 600 years ago, the ancestors of the Mono Lake Paiute inhabited the Mono Basin. They were known as the Cresedica. In this harsh environment of sand and rock, their survival depended on an intimate connection to a fragile web of life. Living in the shadows of the Mono Craters, they crafted tools from the glassy volcanic rock and hunted game in this plentiful land of the Great Basin. Like the inhabitants before them, their lives were threatened by catastrophic geologic events. Of the first people, massive glaciers buried the Sierra Nevada mountains under deep rivers of ice. As the ice fields retreated, melting snows fed countless lakes and streams, that which flowed eastward filled a vast inland sea. As the ancient sea receded, the Mono Basin emerged. Deep on the basin's desert floor lies an ancient Saline Lake. A remnant of this once great sea is known as Mono. Mark Twain called Mono Lake the Dead Sea of California. But this sleeping jewel is far from dead. Heated by the sun, this briny soup spawns simple life in abundance. The lake is alive with the transparent bodies of the brine shrimp, a graceful creature that has adapted to this salty world. With no outlet to flush away its salts and minerals, Mono's salt content is three times that of the Pacific Ocean. The Saline water cannot support fish life, but provides a delicate breeding ground for the brine shrimp which multiply into trillions. Bright ribbons of brine shrimp masses streak the surface of the lake during the warm months of summer. For many people, Mono Lake is known as the Place of the Flies. In spring, the harmless alkali flies blanket its western shores. They enter the lake on its oily surface film and lay their eggs on submerged rock. The eggs develop into fly larvae which remain underwater until maturity. Both the flies and the shrimp feed on microscopic algae, the lowest level of the lake's simple food chain. Together, the brine shrimp and the alkali fly act like magnets attracting thousands of migratory birds to the aquatic feast. The most numerous of the avian visitors are the graceful shorebirds known as the Wilson's Fallero. They come from as far north as Canada and bivouac in Mono's quiet waters. Mono Lake is their major stopover in an incredible journey to Bolivia and Argentina. For many, the lake will be their only rest stop in a journey of 5,000 miles. From freshwater inlets, the piercing cry of gulls breaks the desert stillness. Here in the freshwater, they wash away the salt that has collected on their plumage and within their digestive system. About 90% of this state's California gulls journey from the Pacific shores across the High Sierra to Mono Lake, their ancestral breeding grounds. They nest and raise their young on small islands where they are protected from predators. As the lake's water level lowers, so too does the population of its migratory birds and the web of life to which they are tethered. Lake Basin's unique features, its ghostly limestone monuments, are the most interesting. Known as tufa towers, these haunting pinnacles are born underwater. They become visible as the lake level recedes. The unique variety of tufa attracts the curious and their cameras. Forest Service interpreter Larry Ford is well acquainted with the secrets of the mysterious lake. I think one of the most important contributions I can make living here at Mono Lake as I do, season after season, is that it really gives me a good opportunity to get across to the visitor exactly what this place is like when they can't be here. The tufa towers we see close to the Lake Shoreline today were formed within the last thousand years. The carbonates in the lake mix with calcium brought in by spring water, and when these chemicals combine, they form calcium carbonate, which is limestone. The thing to remember about tufa towers is that they were all formed around springs. When tufa first forms, it's a very soft precipitation of these chemicals. They form around the source of a spring, and if they're allowed to remain in place, protected by deep water, without the effect of wave action, they will grow, they will calcify, eventually become hard enough to withstand the elements outside the lake. Another special feature of Mono Lake is the sand tufa. These are tufa structures that are formed chemically in the same way as the rock tufa you see around the shoreline, but sand tufa is formed beneath the sand, beneath the lake. It's a very delicate, very fragile, very beautiful little formations. Melting snows and alpine lakes feed the few streams that nourish Mono Lake. The daily evaporation and human consumption have caused its water level to drop. In the early 1940s, the city of Los Angeles completed an aqueduct system to collect some of the fresh water before it reached Mono Lake. Combined with long periods of drought, these occurrences have caused the salinity of the lake to double over the years, seriously threatening life in the basin. As the water level lowers, extensive alkali beaches are exposed. They feed choking dust to the basin's atmosphere as angry winds whip the lake