breathing the stuff is highly irritating and can cause real distress
for the very young, the very old, and anyone with a lung disorder. Repeated exposure may injure lung tissue and possibly give rise to cancers, due mainly to physical irritation but potentially also to chemical effects. Mono dust contains the carcinogen arsenic in amounts that may warrant concern.
Such dust storms were nothing new down in the Owens Valley, where the desiccated playa of Owens Lake had been feeding them for years. The Owens storms often blow right up the trough of the valley, over the towns. Mono Basin residents are luckier. Most of them live on the western edge of the lake, upwind from the dust sources. The great storms here move north and east, into country that is sparsely inhabited and little visited (though this is changing).
"You just have to see it, to experience it, to understand how bad it is," says a man who does live northeast of Mono Lake. "If you go outside, your teeth are instantly gritty, and it stinks. It smells like brackish seawater. It hurts to breathe." In a really bad storm you don't have to go outside: "It was so dusty inside the house you could shine the flashlight through the house and see the same amount of dust inside as out."
The Creeks are Ruined
For the lake, the occasional wet year stalled or even reversed the changes that were occurring. But for the streams, those wet years only accelerated the damage. The first great season of destruction came in 1967.
By this time lower Lee Vining Creek was a desert landscape. Rush Creek had fared somewhat better. Intermittent irrigation on both sides of the creek, above the narrows, had maintained some flow in the springs. Streamside vegetation dwindled but did not vanish, and a few trout probably remained. Elden Vestal's "vital thread," though perilously stretched, was not yet actually broken.
In the winter of 1966–67 the snowpack was heavy, especially in the Rush Creek watershed. Spring was wet and cold. At the end of June, the weather suddenly turned hot and meltwater came with a rush—more water than the aqueduct could handle, more water than Grant Lake could store. The Water and Power managers guessed wrong and continued diverting from Lee Vining Creek far longer than they should have; this only increased the amount they had to release down Rush. In early July that stream may have carried more water than at any time since the last glaciation. The torrent, moreover, ran down the newly exposed steep front of the delta and into a lowered lake. By the laws of physics, flowing water works to adjust its course into a smooth elevational arc from source to mouth. That's what happened on Rush Creek in 1967. Cutting upward from the mouth, the temporary new river carved a twelve-foot gash into the old delta.
Lee Vining Creek was spared in 1967. Its turn came two years later. The 1969 flood sliced a ten-foot incision into the bed of the creek near the lakeshore. Farther upstream,
Image not available.
Flowing to a lowered lake, Rush Creek cut a
new inner canyon into its old floodplain.
(Photo by Geoffrey McQuilking courtesy Mono Lake Committee)
the rushing water tore itself a new, simplified channel and stripped the rather shallow soil off most of the floodplain. Left behind was a landscape of sunbeaten, cobble-sized stones.
Nobody much noticed what was happening to the creeks in the late 1960s. Officially, these creeks were not seen as streams at all. They were drains, escape valves for use when the system got out of control. The channel by which water was released, at need' into Rush Creek was called Mono Gate Number One; but the common expression was the Mono Wastegate.
The Second Barrel
Such wastage was about to become rarer. Though the tunnel through the Mono Craters had been built large enough to take almost all the available water from the Mono Basin, there was a bottleneck far down the line, where the original Los Angeles Aqueduct had still not been expanded to match.
Left to itself, Los Angeles might never have gotten around to expansion. By this time the growing city had covered most of the land available to it; its water needs were no longer rising so steeply. Moreover, the city had signed on, through the Metropolitan Water District, to the State Water Project, a scheme to tap the Sacramento River for southern cities and agriculture. When this California Aqueduct came on line, in 1973, Los Angeles would be tied into rivers from Arizona almost to Oregon—would have, in truth, a world of water on call. The city also had a superb underground reservoir, in the gravels of the San Fernando Valley, for the long-term storage of its supply. By any reasonable measure, the city had reached its goal of water security.
It's a terrific irony, in view of all that would follow, that the nudge to speed up the destruction of Mono Lake came directly from the state.
In releasing to Mono Lake some of the water that might be taken south, the city was not living up to the terms of its 1940 diversion permit; it was, technically, "wasting" that water. Similarly, it was taking less than it might from the Owens Valley. In 1959, after issuing many extensions, the State Water Rights Board (successor to the old Division of Water Resources) issued a warning. If action was not forthcoming, the city could lose its claim on the water it wasn't yet using.
Now, losing water rights—whether you especially want to use them or not—is something no traditional water-man can abide. The whole California water law system is based on the principle of seizing, holding, and never, ever , letting go. No agency held that creed more righteously than the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.
So a second Los Angeles aqueduct was built, parallel to the first one and about half its size, at a cost of about $89 million. This "second barrel" came on line in 1970. Given this new plumbing, the city had every reason to use it, to draw on the eastern Sierra rather than on its entitlements from the Colorado or the Sacramento. For one thing,
Major Aqueducts Serving the Greater Los Angeles Area
Image not available.
Three of California's largest aqueducts converge
on Los Angeles and the southern California
metropolitan region.
while the other sources were shared, the Los Angeles Aqueduct was under the city's sole control. For another, the water, coming straight from snowmelt, was simply of higher quality than that from the other sources. And for a very important third thing, eastern Sierra water spun turbines, producing very low-cost energy at the rate of 3,560 kilowatt-hours per acre-foot.
So the department proceeded to carry out the perfectly logical policy of draining the eastern Sierra first. In the Owens Valley, the city pumped more groundwater; falling water tables threatened to complete the desiccation process begun in the 1930s. In the Mono Basin, average diversions nearly doubled, to 100,000 acre-feet a year. The lake
Image not available.
