Chapter 31
Salty, Alkali-Laced Tales (Mostly True)
from the Great Basin Desert, California
and Nevada
Ronald S. Oremland
Abstract My career has managed to blend scientific inquiry with four decades of
field work in the soda lakes of the Great Basin Desert. It has been quite an adventure.
While many of our reported discoveries were serendipitous, they also involved
curious interpersonal interactions that upon reflection were quite humorous. This
writing, therefore, is meant as a tongue-in-cheek personal retrospective of scientific
humor. Especially the “mostly true” caveat in the title. It stands in contrast to the
usual gravitas of scientific works; after all no one would include such a statement
accompanying a research paper, but given that these stories are 30–40 years old,
one’s memory cannot be entirely accurate and some embellishment occurs to make
the episodes entertaining and (hopefully) tie together. So, in these Covid-19 days of
sheltering-in-place, let me take you outdoors on a road trip of my adventures back
into my past field trips (cue the orchestra: John William’s theme music from Raiders
of the Lost Ark or, if there are any aging followers of the late, great raconteur, Jean
P. Shepherd and his N.Y. City radio shows broadcast on WOR/AM out there, Frei
Bahn).
31.1 Part 1
31.1.1 The Mono Basin and a Trip to SNARL
It was during the summer of 1978 when I caught my first glimpse of Mono Lake as I
descended from Tioga Pass (elevation: 9943 ft. or 3031 m) located at the eastern
entrance of Yosemite National Park. I was tasked with driving a field vehicle up to
the Sierra Nevada Aquatic Research Laboratory (SNARL) located about 25 miles
south of Lee Vining and Mono Lake, near Mammoth Lakes, CA. The vehicle itself
was an old, surplus U.S. Postal Service jeep, with a clunky manual transmission and
a very disconcerting tendency to alternately sway left and right as it meandered along
R. S. Oremland (*)
Department of Microbiology and Environmental Toxicology, U.C. Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA,
USA
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
C. J. Hurst (ed.), Microbes: The Foundation Stone of the Biosphere, Advances in
Environmental Microbiology 8, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63512-1_31
653
Salty, Alkali-Laced Tales (Mostly True)
from the Great Basin Desert, California
and Nevada
Ronald S. Oremland
Abstract My career has managed to blend scientific inquiry with four decades of
field work in the soda lakes of the Great Basin Desert. It has been quite an adventure.
While many of our reported discoveries were serendipitous, they also involved
curious interpersonal interactions that upon reflection were quite humorous. This
writing, therefore, is meant as a tongue-in-cheek personal retrospective of scientific
humor. Especially the “mostly true” caveat in the title. It stands in contrast to the
usual gravitas of scientific works; after all no one would include such a statement
accompanying a research paper, but given that these stories are 30–40 years old,
one’s memory cannot be entirely accurate and some embellishment occurs to make
the episodes entertaining and (hopefully) tie together. So, in these Covid-19 days of
sheltering-in-place, let me take you outdoors on a road trip of my adventures back
into my past field trips (cue the orchestra: John William’s theme music from Raiders
of the Lost Ark or, if there are any aging followers of the late, great raconteur, Jean
P. Shepherd and his N.Y. City radio shows broadcast on WOR/AM out there, Frei
Bahn).
31.1 Part 1
31.1.1 The Mono Basin and a Trip to SNARL
It was during the summer of 1978 when I caught my first glimpse of Mono Lake as I
descended from Tioga Pass (elevation: 9943 ft. or 3031 m) located at the eastern
entrance of Yosemite National Park. I was tasked with driving a field vehicle up to
the Sierra Nevada Aquatic Research Laboratory (SNARL) located about 25 miles
south of Lee Vining and Mono Lake, near Mammoth Lakes, CA. The vehicle itself
was an old, surplus U.S. Postal Service jeep, with a clunky manual transmission and
a very disconcerting tendency to alternately sway left and right as it meandered along
R. S. Oremland (*)
Department of Microbiology and Environmental Toxicology, U.C. Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA,
USA
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
C. J. Hurst (ed.), Microbes: The Foundation Stone of the Biosphere, Advances in
Environmental Microbiology 8, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63512-1_31
653