shore. Balancing human needs with those of the environment presents a critical question that will continue to be asked. How much water does the lake need to preserve its fragile ecosystem? Huddled between the snowy Sierra and volcanic uplands, the basin changes moods frequently. The lake moves and breathes as the sun passes its yearly course. The unique alchemy of wind, water, sun and salt produces a frothy foam which dances on the beaches. A rare occurrence few have observed. By the mid-1800s, the basin had attracted a handful of Europeans. They were hardy pioneers, dreamers with ambitious visions. Few succeeded. Today, what remains are time-worn monuments to their occupancy. Some build a narrow-gauge railroad connecting the basin's forests with the gold mines of Bodhi. Others cultivated the land, creating a breadbasket for those who worked the mines in this land of boom or bust. Wallace McPherson's family was among those who dreamed of making their fortune in this unforgiving place. I've been a dreamer all my life, but I haven't had a whole lot of success. My dad's dream was to start a goat ranch, combined with a hotel on the shore, a real destination resort. We went on to the islands and raised goats for milk, which was very highly regarded dietetically at that time. This was going great guns until in 1922, and we were thrown into litigation for about ten years. My dad moved to the shore, and we started mono-in down on the old road. They'd had to move it about four times because it was late in those days, instead of dropping, it was rising. The raising is at the rate of about a foot a year. In the 30s, we used to run excursions out to the island. I would land them on the Peoja on the White Island and take them on around the east side of the island to nudge it and on back to mono-in. I had a lot of fun, but I didn't make much money out of it. And a whirlwind came down the canyon and picked up the whole shooting machine through at about 150 feet, which didn't do it any good at all. So the dreams didn't materialize, but the dreams were there. From every view of the mysterious lake, one's attention is drawn to the islands that break its surface. Twice the size of San Francisco, this inland sea holds two islands captive near its center. The Black Island, known as Nedget, is a volcanic cinder cone. Its name means blue-winged goose in the language of the Cusetica. Paoja, the large, light island, is the result of an upheaval of the lake bottom. Here, hot springs allow heated vapors to escape. The legends of the Cusetica Paiutes tell of spirits with long, wavy hair dancing in the vapor wreaths, boiling from the springs. They call the spirits Paoja in remembrance of the children of the mist who reveled there on moonlit nights. The Cusetica Paiutes made the basin home for several hundred years. Their survival in this harsh environment is a story of courage and tenacity. Jesse Durant, a Monolake Paiute, recalls her life at the lake. As far back as I can remember, we've always lived in Monolake at Rush Creek. My grandparents and my relatives, they have never known living anywhere else. To me, thinking about it now, it was really a paradise because there was greenery all around, metals and trees. We children, when we were small, we would just turn loose. There was no restriction of any kind and we were just all over the place. At that time, I think that there were about 200 Indians living around the lake. During the summer, we would make a little sagebrush little house. And that's the way we would get by during the summer. But during the winter is when we moved to the east side of the lake. The winters in the basins were really hard. The brine fly or the larvae was our main food. It was almost every summer when people or most of the women went out and gathered the kusabi, the brine fly. We'd get out with our winnowing basket and scoop them up. And first we spread some kind of a material blanket or whatever we have sheets. And put that right on and let it dry until we're ready to go home. All the younger generation, I don't think they, they haven't been out gathering it anymore. And it saddens me to see the way things are. The water has a lot to do with it. It has dried up and a lot of things has disappeared. Out of all the families, there's just the three of us left. My uncle and my aunt, so that's all there are. And whenever I visit them, I like to carry on a conversation in Paiute all the time. Human judgment has often painted this strange land as silent and vacant. A place suspended in time over which only the mirage dances and the sandstorm sweeps. But this grand and haunting country has no need of humankind. Yet our dependency on its water has shaped its destiny. A destiny bound to human reason and the whim of nature. And perhaps the grand architect of this enduring yet fragile aquatic world designed it to mirror our own mortality and planetary fate. Here, we can enter an unknown realm and return with insight to the nature of our own lives. Here, where the seasons leave and return on dry winds in a land born of ice and fire.