Lone Pine

The town of Lone Pine is known as the gateway to Mt. Whitney, and was the epicenter of the strongest earthquake in California's recorded history. On March 26, 1872 a tremor registering 7.4 on the Richter scale shook the town, killing twenty-seven people as the eastern side of the Owens Valley dropped twenty feet. There is a graveyard for the victims of quake just north of town.

Whitney Portal

Thirteen miles west of Lone Pine and 8,365 feet above sea level, Whitney Portal is base camp for climbers to Mount Whitney. Over 20,000 climbers attempt the hike to the top of the highest peak in the lower forty-eight states. Although the hike is only ten miles long, the elevation gain on the way to the 14,495 foot peak, coupled with the likelihood of altitude sickness, makes this a tough haul. Once on the top, hikers may visit a small cabin for shelter. At the base, the Whitney Portal Store provides supplies and food for hikers. Bear attacks on cars in the Whitney Portal area are common, even during the day.

Alabama Hills

The Alabama Hills, just west of Lone Pine, have been used for over 400 movies and television shows, especially Westerns and British-army-in-India films, featuring the likes of John Wayne, Gene Autry, Gunga Din, Tom Mix, Errol Flynn, the Lone Ranger, Clint Eastwood, and Mel Gibson. This unusual landscape is favored by the industry because it can be filmed to look like other places.

The hills were the site of one of the last battles between the indigenous Paiute people and the white settlers of the Owens Valley. The name, "Alabama Hills," however, was given by Southern sympathizers from Lone Pine who named the geological feature after a Confederate cruiser. In response, Union sympathizers named a 12598’ peak in the Sierra crest above after the U.S.S. Kearsarge, which had sunk the cruiser.

Held every October since 1990, the Lone Pine Film Festival reprises the role of the area by showing both new and old Westerns.

Alabama Gates

When they are opened, the Alabama Gates, on the west side of the highway, four miles north of Lone Pine, divert the flow of water out of the aqueduct into a spillway leading to the now dry bed of the Owens River. The most famous event in Owens Valley history took place here in 1924 when sixty local men took over the Alabama Gates and opened the spillway to return the water to the Owens River. With the construction of Crowley Lake, the need to divert water into the Owens River in times of abundance has largely ended.

Los Angeles Aqueduct

Soon after the Alabama Gates, Route 395 passes over the open Los Angeles Aqueduct. This portion of the aqueduct extends 23.7 miles north from the Alabama Gates to the Owens River and is unlined. Riparian vegetation takes advantage of readily-available water. The Aqueduct system provides about 70 percent of the water for the city.

Manzanar

Manzanar was the first of the ten Japanese-American relocation camps in the United States established during World War II. Prior to the war, the site was active farming community, with apple orchards, packing houses, and post office. The last harvest was in 1932, after the site had been bought by the City of Los Angeles and left to dry up. During the war, it became an instant and involuntary town of 10,000 people of japanese ancestry, housed and working in hundreds of buildings built hurriedly by the Army Corps of Engineers. After the war, the buildings were removed, many of them finding new uses in the surrounding communities. The site continues to be developed into an interpretive site, operated by the National Park Service.

Independence

Though smaller than Lone Pine and Bishop, the town of Independence is the Inyo County Seat, and the regional administrative and maintenance center for the Los Angeles DWP. Local attractions include the Eastern California Museum, founded in 1928 and offering an overview of Owens Valley history as well as the home of early twentieth century author Mary Austin (whose famous Land of Little Rain recounted life in the Valley), and the Winnedumah Hotel. There is a large, old, hand-drawn map of the Owens Valley and its various tourist destinations in the Chevron Station.

Mt. Whitney Fish Hatchery

Built in 1917, the Mt. Whitney Fish Hatchery is the earliest and grandest of the hatcheries in the valley. Game fish such as trout were artificially introduced into the streams of the eastern Sierras and the Owens River watershed starting in the 1870s. Some 3,500 tons of native granite collected from within a quarter mile of the site were fit together””?none were cut””?to form the building. The fish native to the area ore of the smaller and less desirable variety, like pupfish and suckers. After whirling disease was found at the premises in the late 1980s, this hatchery stopped hatching or raising fish, and was nearly closed by the state in 1996. Local outcry, and the tourist potential of the sixty-thousand visitors to the site every year kept it open. Today some four million trout eggs are raised here, then transported into other hatcheries in the area which then raise the fry and grow catchable fish for release into the lakes and streams of the Sierras. An interpretive display inside explains the process.

Aberdeen

Once located on the main route through the Owens River Valley but now bypassed by State Route 395, the seven acre resort village of Aberdeen has spaces for 34 mobile homes and 35 RVs. The Los Angeles Aqueduct intake is 2 1/2 miles east of the village. The water wars of the twentieth century were prefigured at Goodale Creek where the Hines and Goodale irrigation ditches joined and a dispute led Bill Hines to shoot one of the Goodales in 1895.

