One of the all-time great stories of American environmental law, the Mono Lake saga recounts the protracted conflict over scarce water resources between the City of Los Angeles and advocates for the Mono Basin, Yosemite’s eastern watershed, some four hundred miles to the north. In 1983, in National Audubon Society v. Superior Court, the California Supreme Court famously addressed the conflict by centering the state’s obligations under the common law public trust doctrine, which sets forth public rights and obligations in certain natural resource commons, especially navigable waterways. … While the decision itself is well-represented in the legal literature, the full story of the case has not received the attention it deserves. This Article offers fresh perspective on the least recounted but critical parts of the story—not only the significance of the legal innovations in the decision, but also what happened beforehand to lay the foundations for the landmark ruling, and then what happened afterward to bridge the court’s holding to the ultimate outcome for Mono Lake.