User:Penitentes/Tulainyo Lake

Tulainyo Lake is a freshwater alpine lake in the eastern Sierra Nevada in the U.S. state of California. It lies in a large granite bowl bounded by the Sierra Crest to the north, east, and south, at an altitude of 12829 ft. It lies within Sequoia National Park and the Sequoia-Kings Canyon Wilderness, near the Sierra Crest and in close proximity (less than 1.25 miles) to Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the contiguous United States. Tulainyo Lake's altitude and location on the Sierra Crest mean that it is frozen over during the winter, and ice and snow often linger around the lake's shoreline into the summer. It has even been ice skated.

For many years after its initial mapping, Tulainyo Lake was considered the highest lake in the United States, or even all of North America, a fact which garnered the lake minor fame. However, depending on the definition of 'lake', multiple lakes have been found at higher elevations. Several unnamed tarns in the Sierra Nevada are higher, as are a handful of named bodies of water elsewhere in the United States, including Pacific Tarn in Colorado's Rocky Mountains and Lake Waiau on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Elsewhere in North America, the twin volcanic crater lakes of Nevado de Toluca are located at approximately 13,800 feet. However, Tulainyo Lake surpasses all of them in size, and may also still be the highest named lake in California and the Sierra Nevada. The depth of Tulainyo Lake is not known.

In large part because of its high elevation, the lake has played a notable role in the history of California's Eastern Sierra, a region fraught with disputes over water and between agriculture and tourism. The lake's role in the narrative peaked in 1937, when it was a starring feature of the so-called Wedding of the Waters celebration honoring the opening of California State Route 190 from Owens Valley to Death Valley.

Geography
Tulainyo Lake is described as lying in a cirque that "doubtless held a small glacier until very recently." The lake is enclosed by a moraine, through which some water seeps out. The lake is also rimmed with talus and surrounded by multiple high peaks: 13,563-foot Tunnabora Peak rises to the north of the lake, 13,553-foot Mount Carillon lies to the south, a 13,383-foot subpeak of Carillon named The Cleaver to the east, and 14,094-foot fourteener Mount Russell (the seventh-highest peak in the state) to the southwest.

West of the lake, the terrain slopes down to the headwaters of Wallace Creek, which drains out of the Wallace Lakes basin before joining Wright Creek and eventually the upper Kern River. Tulainyo Lake is not accessible by road or trail, and is most easily accessed from the Wallace Lakes basin off of the John Muir Trail/Pacific Crest Trail 5 miles to the west, or from the steep North Fork Lone Pine Creek drainage to the south via the pass between Mount Russell and Mount Carillon. A fisherman's use trail extends from the JMT to Wallace Lake.

Mapping and naming
The first person, Native American or European, to lay eyes on Tulainyo Lake is not known. According to the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, the name Tulainyo Lake was first given to the water body in 1917 by USGS chief geographer R.B. Marshall—it is a portmanteau, based on the lake's location in Tulare County, immediately west of the Inyo County line. The Board on Geographic Names approved the name in 1928. However, the name appears on maps as early as 1907, and a 1935 Oakland Tribune article states that it was believed the lake was named by government topographer G. R. Davis in 1905.

Highest North American lake determination
On October 16, 1935, Chester Versteeg, chairman of the geographic committee of the Sierra Club, made a public announcement that after two years of research Tulainyo Lake had been determined to be the "highest lake on the American continent." Versteeg's discovery was verified at the time by the United States Geological Survey. Water from the lake was also taken for laboratory testing and found to be very soft (i.e. low in mineral content). At the time, Versteeg mused about the possibility of building a trail connecting Tulainyo Lake to the John Muir Trail, but ultimately no such trail was ever constructed. Versteeg's announcement received coverage in many Western newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, the Oakland Tribune, the Desert News, and the Reno Gazette-Journal. The Tribune even speculated that, as the lake was higher than Bolivia and Peru's Lake Titicaca (generally recognized as the world's highest lake at that time), Tulainyo Lake might be the highest lake in the world.

Wedding of the Waters
In 1937, Tulainyo Lake played a major role in the opening and dedication of California State Route 190 from the town of Olancha to Death Valley, which officially linked the highest—Mount Whitney via Whitney Portal—and lowest points in the contiguous United States. The elaborate ceremony—devised and organized by local boosters such as Fr. John J. Crowley—was called the Wedding of the Waters, and involved taking water from the country's highest lake (as Tulainyo was known then) to its lowest (Badwater Basin sometimes contains an ephemeral saltwater lake) via a wide variety of transportation methods.

