Eastern Sierra & Owens Valley
Payahuunadü, the land of flowing water — US-395 under the Sierra escarpment, the Alabama Hills, Manzanar's hard history, Bishop, Mono Lake's tufa towers, and the ghost town of Bodie kept in arrested decay.
The Nüümü and the Newe called this valley Payahuunadü — the land of flowing water — and made it exactly that, running irrigation ditches off the Sierra snowmelt for centuries to farm a desert valley green. What followed is one of the plainest injustices in California: the Army marched the people out in the 1860s, settlers took the ditches, and then Los Angeles took the water itself — the aqueduct opened in 1913, and by 1926 Patsiata, Owens Lake, was a dry bed whose dust storms poisoned the valley for decades. The Nüümü are still here, still fighting for the water, and the valley still carries their name for it.
US-395 runs the whole length of it, pinned between the highest Sierra crest and the Inyo and White Mountains, the eastern escarpment rising two vertical miles off the sagebrush in places. At Lone Pine the Alabama Hills pile their rounded granite in front of Mount Whitney, the highest summit in the contiguous United States; Hollywood shot hundreds of Westerns in these rocks and never really left. A few miles north stands Manzanar, where the United States imprisoned more than ten thousand Japanese Americans behind barbed wire from 1942 to 1945 — a concentration camp on ground the Nüümü had already been driven from once, two forced removals sharing one square mile of desert.
Farther up the valley: Bishop, the Eastern Sierra's easygoing capital and home to the valley's largest Paiute community; the strange tufa towers of Mono Lake, one of the oldest lakes in North America — Los Angeles reached this far for water too, and the lake dropped for decades until the courts made the city share; and up a washboard road, Bodie — a gold-rush town abandoned nearly whole and kept in arrested decay, the best ghost town in the West by most reckonings.
What to See in Eastern Sierra & Owens Valley
9 places across the region, grouped by what they are.
Geology & Rock Formations
Natural Areas
Historic Sites
Towns & Gateways
Scenic Drives through Eastern Sierra & Owens Valley
Stories from Eastern Sierra & Owens Valley
Eastern Sierra & Owens Valley rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.
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