Saving Mono Lake was a California victory. But it still needs water.

David Gaines was a young research assistant at Stanford University when he showed up at Mono Lake in 1976 with a dozen undergraduate science students and set up camp. The group had a grant from the National Science Foundation to study the lake and its ecology. They rode 10-speed bicycles around the lake, disappearing for days to observe swarms of birds that were migrating south from the Arctic, or analyze the effects of salinity on the trillions of brine shrimp that are endemic to Mono Lake . Gaines spent the summer observing this strange and fascinating place in the Eastern Sierra with the student scientists, and he fell in love with it.

Mono Lake is one of a handful of saline lakes in the Great Basin. It's located east of Yosemite National Park, where the Sierra Nevada's escarpment rolls away into the high desert. The lake is shaped like an amoeba with two islands, Paoha and Negit, and a scattering of islets along its shore. Fossilized springs called tufas rise out of the water. It is an ancient lake, the remnant of a much larger body of water that formed during the Ice Age. But it's also in a constant state of geological change, shaped by volcanic activity deep in the Earth, beneath the lake bed. Geologists estimate that lava flows on Paoha Island erupted as recently as 175 years ago, a blink in geological time.

Five streams fill Mono Lake with snowmelt that runs off the mountains that circle the basin, but there is no outlet. Water escapes only through evaporation, leaving tiny bits of salt behind. No fish can survive in this water, but Mono Lake is teeming with life: Trillions of brine shrimp have evolved to survive the mineral-rich water. Millions of migrating birds arrive every year: California gulls that nest and raise their young on Negit Island; phalaropes that make an essential stop at Mono Lake on their 3,000-mile migration between Canada and South America; eared grebes that spend their entire life on the water and feast on so much brine shrimp, they double their weight before continuing their journey south to the Salton Sea or Baja California in Mexico.

But for all the wonder and awe, Gaines also knew Mono Lake was spiraling to a point of collapse. In 1941, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power started diverting water from four of the streams that feed Mono Lake, shipping the water on the Los Angeles Aqueduct through an 11-mile underground tunnel that led under the Mono-Inyo Craters and continuing south for more than 300 miles to provide water to the sprawling metropolis on the Pacific Coast.

Cut off from its water source, Mono Lake withered away. The decline happened gradually at first, but after the Department of Water and Power built a second pipeline in the 1970s, Mono Lake shrank rapidly. At its lowest levels, the lake had dropped by 45 vertical feet and lost half of its volume, and the water had doubled in salinity. By 1976, when Gaines had arrived, he noted a bathtub ring in the basin of alkali-crusted white rock and sand, where the water had receded.

The shrinking lake was suffering, and so were the people who lived in the Mono Basin and the birds who arrived every year. The increased salinity stressed the food chain. The exposed alkaline dust in the dried-up lakebed created an air quality hazard . On windy days, a toxic cloud of dust obscured the horizon and made it difficult to breathe.

The receding water also exposed a land bridge to Negit Island , where tens of thousands of California gulls were nesting, laying eggs and raising newly hatched chicks. The bridge gave coyotes access to prey on the gulls on their young chicks. If the alarming decline of Mono Lake continued unchecked, scientists predicted "the total destruction of the population."

"Can these natural and scientific values of Mono Lake be weighed against the benefits of providing its water to Los Angeles?" Gaines wrote in an introduction to a 200-page paper the students published after compiling all of the research they had done that summer. Gaines didn't stop there. With his wife Sally, he founded the Mono Lake Committee in 1978 to protect and restore the lake. They printed bumper stickers that read "Save Mono Lake." David and Sally took off on a California road trip to give educational slideshows about the plight of Mono Lake.

David, Sally and the group of college students who embarked on a summer research project wound up kick-starting an environmental movement that would go on to change California history, influence a new era of environmental law and, ultimately, fight the behemoth Los Angeles Department of Water and Power all the way to the California Supreme Court and the halls of Sacramento, where California's water regulators forced the department to stop taking unlimited amounts of water.

Mono Lake was saved from total devastation - or at least that's what environmentalists thought at the time. However, decades later, Mono Lake is still an injured ecosystem that hasn't recovered from the devastation wreaked by Los Angeles in the mid-20th century, and now climate change has entered the stage. Time is compounding the problems the students documented nearly 50 years ago. In 2024, California gulls experienced a near-complete nesting failure, the worst on record. Out of an estimated 11,000 nests, only 324 chicks survived . Scientists attributed the catastrophic loss to chronically low lake levels, the absence of brine shrimp and the continued threat from predators.

