At Water's Edge: Introduction

The Great Salt Lake is on the brink of collapse.

It’s the story of many terminal lakes around the world, desiccated from a warming climate and water consumption that’s out of balance.

But Utahns don’t need to look far to see why the Great Salt Lake is worth fighting for and what they stand to lose if it turns to dust.

In search of solutions, reporters with the Great Salt Lake Collaborative — a group of news, education and media organizations seeking answers to the public crisis facing the lake — traveled to California’s eastern Sierra Nevadas and explored two other saline lake systems: Owens Lake and Mono Lake.

There, on the opposite edge of the Great Basin from the Great Salt Lake, journalists from The Salt Lake Tribune, Deseret News and Fox 13, with support from the Solutions Journalism Network, looked to these other salty lakes provide clues to the potential future the Wasatch Front faces. 

“Because of their proximity in the Great Basin, I’ve always referred to Mono Lake and Owens Lake as sister saline systems,” said Lynn de Freitas, executive director of FRIENDS of Great Salt Lake. 

 FRIENDS  is an advocacy group that formed after becoming inspired by efforts to save those sister lakes decades ago.

The mostly dry lakebed of Owens Lake, as well as some natural pools of water and areas that have been flooded as part of the Owens Lake Dust Mitigation Program, are pictured before sunrise in Inyo County, California, on Friday, Aug. 12, 2022. (Photo credit: Spenser Heaps, Deseret News)

The  Great Salt Lake ,  Owens Lake  and  Mono Lake  are united by a geography that lends itself to terminal lakes — snow falls and accumulates in its high desert peaks, melts and flows into streams. That water is confined by mountain ranges like the Wasatch and Sierra Nevada. It only leaves the basin through evaporation.

Watch more:  Pitfalls and possibilities: an introduction to the project.  

Read more:  Geography of the Great Basin (and why it has so many terminal lakes). 

That all changed in the 1900s, when Owens Lake had all its water diverted down an aqueduct to thirsty Los Angeles, hundreds of miles away, on the other side of the Sierra. 

The change was sudden and unnatural.

Loss of inflows meant Owens Lake dried and became a dust bowl in just a few decades. It’s now the largest historical source of dust pollution in the United States.

Mono Lake, California. (Photo credit: Spenser Heaps, Deseret News)

Farther north, scientists and students realized Mono Lake faced a similar fate when the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power began siphoning off its tributary rivers as well. A nonprofit group of lake advocates took on the utility. And, in 1983, it secured Mono Lake’s right to exist.

The water wars between Los Angeles and rural eastern Sierra watersheds have inspired countless news articles, research papers and Hollywood films that have documented, debated and dramatized the morality and necessity of the utility's actions. 

We wanted to focus our reporting on the potential future for the Great Salt Lake, not past conflicts in California. But the on-the-ground battles there provide useful context. They explain how these lakes came to represent two potential fates for our lake at home.

Views of the Los Angeles Aqueduct carrying water from Sierra Mountain rivers and streams to Los Angeles. August 2022 (Video credit, Manuel Rodriguez, Fox 13 News)

We care about Owens and Mono lakes because of the lessons they hold for those now waking up to what’s at stake for the Great Salt Lake. It, too, has shriveled due to people diverting water from its tributaries to build their lives and livelihoods. And unlike the lakes on the eastern Sierra, Utahns don’t have a single big, deep-pocketed utility to blame.

In a way, we are all in this together.

Exposed and dying microbialite fields of the Great Salt Lake. August 2022. (Photo credit: Leah Hogsten, The Salt Lake Tribune.)