[2] It lies within Sequoia National Park and the Sequoia-Kings Canyon Wilderness, in close proximity (less than 1.25 miles (2.0 km)) to Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the contiguous United States.

[5] Versteeg's announcement received coverage in newspapers throughout the American West, including the Los Angeles Times, the Oakland Tribune, the Deseret News, and the Reno Gazette-Journal.

[16] To commence 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.

[14][15] He ran 17 miles (27 km) with the gourd, down to Whitney Portal at 8,374 ft (2,552 m), where a series of horseback riders recalling the heavily mythologized Pony Express brought it to the town of Lone Pine in Owens Valley, at the foot of the Sierra Nevada.

[15] The next day, the gourd of water was conveyed by a miner on donkey down Main Street, handed off to a covered wagon, again passed off to a twenty-mule team, and then to a stagecoach.

[13][15] The ceremony featured descendants of the Donner Party and Death Valley '49ers, as well as Governor Merriam, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt via telex.

Goodwin, first superintendent of Death Valley National Monument, into the ephemeral lake of Badwater Basin: the lowest point in North America.

[20] Kept in specially designed aerated cans slung over the backs of the mules, the trout were released into walled-in sections of streams as workers camped for the night.

[22][23][24] In 1939, American physicist Guyford Stever used Tulainyo Lake as a location for his research on cosmic rays while in graduate school at the California Institute of Technology (CalTech).

Their higher-elevation experiment site was Tulainyo Lake, where the men carried equipment by mule and paddled out in a faltboot in early September and attached the electroscope to a buoy, where it remained for several days.

The crash occurred in poor weather and at night during a new moon; investigators concluded the proximate cause was deviation from the assigned flight path, as the crew likely thought they were further south, near Palmdale.

On August 10, an Air Force HH-43B Huskie helicopter carrying investigators to the accident site itself crashed just 100 yards (meters) away, causing one serious injury.

[29][30] The lake was also briefly the record-holder for the site of the highest-elevation scuba dive in North America, performed by Peter Hemming and David Moore in 1997.

[35] Most animals are transient, such as the butterfly Parnassius phoebus and the gray-crowned rosy finch; the few exceptions include yellow-bellied marmots and the American pika, which live in burrows constructed among rocks.

[35] Early 20th-century sources indicate the lake itself was stocked with golden trout in the 1930s,[22][23][24] and Hemming and Moore reported sighting a small fish during their record-breaking scuba dive in 1998.