Owens Lake

Patsiata was a lake. It held water for most of the last twelve thousand years, ran roughly sixty miles of the valley at its Ice Age peak, and was still deep enough in the 1870s to carry steamboats hauling silver bullion across to the railhead. The Nüümü and the Newe had farmed the valley around it for centuries with irrigation ditches cut off the Owens River. Then Los Angeles opened its aqueduct in 1913, took the river, and within about a decade the lake was gone.

What replaced it was the largest single source of airborne dust in the United States. Wind coming off a dry alkali playa lifts fine particles laced with arsenic and cadmium; the valley recorded the worst PM10 readings in the country, and the people living downwind breathed it for decades before the air district forced the city to act. The remedy has cost Los Angeles more than 2.5 billion dollars across some forty-eight square miles of lakebed, most of it shallow flooding, using tens of thousands of acre-feet of water a year to hold dust down on a lakebed that water once covered for free.

The unintended result is worth the stop. Those shallow ponds have become serious bird habitat, and the Owens Lake Bird Festival now counts species on ground the city drained. Pull off US-395 south of Lone Pine and look east; the white is salt, the shimmer is the compromise.