"These accumulating impacts of time going by without the lake being at a healthy level are really concerning," said Geoff McQuilkin, executive director for the Mono Lake Committee. "It just adds to the urgency to get the lake on the rise."

All the while, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power continues to divert water from the Mono Basin, even after the city has pledged to source 70% of its water locally by 2035 and is in the process of building up expansive resources to recycle water .

Now, the Mono Lake Committee is petitioning California water authorities to stop Los Angeles from taking any water from the Mono Basin at all. They argue that if Los Angeles stops diverting water, more water would go back to Mono Lake faster, which would give Mono Lake its best shot at filling back up.

"The only remedy at this point is to get as much water in as possible, not only for the sake of the ecosystem health, but you've got to make this lake resilient to future climate change," said Bartshé Miller, Eastern Sierra policy director for the Mono Lake Committee.

The movement to save Mono Lake is rekindling, preparing to fight big city interests once more at an upcoming hearing held by the California State Water Resources Control Board. At the heart of the contentious, ongoing clash is a similar question to the one David asked 50 years ago: Can we sustain the natural resources that prop up the biggest cities in the West? Or will climate change force us to choose?

'Ordinary people trying to use the law to make a difference'

On a late-summer morning, when the high desert was blooming with yellow-gold flowers on the rabbitbrush, I crested Conway Summit on Highway 395, taking in the view of the basin below me. The sun rose above the rolling mountains to the east. Rays of early light struck the Sierra Nevada, a fortress-like wall of mountains on the western shore of the basin. Mono Lake appeared like a silvery sheen surrounded by purple-gray mountains. This place is remote - a three-hour drive from Reno, five hours from San Francisco, six hours from Los Angeles. Fewer than 500 people live in Lee Vining and Mono City, the two main towns in the basin. Yet, the beauty of Mono Lake and the Eastern Sierra Nevada attracts tens of thousands of visitors every year.

I soon arrived at Mono Lake Tufa State Natural Reserve, on the southern shore, one of several places for people to walk down to the water to see the twisted towers of tufa. Winds pushed jagged lines of white caps across the lake's surface, but the birds didn't seem to mind. Down by the water, eared grebes bobbed up and down between islets of tufas. The iconic tufa formations are featured prominently on every postcard of Mono Lake. They were created by a chemical reaction underwater over the course of hundreds of years, but they only became a visible sight-seeing attraction in the past 80 years or so, after Los Angeles began diverting water and the lake receded.

Word of mouth has been essential in drumming up support to protect the lake, and still is. A big part of the Mono Lake Committee's continued work is to give visitors educational tours. At the dusty state park reserve, a handful of other travelers ambled near a series of interpretative signs. A state park ranger rallied them together for a nature tour, continuing the decadeslong effort to share the story of Mono Lake with anyone who will listen. Just then, McQuilkin arrived in a dark SUV with the Mono Lake Committee's education director Ryan Garrett. We were supposed to go kayaking, but the winds forced a change in our plans. Instead, we opted for a nature walk. We set off down the gently sloped path, with Garrett in the lead, binoculars strapped across his shoulder and a clipboard in hand.

"To begin to understand the story of Mono Lake, we first need to understand a little bit about the geology of the area," Garrett said, sweeping his hand around the wide-open basin, toward the mountains that surrounded the lake. A moment later, he picked up the suspense: "Down south, there is a little city called Los Angeles."

Los Angeles secured water rights to the Mono Basin in the 1930s, and in 1940, state water authorities approved the city's water license. At the time, the state understood that, with Los Angeles taking so much water, Mono Lake would eventually disappear. About 11 miles south, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power had already destroyed Owens Lake . In 1913, the Los Angeles Aqueduct cut Owens Lake off from its water supply, and a decade later, the lake had all but vanished, leaving behind a withered ecosystem, dry salt flats and toxic dust storms. If the board approved the license, they could see that Mono Lake would be rushing toward the same future. But the municipal use of water - a scarce resource in the West - was prioritized over the environment and so the board stamped their approval on Los Angeles' plans. But the municipal use of water - a scarce resource in the West - was prioritized over the environment, and so the board stamped their approval on Los Angeles' plans.

"The water board was really upset about it," said Erin Ryan, an environmental law professor at the University of Southern California. "They were really openly agonizing because they had seen what happened at Owens Lake."

When the movement to save Mono Lake coalesced 30 years later, the fears about the lake's collapse were plainly manifesting. The environmental activists knew the only way to save Mono Lake was to stop the Department of Water and Power in court. The likelihood was slim that a group of undergraduate environmentalists would defeat a huge, powerful entity, but the Mono Lake Committee had to try. They only had to look at Owens Lake to know what would happen if they failed.

