Mono Lake — Attraction in Mammoth Lakes

Ten summers ago, my wife and I did a sunset kayak adventure on Mono Lake. When we pulled the car into the parking lot at Navy Beach- where we met our guide with the kayaks, flies of several varieties swarmed the windows. I thought back to the movie Ammityville Horror and shuddered.

Luckily, after getting into our kayak, and after we'd made it past the the wide swath of flies that floated atop the lake edge, we were golden! There was hardly any wind, and a few clouds to the west for sunset pics when we approached the tufa structures...made from minerals piling up for aeons.

If, when you visit this place, you wonder why there are so many California Gulls either flying above or resting on the water at Mono Lake, it is a nesting habitat for these birds. They feed on the brine shrimp and alkali flies here.

The guide told us the water in the lake is 10 times more salty than the ocean. My hands immediately turned white from the salt, after touching the wet kayak paddle, which freaked me out a bit. Our guide cautioned us not to allow the kayak bottom to come near any underwater parts of these tufa towers. We also kept our distance from an active Osprey nesting site atop a particularly tall tufa ahead. The sights were spectacular, the weather was perfect and I was able to get some nice photos to boot. All in all, Mono Lake was a wildly different experience on the water-almost alien planet-like out there, The tufas of all shapes and sizes were unlike anything I'd seen. This was an outing I'll never forget. Highly...

The lake is pretty incredible. I’ve been there twice, once in summer and once in winter. The lake is very alkaline and as a result has huge calcium pillars sticking out giving off a very other worldly-star trek sorta feel. In the winter, despite all lakes around it freezing over, due to the high salt, Mono Lake is hardly touched by ice. In summer the banks are coated by alkaline flies so the rocks are black near the waters edge - DO NOT FEAR THOUGH! The Alkaline flies do not bite, they won’t even land on you, and are completely harmless. In fact they are rather cool more than anything, as stepping on a rock with them will create a black wave of them in the air. Obviously this isn’t for everyone but a lot of people and kids will find this super cool. The air around the lake is also very salty, so salty that birds that drank from the lake (and died because of it) will mummify, sometimes looking near prestine months after death. This lake is an other worldly experience with some incredible stuff at it. If you just want to see the lake for its beauty, take the board walk and the grosser things won’t bug you, you’ll get an awesome view and a nice trail, but if you have a stronger stomach, you will see some of the most fascinating and unique things on earth by the waters edge. I...

A scene featuring a volcano in the film Fair Wind to Java (1953) was shot at Mono Lake. Most of the scenes in the 1973 movie "High Plains Drifter" starring Clint Eastwood were filmed on the south shores of the lake at Navy Beach. The music video for glam metal band Cinderella's 1988 power ballad Don't Know What You Got ('Till It's Gone) was filmed by the lake. Mark Twain's Roughing It, published in 1872, provides an informative early description of Mono Lake in its natural condition in the 1860s. Twain found the lake to be a "lifeless, treeless, hideous desert... the loneliest place on earth." This is a saline soda lake in Mono County, California, formed at least 760,000 years ago as a terminal lake in an endorheic basin. The lack of an outlet causes high levels of salts to accumulate in the lake. These salts also make the lake water alkaline. This desert lake has an unusually productive ecosystem based on brine shrimp that thrive in its waters, and provides critical habitat for two million annual migratory birds that feed on the shrimp and alkali flies (Ephydra hians). Historically, the native Kutzadika'a people ate the alkali flies' pupae, which live in the shallow waters around the edge...