L.A.'S LOSS IS MONO LAKE'S GAIN; WATER LEVEL RISING AFTER DECADES OF DIVERSION DEPLETED BASIN.

Byline: Jennifer Kerr Associated Press

On a crisp fall day, a hike on a squishy boardwalk through a marsh dotted with gray towers looming like termite mounds ends abruptly at the shore of an eerie alkaline lake.

Several boardwalk sections that once stretched farther ahead are piled to one side.

Mono Lake is rising.

Three years after the state water board ended 16 years of court battles - and 53 years of Los Angeles' diversion of the streams that feed it - Mono Lake has risen more than 7 feet, returning to its 1974 level.

``The lake's doing great,'' said Janet Carle, a state park ranger at the Mono Lake Tufa State Reserve.

``Nature is helping us out a lot by delivering plenty of water for the lake,'' adds Frances Spivy-Weber of the Mono Lake Committee, the environmentalist group that next year celebrates its 20th anniversary of fighting for the eastern Sierra lake.

Three wetter-than-average winters have sent water down streams once sucked dry by Los Angeles' waterworks. Instead, the water has run into the salty lake that Mark Twain once called ``the Dead Sea of the West.''

And now Mono Lake enthusiasts are looking eagerly at this winter's predicted El Nino storms.

During the last El Nino winter in 1982-83, runoff was 200 percent of average, Carle said.

``That could be the equal of several feet of rise'' in the lake, she said. ``We're anticipating pulling out a lot of boardwalk if we get the big winter everyone says we're going to get.''

The boardwalk sections taken from the marsh at the Mono Lake County Park are not discarded, but moved to cover newly wet areas appearing at the South Tufa Area on the other side of the lake.

The one-mile South Tufa Area walk winds along a salty-sandy path through Mono Lake's trademark calcium carbonate spires. The spires, called tufa, are formed when calcium-bearing, freshwater springs well up through carbonate-rich alkaline lake water. The tufa, much like stalagmites in caves, grow only in the lake itself. But as the lake dropped during Los Angeles' stream diversions, they became stranded along many shores.

Now the rising lake is lapping at the tufa along the hike. Rangers had to redesign the trail last summer.

Mono Lake, along the Nevada border on the western edge of the Great Basin and just east of Yosemite National Park, is more than 700,000 years old, one of the oldest lakes in North America.

It has no outlets, so through its long life it has retained the salts and minerals washed into the lake by streams draining out of the Sierra Nevada. As water evaporated, the minerals stayed behind, leaving the lake about 2-1/2 times as salty and 80 times as alkaline as seawater.

The lake is too alkaline for fish, but it has always supported a thriving food chain of green algae, brine flies and brine shrimp. The latter two are tasty morsels for more than 80 species of migratory birds that visit the lake each spring and summer. They include grebes, phalaropes, California gulls and snowy plovers.

In 1941, the lake level was at 6,417 feet of elevation. That year, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power began diverting water from four of the five streams that feed the lake.

The diversions, equal to 17 percent of the city's water use at their height, lowered the lake's elevation to 6,372 by 1982, halving the lake's volume and doubling its salinity.

The diversions caused only minor stirs until the mid-1970s, when biologist David Gaines of Los Angeles brought a party of Stanford University and University of California biologists to Mono Lake for field research. He noted the lack of scientific information about the lake and spent two years explaining to environmentalist and civil groups how water politics could destroy the lake.

In 1978, he formed the Mono Lake Committee - which operates from a storefront office on the lake's shores - and began the long, slow process of challenging the DWP.

``The dispute is not whether diversions are going to kill the lake, but at what point they're going to kill the lake,'' Gaines said in 1985, three years before he was killed in a traffic accident.

The committee and other interested groups began winning a series of court decisions between 1984 and 1990.

The issue was bumped to the state Water Resources Control Board, which on Sept. 28, 1994, issued an order ending DWP diversions until the lake returns to 6,392 feet. That could take up to 20 years.

Now Mono Lake is also protected by the state reserve, established in 1982, and the Mono Basin National Forest Scenic Area, formed in 1984. State and federal rangers and Mono Lake Committee volunteers lead regular hikes daily during the summer and weekends in the spring and fall.

Kayaking and canoeing are also popular on the lake. Stuart Wilkinson, owner of Caldera Kayaks, has been leading commercial paddles on the lake for three years and says boating is increasing.

``I think it's the dramatic scenery and paddling through the tufa towers, which kind of look like another world,'' he said.

DWP, resigned to the decision, has replaced the lost water for its 3.5 million customers through purchases from other agencies and conservation, says spokesman Chris Plakos.

``The state granted the city the license to export water from the Mono Basin in the '30s and chose to change the license,'' he said. ``The decision has been made and the city is trying to abide by it.''

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Photo

PHOTO Peculiar calcium carbonate spires, called tufa, rise from Mono Lake as a kayaker paddles on the surface.

Associated Press