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A breakthrough came when UC Berkeley student Tim Such, who was part of the committee, learned about a concept called the public trust doctrine.

The public trust doctrine is an ancient creed that dates back to the Roman Empire and the Magna Carta, said Ryan, who wrote the book "Law for the Land: The Public Trust Doctrine, Mono Lake, and a Quiet Revolution in Environmental Rights."

"The public trust doctrine is one of the oldest doctrines of the common law," Ryan said.

It's a complex idea, but essentially it says that some resources, such as navigable waters, need to be safeguarded for the benefit of everyone, not just one all-powerful individual or entity. Historically, the doctrine was used for navigation, commerce and fishing - treating waterways essentially as public highways. But in the 1970s, a law professor at the University of Michigan named Joseph Sax argued the public trust doctrine could also give ordinary citizens a way to hold the government accountable.

Such floated the idea to the committee of using the public trust doctrine to save Mono Lake in the courts. The doctrine was untested as a tool for environmental protection in a case like this, Ryan said, but the idea took hold, and in 1979, the Mono Lake Committee worked with the National Audubon Society to sue the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, a case the California Supreme Court would take on.

Four years later, the phone rang at David and Sally's home on a wintry day in Lee Vining. It was February 1983, and a reporter from a Stockton radio station was calling to tell them the California Supreme Court had made its ruling : The public trust doctrine applied to Mono Lake.

The court went on to say that California water authorities needed to reconsider how much water Los Angeles was taking from Mono Lake. According to Ryan, the state could no longer give Los Angeles carte blanche to take as much water as it wanted, ignoring the environmental, scenic and recreational damage that would cause. Now, the state had to balance protecting Mono Lake - keeping it in the public trust - with the city's demand for water.

Upon hearing the news of their win in court, David was in disbelief. He had to call the committee's lawyers to confirm that what the radio reporter said was true. The next day, he told the Mono Herald the court's decision was "everything we could have asked for."

The Mono Lake case "is this amazing legal history story about this college student, combined with this law professor's idea, and all this blood, sweat and tears and hard work of just ordinary people trying to use the law to make a difference," Ryan said. "And they accomplished this incredible, at the time almost unimaginable, goal."

After the Supreme Court victory, Mono Lake became one of California's greatest environmental success stories. In 1994, the California State Water Resources Control Board made the court's ruling official water policy, forcing Los Angeles to drastically reduce the amount of water it was taking. After decades of diverting an average 100,000 acre-feet a year, now Los Angeles could only take 16,000 acre-feet a year from the Mono Basin, and even less during drought years, when Mono Lake dips to its lowest levels.

Even though Mono Lake will never recover all the water it lost in the 20th century, the new framework set it on a course to rise about 20 feet, so its surface level could reach an elevation of 6,392 feet. The state water board estimated it would take 20 years to get there.

Tragically, David would never see Mono Lake rise. He and another member of the Mono Lake Committee died in a horrible car crash in 1988. David left behind his wife Sally and their two children.

"I am convinced that had David not decided to fight for Mono Lake, no one else would have," wrote Genny Smith, a Mono Lake Committee board member, in 1988, in an obituary published in the committee's newsletter after David died. "Who else was dedicated enough, or young and foolish enough, to believe that one could win against giant DWP?"

Eastern Sierra water props up the City of Angels

I followed McQuilkin and Garrett to the shore of Mono Lake and I dipped my hands in the water. After the water dried, salt crusted my fingers. An osprey flew overhead, perhaps to find food for the chicks we could hear shrieking in its nest.

Garrett filled a clear glass with water and handed it to me. I could see two brine shrimp swimming circles in the water. They were so tiny, with black specks for eyes. The endemic species evolved to live in the harsh saline lake. But scientists have documented that, in recent decades, Mono Lake's brine shrimp have been shrinking in size by about 10-15%. They attribute this to the increased stress of living in water that's now 2.5 times saltier than the ocean. It's one of the many cascading effects that's come from Mono Lake being so low for so long.

When I looked up, McQuilkin was assembling two large pieces of PVC pipe, creating a T-shaped structure that stood upright on the sand. It measured 10 feet tall and towered above McQuilkin, representing where the lake's surface would be if Mono Lake reached 6,392 feet, the target set by the water board in 1994. The lake still has a lot of ground to cover before it reaches that level.