Tinemaha Reservoir

Capable of holding up to 16,282 acre feet of water, Tinemaha Reservoir is a supplementary storage area to hold Owens River waters when the aqueduct is shut down for repairs or when river flow exceeds the capacity of the aqueduct.

Tule Elk Viewpoint

Developed by the Inter-Agency Committee on Owens Valley Land and Wildlife, this viewpoint above the Tinemaha reservoir gives tourists a chance to see a herd of Tule Elk. Not indigenous to the Owens River Valley these dwarf elk rather come from the San Joaquin Valley and coastal areas where the introduction of cattle nearly drove them to extinction. Legislators realized the danger of extinction and gave them protection in 1873. Although the elk began to recover, their raiding of crops was considered to be a nuisance by San Joaquin Valley farmers. 55 animals were transplanted to the Owens Valley in 1934. The herds flourished on protected Los Angeles land and in Inyo National Forest and have been transplanted back to other parts of the state.

Fish Springs Fish Hatchery

The Fish Springs Fish Hatchery is one of three active state hatcheries in the Owens Valley area. It produces about 1.6 million catchable-size trout a year. Although trout are not indigenous to the lakes of the Sierras, they are a major attraction, providing local towns with a great deal of fishing-related tourism in the summer. Statewide, sport fishing is a $3 billion a year industry, fueling some 75,000 jobs. Nationwide, sport fishing is so big that if it were a corporation, it would be the thirteenth biggest in the US. The existence of game fish in the Owens River Valley is maintained by the state hatcheries, which are funded by fees from fishing licenses.

Owens Valley Radio Observatory

The Owens Valley Radio Observatory (OVRO) is a major site for radio astronomy observations, with numerous large steerable dishes. It is located here because of the lack of conflicting radio sources, a result of the remoteness and depth of the Owens River Valley, with 14,000 foot high mountains on either side. Features of the facility include the Caltech Millimeter Array, which consists of six 10-meter dishes on a configurable track, a solar interferometer antenna array, with two 27-meter dishes, and two Cosmic Microwave Background antennas. Most of the site is operated by Caltech and funded by the Office of Naval Research since 1960, with the exception of the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) antenna, which is one of a network of ten antenna sites across the United States that make up the VLBA, a National Science Foundation project. Given its proximity to the ancient Bristlecone pines and fossil rich White Mountains, it is a propos that some of the oldest stars in the universe were discovered here.

Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest

A road from Big Pine leads up to the Bristlecone Pines, which some scientists consider the world’s oldest living things. Up to 4,700 years old, these trees can be found on the seemingly barren summits of the White or Inyo Mountains. At 4,723 years of age, the Methuselah Tree has been called the oldest living thing in the world. The forest is a protected area, and there is a visitors center with walking trails that lead through the various groves. Despite the notoriety of the tree, its identity is not indicated on the walking trail in order to protect it from souvenir-hunters and vandals, making it an invisible attraction. Its status as the world's living thing is, not surprisingly, subject to some debate. A recently discovered creosote bush in the Mojave desert is said to be 11,700 years old while some Pennsylvanians claim the title for a rare box huckleberry plant near a highway.

The White Mountains are prime habitat for the "chukar" or Hungarian Partridge, actually the Kurdish national bird, introduced into the United States by the government in the 1950s. The chukar’s natural habitat consists of the barren mountain highlands of Asia and Southeastern Europe. A gray bird with black and white stripes on its front, the chukar is about twice the size of a quail and is called the chukar because of the "chuck-chuck-chuck" noise it makes. Apparently a tasty game bird in the pheasant family, the chukar is notorious for being hard to bag. A hunter lucky enough to chance upon a chukar will typically find it near water, low down on the mountain, only to face a long chase as the cliff-dwelling bird leads him up one side of the mountain and down another.

White Mountain Research Station

Founded in 1940 by the Navy and operated by the University of California, the White Mountain Research Station is a high altitude and alpine research complex, composed of four separate facilities located at different elevations. The Owens Valley Laboratory is located in Bishop, the Crooked Creek Conference Center at 10,150 feet near the Patriarch Grove of Bristlecone Pines, the Barfcroft Laboratory at 12,470 feet, and the generally unmanned Summit Station, the highest high altitude lab in North America (fourth highest in the world) is on top of the 14,250 foot White Mountain Peak. Winds on the summit routinely exceed 150 miles per hour.

Even though the White Mountains are nearly as high as the Sierras, they lie deeply in their rain shadow, keeping them dry and relatively snow-free throughout the year. This lack of heavy snow makes them the only suitable place in the country for year-round high altitude study. Research is conducted in a variety. of disciplines, including archeology, physiology, biology, and aerospace.

The Mt. Barcroft laboratory also boasts the highest pool table in North America while the summit station contains the continent’s highest Internet node, allowing for real-time, remote monitoring of scientific equipment. University of California Television recently made an Emmy-award nominated documentary on the facility. It can be viewed on the Internet.