Owens Lake

Owens Lake is a large dry lake in eastern California's Owens Valley, located about 5 miles south of Lone Pine, California. Unlike most dry lakes in the Basin and Range Province (which have been dry for thousands of years), Owens held significant water until 1924.

Changes in climate since the end of the last ice age, has slowly shrunk the size of the lake from at least twice its current area and more than 250 feet deep to its recorded history depth of 30 feet and 10 by 15 mile size.

Before the lake dried up, a chemical plant at Bartlet evaporated brine to extract chemicals. A charcoal kilns burned wood from Cottonwood Canyon near the lake to feed silver and lead smelterss across the lake at Swansea. Cartago was a port out of which a barge-like vessel, the Bessie Brady (launched in 1872), cut the three-day freight journey around the lake to three hours. Much of the freight it carried was silver-lead bullion mined from the Cerro Gordo mines which at its height was so productive that bars of the refined metals had to wait in large stacks before teamsters could haul it to Los Angeles in a trying three-week journey (one way). This situation improved after the formation of the Cerro Gordo Freighting Company. Keeler, now just a patch of trees, was a town near the lake that once had a population of 5,000 people and was the center of trade for the Cerro Gordo mine in the 1870s. In 1879 silver mining ended but the town was saved when the Carson & Colorado Railroad built narrow-gauge rail tracks to the town. The town then became a soda, salt and marble shipping center until 1960 (the rail line was sold to Southern Pacific Railroad in 1900).

However, starting in 1913, the streams that fed Owens were diverted by Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) to feed the Los Angeles Aqueduct and the lake level started to drop quickly (see California Water Wars). As the lake dried-up, soda processing at Keeler switched from relatively cheap chemical methods to more expensive physical ones. The Natural Soda Products Company sued the city of Los Angeles and built a new plant with a 15,000 settlement. A fire destroyed this plant shortly after it was built but the company rebuilt it on the dry lakebed in the 1920s.

During the unusually wet winter of 1937, LADWP diverted water from the aqueduct into the lakebed, flooding the soda plant. Because of this the courts ordered the city to pay $154,000. After an unsuccessful appeal attempt to the state supreme court in 1941, LADWP built the Long Valley Dam which impounded Lake Crowley for flood control.

The lake is now a large salt flat or playa whose surface is made of a mixture of clay, sand, and a variety of minerals including halite, mirabilite, thenardite and trona. In wet years these minerals form a chemical soup in the form of a small brine pond within the playa. When conditions are right, bright pink halophilic (salt-loving) bacteria spread across the salty lakebed. Also, on especially hot summer days when ground temperatures exceed 150° F, water is driven out of the hydrates on the lakebed creating a muddy brine. More commonly, periodic winds stir up noxious alkali dust storms which carry away as much as four million tons of dust from the lakebed each year, causing respiratory problems in nearby residents.

This once blue, saline lake was a very important feeding and resting stop for millions of waterfowl each year and is still considered to be a Nationally Significant Bird Area by the Audubon Society even though Owens is now a mostly dry lake. At the playa's shore, a chain of wetlands, fed by springs and artesian wells, keep part of the former Owens Lake ecosystem alive. Snowy Plovers nest at Owens along with several thousand Snow Geese and ducks. As part of an air quality mitigation settlement, LADWP is shallow flooding 10 square miles of the salt pan to help minimize alkali dust storms. Even this limited amount of water is helping to buoy the lake's ecosystem causing hope in conservationists that an expanded shallow flooding program could do even more. There are no serious plans, however, to restore Owens to anything resembling a conventional lake.

References

• Geology Underfoot in Death Valley and Owens Valley, Sharp, Glazner (Mountain Press Publishing Company, Missoula; 1997) ISBN 0-87842-362-1
• The Owens Valley Committee: Owens Lake