Producer's Journal: Beauty (and Jet Noise) at Mono Lake

Posted by Catherine Stifter

July 28, 2007

The weather was perfect. A hot, dry, windless Eastern Sierra morning. The small group of folks ready for a canoe tour with the Mono Lake Committee were enthusiastic about the recovery and restoration of this, the largest natural lake in California, twice as salty as the ocean, with an alkaline level that of household soap.

It was our second canoe trip in as many days. Yesterday, we took a canoe ride with the Executive Director of the Mono Lake Committee and interviewed him while floating near Owl Tufa on the south side of the lake. Today, our mission was to record the scenes of a canoe trip designed to give members of the public their best view into the lake (literally).

We recorded in stereo the quiet dip of paddles propelling the canoe over a calm, clear brine shrimp soup of a lake. California Gulls were fattening up on abundant alkali flies, nabbing them at the rate of about 1 per second (our guide made us count the number of bites in a 10 second period!) The guide talks were stuffed full of fascinating natural history facts.

But those jets! Sonically interrupting the beauty of the day. Over and over and over again.

After 3-4 attempts, stopping the recording each time to wait for the sound to subside, I realized it was useless. Jet noise takes up the whole sky and then some. Not just while the plane is flying over, but long before you can see it, you hear that motor noise, like chewing on tin foil, nails on a chalk board, pick your favorite metaphor, its a sound that makes your teeth hurt. The flight path is just north of the Lake, but you hear each jet enter the Mono Basin, fill the sky with unnatural motor noise. And then long after the jet passes California airspace, the doppler effect lingers. It is hard to wait for the quiet moment. Just when I'm ready to start recording again I heard another one coming.

I gave up and just kept recording while the jets flew over.

Apparently here, where LA now puts water back in the streams feeding the lake and restoration of habitat, flora and fauna are well underway, the air space is unsalvageable. There is nowhere free from the sound of human travel.

When we asked Geoff McQuilkin about all this jet noise spoiling the experience of nature, he reminded us that the view out an airplane window is one of the first ways many folks discover Mono Lake. It is a distinctive site from 30 thousand feet. It was from the air that the shrinking lake became very noticeable. And now, as restoration becomes apparent in the rising lake levels, folks flying from San Francisco to Boston will sometimes snap a picture of the rising lake and send it to the Mono Lake Committee as proof of this conservation success.

Here we are canoeing with Geoff McQuilkin near Owl Tufa.

I think we may just leave those jets in the documentary.