2006-07-29 04:00:00 PDT Mono Lake, Mono County -- Thirty years ago, a dozen students from Stanford University, UC Davis and elsewhere camped at ancient Mono Lake for more than two months, conducting the first ecological survey of California's largest lake, which was dying as a result of massive water diversions to Los Angeles.

This month, the same group -- now college professors, government scientists, an inventor, a physician and high school teachers, all in their early 50s -- returned for a historic reunion at the million-year-old lake that once inspired Californians to slap "Save Mono Lake" bumper stickers on their '70s vans.

Today the lake is saved -- rising and healthy.

The group's 1976 study of birds, insects, phytoplankton, salinity and hydrology has been recognized as the scientific underpinning of the California Supreme Court's 1983 ruling that the state must protect natural resources such as Mono Lake under the state Constitution's public trust doctrine. That decision ultimately saved the lake from the kind of water grab that in the 1920s turned Southern California's Owens Lake into a 110-square-mile salt flat.

"Everything we did was later repeated with more rigor," said Jeff Burch, an engineer and inventor for Agilent Technologies in Palo Alto, who came to the reunion at Mono Lake County Park. "But we pointed to the direction that policy needed to change or otherwise you'd have this train wreck, with the Mono Lake ecosystem collapsing."

It had been 30 years since Burch saw Connie Lovejoy, then a UC Davis student and now a biology professor at LaVal University in Quebec City, Quebec. Back then, she was commanding him to pull up algae samples as they teetered in a small boat rocking on the lake amid its famous limestone towers. Lovejoy, with her college colleague Gayle Dana, now a hydrology professor at the Desert Research Institute in Reno, conducted the water chemistry and biology studies of the lake.

David Winkler, now a biology professor at Cornell University, hadn't seen Bob Loeffler since Winkler was counting birds in the sagebrush 30 years ago and Loeffler strode by on his way to complete calculations on groundwater levels around the Mono Lake Basin. Winkler edited the final report of the 1976 research, for which he directed the bird study. Loeffler, then at Stanford and now director of the mining, land and water division in the Alaska Department of Natural Resources, measured groundwater, river flow and evaporation.

Two weeks ago, the group returned to celebrate saving the world wonder. They found a thriving 60-square-mile lake freshened by a record amount of winter and spring runoff from the tributary creeks.

The lake is teeming with brine shrimp and alkali flies that feed the birds. Bright green native grasses grow right down to the lake, now large enough to cover the once-exposed lake bottom.

The surging waters cover the old land bridges that had allowed coyotes to eat gull eggs and baby birds. Freshwater springs bubble up from the lake's bottom, growing a new crop of tufa crystals that will eventually form new underwater towers of calcium carbonate, a type of limestone.

The tributaries of Lee Vining and Rush creeks are gushing mountain streams filled with brown trout, and willows flourish on the edges along with the resurgence of Jeffrey pines. Sprouting up are buffalo berry bushes and Woods' roses, prized by the willow flycatcher. The songbird known as "the ivory-billed woodpecker of Mono Lake" disappeared, then suddenly reappeared as waters returned to dry creeks.

The dying lake

For 35 years before the students arrived at Mono Lake, state and federal regulators had all but ignored the environmental fate of the lake, sister to Great Salt Lake. When the budding scientists showed up, the lake had dropped by 42 feet, lost half its volume of water and shrunk in surface size by nearly a third.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power had been legally taking water since 1941 from four of the lake's tributary creeks. The water moved through an 11-mile tunnel to the upper Owens River and Lake Crowley, a reservoir that sends water through three hydroelectric power plants before the flow hits aqueducts aimed at faucets in Los Angeles.

Because of those freshwater diversions, the lake -- naturally a mix of table salt, baking soda, Epsom salt and a dose of lye -- had become unnaturally saline. Instead of its natural 50 parts per thousand of salt, the lake contained 92 parts per thousand -- about 2 1/2 times saltier than seawater. One-inch-long brine shrimp and alkali flies were reaching their salt-tolerance limits.

Survival of these creatures was crucial because they fed more than 80 species of migratory birds stopping at Mono Lake, including thousands of Wilson's and red-necked phalaropes and eared grebes. Snowy plovers and the state's largest breeding colony of California gulls were at risk.

Tributary creeks were dry. The lake's tufa towers looked like a boneyard as the limestone eroded. There were few fresh calcium-rich springs to bond to the carbonates in the water and build new tufas. And the lake was shrinking, leaving an alkali dust ring that caused unhealthy air pollution that filled the sky hundreds of miles away.

The ragtag group of science-minded friends of friends, later known as the Mono Basin Research Group, shared a love of the natural world, and they wanted to discover scientific ways to measure the lake's health and save it. They set up a camp on the principles of women's equality, the health of organic foods and a philosophy of science for the people.

"There was zero competition and an unbelievably positive and supportive atmosphere," recalled Jamie Grodsky, who periodically camped with the group and is now an environmental law professor at George Washington University.

Bird expert Winkler, nicknamed "Wink," later persuaded the late David Gaines to found the Mono Lake Committee, which since 1978 has served as an advocate for the lake. The committee would print the ubiquitous bumper stickers that spread the conservation word.

In 1979, the National Audubon Society, the Mono Lake Committee and other groups sued Los Angeles, the first in a series of lawsuits that alleged the water diversions violated the public trust doctrine. Four years later, the state Supreme Court ruled that the state had an obligation to protect such places as Mono Lake "as far as feasible" even if it meant reconsidering past allocations.

Eleven years after that, the state Water Resources Control Board re-examined Los Angeles' water rights and set minimum stream flow requirements. The agency ordered 18 vertical feet of fresh water returned to the lake.

