Owens Valley

Owens Valley
	Upper course of the Owens River near Bishop
location	California (USA)
Waters	Owens River
Mountains	Sierra Nevada , White Mountains , Inyo Mountains
Geographical location	36 ° 48 ′ N , 118 ° 12 ′ W Coordinates: 36 ° 48 ′ N , 118 ° 12 ′ W
length	120 km

The Owens Valley between Sierra Nevada and the White Mountains

Owens River south of Big Pine

The Owens Valley is the approx. 120 km long valley of the Owens River in Mono and Inyo Counties in the south-east of California (USA). It runs from north to south between the Sierra Nevada in the west and the White Mountains in the northeast and the Inyo Mountains in the southeast. To the south, the valley is bordered by Owens Lake , a now dry salt lake . In the north, the Owens River rises in the Long Valley Caldera , a volcanic crater system. US Highway 395 runs through the valley ; from south to north there are Lone Pine , Independence (seat of the Inyo County administration), Big Pine and, as the largest town in the valley, Bishop .

geology

The Owens Valley was formed by a tectonic expansion of the earth's crust, a so-called rift valley , in the last three million years. From a geological point of view, the valley is thus a ditch , comparable to the Upper Rhine Rift in Europe. Its flanks are bounded by the Sierra Nevada Fault to the west and the White Mountains Fault to the east. The Owens Valley is the westernmost trench ( ger .: Basin ) of the Basin and Range Province , which until well after Colorado in the east and from the border with Oregon as far as Mexico extends. The block, which sank into the rift valley, lies almost 3000 m below the surface in the Owens Valley, up to today's level the valley has been filled with eroded material from the neighboring mountain ranges, especially from the Sierra.

Despite the strong backfilling of the valley, the Owens Valley is the deepest valley in North America with a level difference of 3282 m between the summit of Mount Whitney , the highest mountain in the United States outside of Alaska , at 4418 m and the valley floor at Lone Pine at 1136 m at one horizontal distance between summit and site of 20 km.

The Owens Valley was shaken on March 26, 1872 by a tremor measuring 7.1 on the Richter scale. It was the third strongest quake in the history of California. The city of Lone Pine in particular was badly hit. Almost all of Lone Pine buildings, 52 of 59, were destroyed. A total of 27 people died in the valley. The area is still shaken by light tremors today.

To the east of the upper Owens Valley near Bishop are the Volcanic Tablelands , a landscape that was created by the erosion of tuff from eruptions of the Long Valley Caldera. In the lower Ovens Valley, volcanic basalt flows lie on the Darwin Plateau . Also of geological interest are the Alabama Hills on the west side of the Upper Valley near Lone Pine . They are and have been the setting of countless feature and television films.

history

The first natives of the valley can be traced back to around 8000 BC. To date. Ancestors of the Paiute Indians can be identified from around the year 500 . They lived primarily as hunters and gatherers , but also practiced rudimentary irrigation farming . In the aftermath of the California gold rush , settlers reached the valley from the end of the 1850s and built cattle breeding and ore mines . In particular, they looked for gold , but found only modest silver , lead and zinc deposits. The penetration of the whites, who partly appropriated the irrigation systems of the indigenous people, led to conflicts with the Indians. In 1862 a military post was set up in the valley, from which today's village of Independence developed, and in 1863 around 1000 Paiute were forcibly relocated to a reservation at Fort Tejon , around 200 km south . Almost all of them returned in the following years, some of them working for the ranchers and continuing their traditional subsistence farming. In 1900 there were three schools in the valley operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs .

The mines were exhausted around 1880, the valley lived only from agriculture and suffered from the lack of sales opportunities for goods due to the remoteness behind the mountains. The situation was not improved until the Carson & Colorado Railroad's narrow-gauge railway was built in the mid-1880s. The farmers dug several irrigation canals to make the most of the water from the Owens River.

Between 1905 and 1910, the Owens Valley Improvement Company called for the valley to be used for fruit growing . In the newly created town of Manzanar (from the Spanish word for apple orchard), some families settled and grew various fruits, especially apples. At the same time, the city council of Los Angeles , about 300 km away , had decided to divert the water of the Owens River and thus enable the ascent of the previously insignificant city. Although the valley lies in the rain shadow of the Sierra Nevada and the river only collects the runoff from the eastern flank of the Sierra, the water was valuable for the city administration's department for water and energy and appeared to be accessible due to the sparse population of the valley. The city administration bought all available water rights.

William Mulholland , the head of the Los Angeles waterworks, started the construction of the first Los Angeles aqueduct . For this purpose, a reservoir , the Tinemaha Reservoir , was built on the Owens River and a 370 km long aqueduct with 164 tunnels from the valley to Los Angeles. In 1913, Mulholland officially opened its masterpiece, which was fed by the tributaries of the Owens River. Owens Lake dried up completely in fifteen years . The acquisition of permits and water rights was legally and morally imperfect. Farmers in the Owens Valley area fiercely resisted what became known as the California Water Wars. So in 1924 they blew up the aqueduct of Jawbone Canyon; other opponents of the project opened a lock and drained water for four days, causing prices to rise. This situation forced the Los Angeles City Council to negotiate with the farmers. Mulholland himself was adamant. He said that he regretted the loss of so many trees in the valley, in part because a sufficient number of trees were now missing to hang every troublemaker living there. Many residents left the valley because agriculture was no longer possible. It was not until the 1990s that the farmers and Los Angeles reached a final out-of-court settlement, according to which a guaranteed residual water volume of 5% of the natural runoff in the Owens River has remained since the end of 2006.

Memorial stone at the site of the Manzanar camp

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor , the War Relocation Authority set up the Manzanar War Relocation Center in the valley as part of the internment of Americans of Japanese descent. From 1942 to 1945 up to 10,046 people were locked in the camp. It was not until 1988 that the victims who were still alive were compensated. The camp is now designated as the Manzanar National Historic Site , a visitor center provides information about the history and once a year former inmates and family members come together for a celebration.

Owens Valley in the media

The film Chinatown with Jack Nicholson (1974, director: Roman Polański ) is set against the backdrop of the California Water Wars of the 1920s and 30s.
The book Farewell to Manzanar - A True Story of Japanese American Experience During and after the World War II Internment by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston from 1972 tells the story of the Manzanar internment camp.