Lee Vining CA (Mono Lake)

I used to fly over Mono Lake every time I flew into SFO. We have been here once before when we visited Yosemite with the kids, but we were just passing through. Mono Lake has no outlet. It's a Great Basin lake like the Great Salt Lake. In the 40s the city of LA began diverting most of the water that flowed into it, south, to water their lawns. The lake began to recede dramatically and the salt content began to rise. It took many years of litigation but there has been some progress made in saving the lake. The weird outcroppings were formed under water (at one time the lake was 600 feet deep) They are composed of calcium carbonate that bubbled up from springs beneath the lake.