Mono Lake, CA

I had just fin­ished hik­ing in the Sier­ras for a few days and was dri­ving back home. I had some time and had always want­ed to try to swim across Mono Lake. It was mid Sep­tem­ber so the weath­er was still nice and the water was warm, almost bath tub warm, so I decid­ed to give it a go. The route that I had looked at, shown below, entailed about three miles of swim­ming to get to Pao­ha Island, about 2.5 miles of hik­ing across the island, then one mile of swim­ming to Negit Island, about a mile of hik­ing across the island, and final­ly one to two miles of swim­ming to the north shore. In total, about six miles of swim­ming and three and half miles of hik­ing. All in all a pret­ty sol­id day trip and fun adven­ture. The total time took about ten hours.

Swim­ming and hik­ing route across Mono Lake

Tufas at the start of the swim

Mono Lake is an amaz­ing lake with spec­tac­u­lar tufa for­ma­tions along parts of the shore­line. I high­ly rec­om­mend a trip to check them out. There is also an uncan­ny amount of flies that con­gre­gate along the shore­line. As I was doing the hik­ing sec­tions of the jour­ney it con­tin­u­al­ly felt like things were fly­ing into my legs. The swim­ming sec­tions were a nice change to being bom­bard­ed with flies. I would high­ly rec­om­mend wear­ing shoes if you are plan­ning to do a trip like this. The bot­tom is very mucky and there are ran­dom hard rocks, so it is nice to have some protection.

There are hoards of flies along the shoreline