In the 30 years since the water board's decision, Mono Lake has seen big winters and long droughts, and climate change is driving those ends to further extremes. The lake swells and shrinks. Los Angeles continues to take its allotted 16,000 acre-feet of water, year after year, while Mono Lake has only made it halfway to its recovery level. On Oct. 1, the day the water year resets, the surface of Mono Lake was at a stubborn 6,382 feet, 10 feet short.

In its 1994 decision, the state water board built in a trigger that, if Mono Lake hasn't reached 6,391 feet by Sept. 28, 2014, then it could hold another hearing to check in on the condition of Mono Lake and make any revisions to the water license it issued to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

This year, the board finally seems to be moving in that direction. It commissioned the University of California Los Angeles Center for Climate Science to do a study on Mono Lake, modeling what the future looks under different scenarios of greenhouse gas emissions. The study found that, while climate change is certainly hindering the lake's recovery, it's not playing as big a role as Los Angeles. In March, UCLA scientists told the state water board that if Los Angeles continues to divert water from the Mono Basin, it's " unlikely " Mono Lake will ever see 6,392 feet. But, if Los Angeles stops diverting water, Mono Lake has about a 66% chance of rising to the state's target by 2064.

After the March meeting, the board directed staff to get ready for a hearing on Mono Lake, and since then, two public workshops have been held, diving into Mono Lake's water quality and wildlife, including its migratory birds and aquatic species. The board has not yet set a date for the hearing to begin, but the Mono Lake Committee expects the board to announce the hearing before the end of the year.

A lot is at stake today, not just for Mono Lake, but also for the millions of Angelenos who rely on water delivered from the Sierra Nevada. And this time, the board has to contend with the added pressure that climate change presents for both California's most vulnerable landscapes and the cities that remain reliant on water that's imported from rural places, hundreds of miles away.

After the state revised its water license in 1994, accounting for the public trust benefits of Mono Lake, Los Angeles had a big adjustment to make. For decades, the city had been taking 100,000 acre-feet of water from the Mono Basin, on average, every year. That's more than 32 billion gallons of water. It was a year's worth of water for 200,000 to 400,000 households. But now, they could only take a fraction of that amount.

Los Angeles responded with remarkable innovation and progress, becoming one of the most water-wise cities in the country. In 35 years, the city grew by half a million residents, but reduced its water use by a third .

Today, the 16,000 acre-feet that Los Angeles continues to divert from the Mono Basin every year makes up about 2-3% of the city's water supply, said Adam Perez, water operations director for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

The Mono Lake Committee points to that number and says it's a tiny fraction of the department's water portfolio, an amount that could be offset by new facilities coming online that source groundwater and recycle water. But those 16,000 acre-feet could make all the difference for Mono Lake. Every year, Los Angeles shaves between 4 and 6 inches from the surface of Mono Lake.

Perez said it's not that simple. Mono Lake is a critical source of water for the 4 million people served by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. It's some of the most affordable, secure and environmentally sound water that LA gets. Replacing that 16,000 acre-feet would cost Angelenos about $16 million, Perez continued, and those costs are only getting higher as other sources of water - like from the Colorado River or the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta - become more constrained and precarious. On the Colorado River, California, Nevada and Arizona must cut water use by 1.25 million acre-feet annually, with more cuts possibly on the way, while golden mussels invading from the Delta pose a " serious and fast-growing threat " to the State Water Project.

Perez contested the UCLA study, saying it still needs to be peer reviewed and vetted by experts. Instead, he pointed to the department's own water modeling, which paints a very different picture for the future of Mono Lake, showing the lake will recover in a quarter of a century, regardless of what Los Angeles does.

Los Angeles is not the main culprit for Mono Lake's continued struggles, Perez continued. Rather, the lake is a victim of its own hydrology and climate change. "It's really not the city's export that is really driving the overall lake level rise and drop," Perez said, pointing to the big winters over the past decade that delivered plenty of water.

After the record-breaking winter of 2023, when Mammoth Mountain Ski Area measured a season total of 900 inches of snow at its summit, Mono Lake rose 5 feet. But, as the Mono Lake Committee points out, Mono Lake can't hold onto those gains. The lake has since dropped more than a foot.

The committee maintains Los Angeles is chipping away at Mono Lake's progress. That's why McQuilkin wants Los Angeles to stop taking water from the Mono Basin until the lake reaches the 6,392-foot mandate laid out by the water board.

"In other words, the lake would be stable, but for diversions, it's going down. And this is the problem that we've seen over decades now," McQuilkin said.

McQuilkin insists it's not an either-or decision. He specifically called out a project to build a water purification facility at the Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant, which the Los Angeles Times reported will produce enough recycled water for 500,000 people in Los Angeles. It's scheduled to come online next year. McQuilkin said the new plant will create more than enough water to offset what's being taken from Mono Lake.