As water was diverted to Los Angeles (black bars),
total streamflow into Mono Lake decreased (white
bars) and the lake level dropped. Read left scale for
lake level, right scale for streamflow and export
volumes. Streamflow includes not only the four
diverted streams but also Mill Creek and lesser
streams that were never diverted from the Mono
Basin. An acre-foot is about 326, 000 gallons.
(Adapted from California State Water Resources
Control Board, Draft Environmental Impact Report,
1993, vol. 1, figs. 1-6 and 1–7.)
sank faster, over two feet per year. Its volume shrank more rapidly. Salt concentrations grew. In both regions, these effects began to produce new citizen protest and to attract renewed sympathetic attention from the outside world.
The Second Owens Valley War
In the decades after the turbulent 1920s, Los Angeles and the population of the Owens Valley had evolved a curious peace. There were conciliatory voices, conciliatory policies. Tourism became more and more important in the valley, replacing agriculture as the regions major industry. And many observers found themselves thinking the same thought: that if Los Angeles had not bought up water and land, the splendid high-desert landscape, mountain-rimmed, magnificent for its very emptiness, would be much more cluttered and, indeed, less to be treasured.
Then came the second barrel of the Los Angeles aqueduct, and a reminder that such benefits, however real, were purely accidental.
The city had permitted irrigated agriculture to continue, under lease, on approximately 30,000 acres of its lands. It now proposed to reduce this green area by half (though the remainder would have a more reliable water supply). Water and Power also proposed to increase the extraction of groundwater from its numerous wells. Pumping had been minimal for decades; water came to the surface in extensive wetlands and was "lost" (from an engineer's point of view) to evaporation. Now some of this groundwater would go to the remaining farms (freeing up river water for export); and in some years pumping would add directly to the aqueduct flow. Water tables would fall.
As soon as the new aqueduct was complete, the pumping began. By 1972, unadvertised effects were becoming obvious. Springs that had been familiar landmarks were drying up. Deep-rooted desert plants began to die off; dust storms seemed to increase.
In 1972, Inyo County went to court, demanding that Los Angeles prepare an Environmental Impact Report (EIR) on the effects of its actions. After some early maneuvers, the case wound up in Sacramento, bouncing back and forth between the Sacramento County Superior Court and the Third District Court of Appeal. The lower court generally saw things the city's way; the appellate court tended to side with Inyo County. The higher court required the EIR and was later to reject as inadequate two successive drafts. The courts also took control of the pumping, setting the permitted rates, amid much wrangling, from year to year.
This second Owens Valley controversy continued for more than a decade. In its early stages it prepared the way for action at Mono Lake. It showed that the Department of Water and Power was not, after all, legally untouchable and that citizen pressure could accomplish a great deal.
Stirrings at Mono
In Mono County, too, an opposition struggled to form. Inspired in part by limnologist David Mason, some shoreline property owners banded together as "Friends of Mono Lake," wrote letters, and tried to rally the community. They found it hard going. People resented Los Angeles, which operated somewhat like a feudal overlord, but few now saw the lake itself as worth much effort to defend. Unlike the citizens of Inyo, the Mono protesters did not try to persuade their Board of Supervisors to take any particular action.
Organizations based outside the region were also starting to take an interest. The National Audubon Society took an inconclusive look at the issue. The Toiyabe chapter of the Sierra Club addressed a protest to the Department of Water and Power. There was talk of adding the Mono Basin to Yosemite National Park. But the mobilization process was like starting a balky power mower: it took quite a few pulls on the rope before the engine finally caught.
What drew the attention of outsiders, at this point, was not the lake or the landscape
as a whole but one dramatic feature within it: Negit Island. Bulging on the water like a big black hat, with rocky crown and level surrounding brim, Negit was romantic, photogenic, and doomed. In 1940 two miles of water had lain between island and mainland; now just two narrow straits interrupted a land bridge. When these closed, coyotes and other predators would reach the California gull nests. American Birds magazine predicted "total destruction of the population."
In 1972 the Bureau of Land Management, proprietor of the federal land on the lakeshore, took the ineffectual but symbolic step of declaring Negit an Outstanding Natural Area. In January of 1973, state Assemblyman Gene Chappie led a field trip to the island and called on "DWP and the people of Los Angeles to recognize their responsibility for the problems they are creating." He promised "to do a little disturbing in the Southland in the near future." Chappie seems to have found the colossus to the south rather hard to disturb, however.
That same year, the former McPherson place on the big neighbor island, Paoha, was for sale. The Department of Water and Power eventually picked up the property, "to assure a possible sanctuary for the gulls," aqueduct manager Duane Georgeson said. Though gulls had nested on Paoha in the distant past, they were to show no interest in it, this time around.
By 1974, then, Los Angeles was beginning to feel some renewed heat regarding its operations in the eastern Sierra. For Mono Lake, however, it appeared to be too late.
From Permit to License
With water flowing southward at a new and higher rate, the city's water rights could at last be "perfected." Ever since 1940, Water and Power had been diverting water under interim "permits." At the beginning of 1974, the state water rights agency—it had changed its name yet again and was now the State Water Resources Control Board—quietly converted these permits into permanent "licenses." Curiously, in view of the mounting concern about Negit Island, no one filed a protest. For its part, the water board did no fresh analysis. It felt that conversion from permit to license was an automatic process: the authorities were there only to do the paperwork.
In 1974, luck was still running with the Department of Water and Power. Had the licensing been delayed even three more years, the city would have faced a real battle. But the opposition had not taken form in time. Now the licenses were in hand. Effectively, Los Angeles owned Mono Lake. Whatever destruction ensued, the department leaders could well feel, they had now nothing to fear but a little more bad press.