To kick off the ceremony, on October 29, 1937, a young Washoe Native American youth from Nevada named Jerry Emm cracked the ice on Tulainyo Lake and filled a gourd with water. He ran 17 miles with the gourd, down to Whitney Portal at 8,374 feet, where a chain of horseback riders in the style of the heavily-mythologized Pony Express brought it to the town of Lone Pine in Owens Valley at the foot of the Sierra Nevada. That night, the water remained in a bank vault while some was served to Governor of California Frank Merriam at a celebratory dinner. The next day, the gourd of water was then taken by a miner via burro down Main Street, handed off to a covered wagon, again passed off to a twenty-mule team, and then a stagecoach. Next, a narrow-gauge railway train took the gourd to Keeler. On October 31, the gourd's penultimate travel segment was from Keeler to the new highway's cutoff to Darwin, in a 1938 Lincoln-Zephyr car, where the highway was officially opened in a ceremony featuring descendants of the Donner Party and Death Valley '49ers, as well as Governor Merriam, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt via telex.

From Panamint Valley, an airplane took off with the gourd, and finally the water from Tulainyo Lake was then dropped by T.R. Goodwin, Superintendent of Death Valley National Monument, into Badwater Basin: the lowest point in Death Valley, the United States, and North America. Signal fires were lit across the mountains from Dante's View to the summit of Mount Whitney, where a firefall lit by Norman Clyde culminated the ceremony. The sequence of transportation methods for the gourd was intended to recreate the use of those methods in California's history, from earliest to most recent.

Trout stocking
In the 1930s the lake was also stocked with golden trout by the California State Fish and Game Commission. The mountainous terrain was deemed too risky for aerial fish stocking, where fish are released from aircraft at low elevations above the lake. This meant that in 1938, 10,000 juvenile trout from the Mount Whitney Fish Hatchery had to be transported by mule 40 miles and 9,000 feet from the hatchery over Shepherd Pass into the Kern River basin, where they were taken cross-country through the Wallace Lakes basin to Tulainyo Lake. The trout were kept in specially designed aerated cans on mule-back, and when camping for the night were released into walled-in sections of streams. Only 20 trout died on the journey, but there were concerns about whether any of the remaining trout would survive the extremely harsh winter at nearly 13,000 feet. They reportedly thrived for several years, and their fate afterwards is unknown. Other fish stocking efforts in Tulainyo Lake are referenced in 1933 and 1936 in less detail.

Aviation events
In the winter of 1950, Johnny Hodgkin, a rancher and pilot from Selma, California, landed a light plane on skis adjacent to Tulainyo Lake, potentially setting a record at the time for highest-altitude aircraft landing and takeoff. As Tulainyo Lake and its environs were within the boundaries of Sequoia National Park, he was reprimanded by park authorities and forbidden from repeating the feat in the park again.

The lake's vicinity was also the site of a tragic aviation accident in the 1960s. On February 8, 1969, Hawthorne Nevada Airlines 'Gambler's Special' Flight 708 (a Douglas DC-3 airliner flying from Hawthorne, Nevada to Burbank, California) crashed into the sheer cliffs forming Tulainyo Lake's eastern ramparts high above the Hogback Creek drainage. All 35 passengers were killed on impact. The crash occurred in poor weather at night during a new moon, and investigators concluded that deviation from the assigned flight path was the cause of the accident, as the crew likely thought they were further south, near Palmdale. Due to the inclement weather, including heavy snowfall, the wreckage site was not discovered until August 8 of the same year. On August 10, 1969, an Air Force HH-43B Huskie helicopter carrying investigators to the accident site itself crashed just 100 yards from the previous crash site, resulting in one serious injury.

Guyford Stever muon research
In 1939, famous American physicist Guyford Stever used Tulainyo Lake as one of the locations for his research on cosmic rays while in graduate school at the California Institute of Technology (Cal Tech). Stever and two fellow graduate students were using recording electroscopes with a quartz fiber and a battery-powered clock to recharge the fiber to measure the intensity of mesons at two different altitudes. To eliminate absorption effects and ensure that any difference in the quantity of mesons detected was due to their decay while in transit (mesons are extremely short-lived), Stever and his fellows immersed the electroscopes deep in water. Their higher-elevation experiment site was Tulainyo Lake, where the men paddled out in a faltboot in early September and attached the electroscope to a buoy, where it remained for several days. The experiment was successful, although the faltboot was damaged and some equipment lost in the lake during a storm when the faltboot overturned. Afterwards, the experiment attracted the attention of J. Robert Oppenheimer at Cal Tech.

Other events
Tulainyo Lake was reportedly also the favorite lake of Norman Clyde, a prolific and notable mountaineer and guide in the early 20th-century Sierra Nevada.

Tulainyo Lake was briefly the record-holder for the site of the highest-elevation scuba dive in the United States, performed by Peter Hemming and David Moore in 1998. The pair dove to a depth of approximately 30 feet for 15 minutes.

Ecology
Tulainyo Lake lies in an alpine environment, meaning that it is well above tree line and subject to cold and snowy conditions for much of the year. Early 20th-century sources indicate the lake used to be stocked with golden trout, and there is at least one modern report of a small fish being sighted in the lake during a dive in 1999.