Mono-Inyo

Why should it be a National Park?

The Sierra Nevada Mountains are one of the country's most celebrated mountain ranges, but only a small percentage of the people visit the desert on the eastern side of the range and experience the secret wonders there. Hot Creek is a taste of Yellowstone in the high desert. The creek is located within the Long Valley Caldera, a 20 mile-wide depression created by the collapse of a volcano over 700,000-years-ago. The warm, geothermal waters carved a gorge through the caldera, offering expansive views of the eastern slope of the Sierras along with several strange rock formations, pools, steam vents, and hot springs. Although it's less than an hour away from Yosemite's eastern entrance, Hot Creek is virtually unknown. The Inyo National Forest, which manages Hot Creek and the Mono–Inyo volcanic craters to the north, receives minimal federal funding and has difficulty even maintaining safety measures like fences to ensure visitors are safe around dangerous volcanic features.

Mono Lake is theorized to have been created hundreds of thousands of years ago when the basin where it lies was filled with water. Without an outlet to the ocean, the water was trapped and has been slowly evaporating away. With every passing year, the salinity of the lake increases as the water level drops, resulting in white limestone tufa formations that made the lake famous. Sadly, visitors regularly trample the delicate limestone towers as they climb on them and take pieces of tufa for souvenirs, endangering this natural wonder.