If you are one who has not yet traveled to the eastern side of the Sierra, you're in for a surprise. Just a few hours away from Placerville, Mono Lake is a strangely beautiful landscape so unlike anything you know from the west side that at first you may think it's not worth a closer look? That was in fact my first reaction when I drove past the lake perhaps 20 years ago and wrongly interpreted the whitened shoreline as pollution! How wrong I was.
If you come at it from the north, your first view of the lake will be from Conway Summit (8,143 feet) which is where I shot the snowy picture shown top left. It will be worth a few minutes to stop and look out over this landscape and admire the transition from Sierra into Great Basin landforms and vegetation.
Once you drop down to lake level (6,383 feet) and are driving toward Lee Vining, be sure to stop at the Visitor Center that sits so prominantly on the hilltop just a mile or so before the town. It will take 30 minutes to pick up some information about the age of the lake (more than 700,000 years), the early area inhabitants, and the recent efforts to save the lake and its ecosystem from being ruined by diverting water to Los Angeles.
Prime times to visit Mono Lake are Spring for wildflowers (Great Basin vegetation) and again in mid-Autumn for the fall colors that pull leaf peepers from all parts to oogle the aspens of Lundy Canyon and several other routes into the Sierra High Country. Even before you arrive at lake level, the landscape along the grade to Conway Summit will wow you with scenic Sierra backdrops to rolling meadows with groves of aspens turning from green to yellow and orange. It's amazing, and there are certainly places to pull off the road for photo opportunities.
If you have limited time to explore, hit the Visitor Center, then probably stop at the Mono Lake Committee just as you enter Lee Vining so that you can review the guide books and photos of both the lake and Yosemite. (Did I forget to mention that Lee Vining is where Hwy 120 leads up to Tioga Pass and Yosemite?) After that stop, head south about five miles to where 120 leads off toward Benton. A few miles east of 395, find South Tufa, the best display of what makes Mono Lake so visually interesting, the exposed tufa towers that formed underwater from calcium carbonates, and are now revealed thanks to a serious drop in lake level due to many years of diverting the inflow waters to head for Los Angeles to fill swimming pools and keep golf courses green! There is a terrific pathway and boardwalk system that will guide you around the best views and offer explanations for the vegetation, the restoration, and the continuing use of Mono Lake by many thousands of birds as a stop-over on migrations. In fact Mono Lake is perhaps best known to many as a birding destination above all other points of interest.
If you have a weekend to spend in the area, what I enjoy doing is camping out in the Ponderosa forest just another mile or so west of the South Tufa. There, along the base of the pumice and obsidian flows, the trees grow in an open forest (trees quite spaced out when compared to our west-side stands) and the pumice soil, while looking too loose to support a vehicle, actually allow access to a number of camping spots. This allows for a terrific night of stargazing, followed by a great sunrise with sunlight painting the Sierra so immediately to the east. It's just an easy drive up Tioga Road to enter the park, or maybe just leave the vehicle outside the entrance and head off for a day trip to the Dana Plateau.
If your timing is right in late summer-early fall, you stand a good chance of being entertained by pinyon jays (Gymnorhinus cyanocephalus). These gregarious birds travel in packs, attacking the ripening cones of ponderosa and pinyon pines alike. If you get to see them swarm into a ponderosa, I swear you will laugh. They move as a unified group of 15 or more birds, suddenly selecting a tree, landing within the tree and immediately setting upon the cones like piranhas of the forest! The branches shake with activity, cone fragments come flying, and the excited chatter is comical. Suddenly some signal alerts them that it's time to move on; they all fly off to another tree nearby and start all over again. This is one of my favorite parts of staying out in the forests of Mono Lake.
There are simply too many options available! Mono Lake has all the botany you could want in Spring and into Summer; there are grasses that could take your whole day to enjoy; birds by the thousands; butterflies aplenty according to the information that describes the one-day workshops offered by the Mono Lake Committee. And when you consider that you can wrap this with a day trip into Yosemite, and still get back to El Dorado County by Sunday night, what's not to like about a trip to the other side?
A bathymetric map of Mono Lake
