The Owens Valley of eastern California is a deep north-south trending basin lying between the Sierra Nevada on the west and the White-Inyo Mountains on the east. The valley’s maximum topographic relief is about 10,800 feet between Mt. Whitney (14,494 ft.) and Lone Pine (~3,700 ft.), a horizontal distance of only about 13 miles. The … Read more
During the late Pleistocene (approximately 10,000 years ago), interconnected lakes and rivers covered much of the Great Basin. At the westernmost edge of the Great Basin, the Owens River filled the Owens Lake basin to a depth of approximately 250 feet and overflowed it, continuing as far south as China Lake. As these glacial waters … Read more
2/15/2014 March 22, 2014 OVC fund raising event to feature Bill Powers OVC is pleased to announce that Bill Powers, an expert on distributed solar power generation (aka “Solar Done Right”) will speak at our annual fund raising event Saturday March 22, 2014 at the Mountain Light Gallery, 106 Main St., Bishop, CA. The event … Read more
Action: Write to the Inyo County Board of Supervisors or the LADWP Board of Water and Power Commissioners. Urge Inyo County to reject a larger station and urge Los Angeles to abide by the terms of the Inyo-Los Angeles Water Agreement. Background: The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) has launched a lobbying … Read more
By Daniel Pritchett, Conservation Chair of the local Bristlecone Chapter of the California Native Plant Society Skip to: Riparian forest and shrub communities Alkali meadow and shrub communities Upland xerophytic shrub communities Groundwater-dependent vegetation References Vegetation of the Owens Valley has been studied, classified, and described in many ways. Paiutes living in the Valley when the first … Read more
Historically, Owens Lake was one of the most important stopover sites for migrating waterfowl and shorebirds in the western United States for thousands of years. Joseph Grinnell, visiting the lake in 1917 from the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology in Berkeley, reported, “ Great numbers of water birds are in sight along the lake shore–avocets, phalaropes, … Read more