Thanks to YubaNet.
When I heard about this discovery at Mono Lake, I just nodded my head. Mono Lake is the weirdest lake in California, if not the whole world. If something like that is gonna be found anywhere, it's there.
First of all, you would think that 'Mono' has something to do with 'one' or 'singularity' or something like that. It doesn't. It means "eaters of fly larvae" referring to its early inhabitants.
Mono Lake figures prominently in California's forever-and-forever-amen water wars. When I was a kid, the lake came right up to US 395. Not anymore. It's stopped shrinking and is growing in area again, but it took a decades-long lawsuit.
There's just too much info about this place to put it here. Suffice it to say it's an interesting place in an interesting area in my favorite part of my state.
My favorite Mono Lake story is about the bird island. Birds come from everywhere to breed there. As the water level dropped, a land bridge appeared and coyotes could walk to the island for lunch. The birds stopped coming. In their wisdom, the officials built a fence to keep the coyotes from the bird areas, but the birds didn't come back. Somebody finally figured out that the birds couldn't see the fence from the air and figured they were still on the menu and kept on going. Heh.
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