Mono Lake, photo by Joshua Frank, August 3, 2026.
I just returned after a few days of hiking in California’s Eastern Sierra, home to the Lower 48’s highest peak (Mt. Whitney, 14,405 feet), alpine lakes, hot springs, and expansive valleys. It’s one of the state’s most scenic places and, depending on when you ask, my favorite refuge from the steamy sprawl of Los Angeles.
While much of the Rocky Mountain West experienced extremely low snowpack this year, the Eastern Sierra didn’t fare well either, despite early rains in December and January. It also saw low precipitation, with snowfall at 24% of its average annual amount. Summer temperatures have scorched the Sierras. Thus far in 2026, California has experienced its warmest year on record, and no corner of the state has been spared.
This isn’t great news for the strange and beautiful Mono Lake, an ancient saline lake with scattered tufa towers along the western edge of the Great Basin. Since 1941, Los Angeles, 330 miles south, has diverted water that feeds Mono, and that water now accounts for 2% of the city’s supply.
The moon rises above Mono Lake, photo by Joshua Frank, August 3, 2026.
LA’s thirst nearly destroyed Mono Lake, which lost half its volume and dropped 45 feet. Toxic dust began to swirl, and gulls’ nesting grounds disappeared. It wasn’t until the mid-1970s that a group of ragtag students from UC Davis and Stanford stepped in and conducted a study showing that Mono was teeming with life – a biological haven for brine shrimp and the birds that fed on them. Despite their findings, ecological collapse seemed inevitable as long as Los Angeles continued to draw water from the Mono Basin.
By the early 1980s, a movement to protect Mono Lake had grown, and in 1982 the California Supreme Court ruled that the state must recognize its ecological importance, overriding the city’s alleged water rights. In 1994, the State Water Board set legal rules requiring Los Angeles to reduce its draw from the resources feeding the lake until it rebounded. The board set the water level at 6,392 feet above sea level. As of today, Mono Lake sits at around 6,382.7 feet, below the state-regulated benchmark but still above its record low of 6,372 feet back in 1982.
Yeah, it’s an improvement, but LA is still drawing too much water from the basin. Mono still has a long way to go before it reaches the level scientists consider healthy. The situation is far worse in Owens Valley, which lies south of Mono Lake and supplies one-third of Los Angeles’s water.
Since 1913, Los Angeles has been draining the Owens Valley, a process William Mulholland conceived when he proposed building a viaduct to deliver water to the burgeoning city. “There it is, take it,” Mulholland infamously said as he watched the first stream of water flow through his new channel. Today, the Los Angeles Aqueduct delivers an average of 430 million gallons of water to the LA region every day, and it has left much of the Owens Valley ecologically devastated.
Owens Lake (Patsiata in the Native Nüümü, Owens Valley Paiute language) was once a flourishing alkali wetland, but it is now nearly vanished. Invasive plants have taken over, and the once-rich biodiversity has been destroyed. Creeks have dried up, and streams no longer flow. The valley is a dust bowl for most of the year. This environmental disaster falls squarely on the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), which owns 90% of the private land in Owens Valley.
LADWP’s land acquisition was a parcel-by-parcel land theft that was one of the storylines of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, and now, with climate chaos further straining Owens Valley, those old California water wars are being revived. A major legal victory for Owens Valley, particularly for Native tribes there, came after LADWP faced a series of lawsuits and regulations requiring the agency to conduct dust mitigation in the dry Owens Valley, which the EPA has stated is the country’s largest source of particulate air pollution.
Now, organizations such as Friends of Inyo and the Owens Valley Indian Water Commission have united to launch an initiative called Payahuunadü (the Indigenous name for the Eastern Sierra). Their efforts aim to educate the public about LA’s harmful water depletion in the Owens Valley and to hold LADWP legally accountable. The ultimate goal is to restore this part of the Eastern Sierra to its former thriving condition. Although Mono Lake’s recovery is a modest success, Owens Lake could be an even greater achievement if it comes to fruition. But they need our help. Tap in to learn more.
+++
In some exciting news, you can now pre-order my forthcoming book Bad Energy, and bundle with a very cool t-shirt designed by Roger Peet. Show the world how much you hate data centers and grab a copy of my book while you’re at it.
