Owens Valley

Today was a long interesting drive from Barstow to South Lake Tahoe, California. Almost all of it was on US395 through high desert with mountains on both sides. The last 1/3 of the drive consisted of travel through a place called Owens Valley before we climbed into the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The valley road was similar to Interstate, 4 lane divided before turning in 2 lanes, with occasional passing lanes, for the climb over a 7,000 foot pass and another of over 8,000. With a final drop of 2,000 feet to Lake Tahoe.

Owens valley was interesting for several reasons, we stopped at two of them, but were flabbergasted by a third. The City of Los Angeles gets about half of it water from here via 223-mile aqueduct, turning once massive lakes into alkali flats. We did stop and tour Manzanar, the first Japanese American Internment camp during WWII. Around 110,000 Japanese Americans on the west coast were rounded up and sent to 10 such camps, with 10,000 ending up here in the shadow of the Sierras. Our other stop was Mono Lake, a place Mark Twin called, “lifeless, treeless, hideous desert… the loneliest place on earth.” He is kind of right, but the shallow, very salty, lake has a weird beauty to it due to its tufa columns.