But Perez at the Department of Water and Power doesn't see it that way. He affirmed the city is working toward sourcing more water locally, but said if the city cuts back on its imports, those cuts would come from the Colorado River or from the Metropolitan Water District. Perez said the Department of Water and Power has no intention of stopping the stream of water it imports from the Mono Basin.

"The Tillman water will not replace water from the Mono Basin supply," Perez said. "The idea is that we will manage the water portfolio as best for the ratepayers, as well as best for the environment and best for overall in regards to the reliability of that water coming into the city."

That's the kind of language that drives Miller, the committee's policy director, mad. The Department of Water and Power says it will source more water locally, but it's also not letting go of any of the water it imports from the Eastern Sierra, Miller pointed out. "They talk out [of] both sides of their mouth," Miller said.

Will Mono Lake ever be saved?

After the nature walk by Mono Lake, I went to see the Los Angeles Aqueduct with Maureen McGlinchy, the committee's hydrology expert. McGlinchy drove me to the place where the Los Angeles Aqueduct begins, at the foot of Tioga Pass, near Yosemite National Park, where snowmelt rushes into Lee Vining Creek. From here, water is shipped down the length of the Sierra Nevada all the way to LA on gravity alone.

She explained how much of the 350-mile aqueduct was built more than a century ago, and it was such a marvel of engineering and so effective that it utterly transformed the Eastern Sierra, which in turn led to even more engineering to solve those problems. After Owens Lake was decimated, and the toxic dust in the dried lakebed became such a massive air quality and public health issue, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power built a system to tamp down the dust. The department states that this " mitigation project " includes a "vast network of computer-controlled valves, pipes, outfalls, and sprinklers across the ancient lakebed."

Beneath the dramatic rock-walled couloirs of the Dana Plateau, Lee Vining Creek pooled at the mouth of the aqueduct. A few men lazed on the bank, with a fishing line cast in the water. I followed McGlinchy across a metal bridge that crosses the creek and the aqueduct, passing several signs that warned of danger and swift water. Water sprayed below our feet. Some of the water went into the aqueduct. The rest continued downstream, eventually making its way to Mono Lake.

When the aqueduct was first built, Lee Vining Creek dried up entirely. But after the state water board's 1994 hearing, the Department of Water and Power worked alongside the Mono Lake Committee on several stream restoration projects. They overhauled the infrastructure at Lee Vining Creek, installing a gate that rises and lowers automatically to ensure the appropriate amount of water flows into the aqueduct, and not a drop more.

After the water returned, Lee Vining Creek made a vibrant comeback. Today, the banks are lush with bushes and trees.

The effort to restore streams and the environment in the Mono Basin continues. Los Angeles is now focusing on Grant Lake and Rush Creek for what it called "one of the largest environmental restoration projects in the Mono Basin." The project, which will restore the spillway in the dam at Grant Lake so that more water can flow into Rush Creek, is also a project that's required by a 2013 settlement with the Mono Lake Committee to restore the streams in the Mono Basin. The committee says this work is " long overdue ."

Perez said the Department of Water and Power supports a second hearing for Mono Lake, calling for a fair, transparent process. However, the best scenario for Los Angeles would be to continue the status quo, allowing the city to take its 16,000 acre-foot allotment.

"For us, the best outcome would be that, at this point, that we manage things as we have to date," he said.

As the water board moves toward its hearing, climate change will cast the Mono Lake case in a new light, raising issues that were not present several decades ago.

In its 1983 decision, the public trust doctrine enabled the protection of Mono Lake. But Ryan, the law professor, pointed out that the courts were also cognizant of the need to provide water to Angelenos. Moving water from one part of California to another is what makes this state and its biggest metropolises work.

"The court didn't say you must at all costs protect Mono Lake," Ryan said. "The court said you must protect Mono Lake as much as you possibly can, considering that there are all these other demands as well. The court left it to the water board to finally do the balancing act about how to balance these competing considerations."

Ryan lives in Los Angeles and says she believes the city hasn't exhausted all the possibilities for water reclamation. At the same time, Angelenos, and all Californians, may have a tough decision ahead of them.

"I don't know that we have to make an either-or decision here. But I say that cognizant of the fact that climate change means we probably are going to have to make either-or decisions on some things," Ryan said. "Like, either we still have swimming pools in LA, or we have places like Mono Lake."

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This article originally published at Saving Mono Lake was a California victory. But it still needs water. .