Mono Lake

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Some old, scanned photos of Mono Lake, in the California desert east of Yosemite. These were taken in the early 1990s during the height of the court battle over the lake's water. The short version of the story: Since the 1940s, water had been diverted from flowing into the lake, and ended up in swimming pools in L.A. instead. As you might expect, this caused the lake to start drying up. Not everyone was thrilled about that, and -- this being California -- there were ugly, expensive, lawsuits, which went on and on for years as the lake level continued to drop. A couple of years after I was there, the city of Los Angeles lost the case and was forced to put water back into the lake. Wikipedia insists the lake's almost back up to its pre-diversion lake level. In which case some of the the scenery in these photos is now back underwater where it belongs.