Los Angeles originally was prohibited from taking any water from the Mono Basin until the lake's level reached an elevation of 6,377 feet above sea level. Los Angeles today is allowed to take 16,500 acre-feet of water a year -- or 16 percent of its original diversion, a restriction that will remain until the lake reaches an elevation of 6,392 feet.

The saved lake

Last week, the lake reached the 6,385-foot level. In eight more years, it's expected to rise 7 more feet to reach the target level.

"It's only been 10 years, but you can see how it's all beginning to come back," said Geoffrey McQuilkin, co-executive director of the Mono Lake Committee.

The return of the endangered willow flycatchers that had been long gone from the Mono Basin is a great sign, he said.

"That tells us we've gone from a dry wasteland to a recovering streamside forest," he said.

The once-diverted, now-restored creeks are supporting 49 species of breeding birds, according to PRBO Conservation Science, the nonprofit research group formerly known as Point Reyes Bird Observatory. That number is in addition to the 80 species of migrating and resident birds living off the alkali flies and brine shrimp in the lake.

PRBO biologist Chris McCreedy spied the first willow flycatcher's nest in 2002.

As water filled the creeks, back came the shrubby vegetation, followed by the willow flycatcher that nests there, said Sacha Heath, PRBO eastern Sierra program director. The yellow warbler also returned.

But birds that nest in tree holes and on top branches -- such as the American kestrel and the mountain chickadee -- are fewer because the trees haven't yet grown tall. "In 10 years, I'd expect we see an increase in the canopy and the cavity nesters," she said.

PRBO researchers have been watching the gulls as far back as 1983, the year of the state Supreme Court decision. The gulls make nests and lay eggs on three islands in Mono Lake. In the 1970s, the water level had sunk so low that bridges of land jutted above the surface of the lake, connecting the islands to the shore. Coyotes trotted onto the island and ate the gull eggs and the chicks. For several years, the gulls abandoned nests on black volcanic Negit Island, in the middle of the lake, then recolonized. The populations have grown steadily between 1999 and 2004.

"The lake's up now, and there's not much chance of the coyotes getting out there," said Dave Shuford, a PRBO biologist.

The colony has remained at about 45,000 gulls. But if the diversions hadn't been cut, the numbers of gulls would be way down, he said.

As the lake rises and becomes less saline, the flies are expected to grow in numbers and provide food for even more birds.

Dave Herbst, a member of the original core of a dozen in 1976, is now a UC Santa Barbara researcher based at the Sierra Nevada Aquatic Research Laboratory 30 miles south of Mono Lake. He continued to study the lake until his research funds dried up a couple of years ago.

Thirty years ago, his lab studies showed that the flies would die if salinity kept increasing. Since then, he has published peer-reviewed experiments on the flies' response to changing habitat and salinity.

A higher lake has a greater area of shallows around the edges, places where larvae and pupae thrive because temperatures are warmer and algae is more abundant, Herbst found. As the water covers the tufas, they transform into habitat for aquatic life, "like the rocky headlands of the intertidal zone," he said, providing surfaces protected from wave action on which the algae and pupae can attach.

And declining salinity favors growth of algae that feed the flies, helping them grow faster and larger, Herbst said.

Robert Jellison, also a research biologist at UC Santa Barbara who works out of the same Sierra Nevada lab as Herbst, has monitored Mono Lake for 24 years.

"Mono Lake is one of the real success stories worldwide in saving the ecological and public trust values of a salt lake. Salt lakes throughout the world are desiccated, and Mono Lake is the exception," Jellison said.

Water diversions have shrunk the Salton Sea, Nevada's Walker Lake and the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.

Ironically, under the 1994 state water-diversion order, Mono Lake will never reach its climatic equilibrium or natural size. Once the lake fills to the target elevation, Los Angeles can increase its diversions as long as the lake doesn't fall below the elevation. Ultimately, it lost 45 feet. It's only getting about 18 feet back.

Starting the study

The work behind the recovery happened much by happenstance, all set in motion by a high school science teacher, Fred Savage, now in his 43rd year of teaching in the Orlando, Fla., area.

Savage received notice of a National Science Foundation grant program for original student research and promptly tossed it. Later, he reconsidered, pulled it from the wastebasket and sent it to Burch and his brother, Elliot, then a UC Santa Cruz student.

Jeff Burch immediately thought of Winkler, a UC Davis student Burch had met while counting birds at the Farallon Islands. They had talked about doing a project together. The grant possibility opened the way.

Burch also recalled passionate urgings for a Mono Lake study from biologist Gaines, the founder of the Mono Lake Committee. Burch and Winkler decided to seek the Mono Lake grant and won it.

At the reunion, David DeSanti, a former Stanford teacher of several members of the group, praised Gaines as "an amazing person" who feared for the "loss of the glory of Mono Lake." Gaines died in a car crash in 1988.

DeSanti, now director of the Institute for Bird Populations in Point Reyes Station, said: "These strong young minds, who were really in love with the Earth, were stimulated by David Gaines and maybe to change some course of events."

Herbst recalled the summer as "one of those moments from where you can trace the change in your life."

"We were all pretty green. We had to rely on our classroom information and intuition," said Herbst. "We discovered what it was like to be a scientist, to find our own way."

The lake also changed. Now just swimming in the lake demonstrates the difference over three decades, Jeff Burch said.

"The fresh water lies on top of the lake water. You feel six inches of icy cold Sierra snowmelt at the chest. Below it's warm. The underwater tufas are really coming back to life. Every tufa tower is bubbling and burping as fresh water is coming in.

"It was all worth it."