Little Lake & Pearsonville — Through the Gap

You're threading the Little Lake Gap, a narrow slot where the Sierra's eastern wall and the dark Coso volcanic field nearly pinch shut. Almost everything that ever moved up this country — water, animals, people, rails, and the highway under your wheels — had to funnel through here.

The black cliffs and cinder cones around you are young, geologically speaking. Coso lava erupted in pulses, the most recent flows only tens of thousands of years ago, and one basalt sheet dammed the ancient, glacier-fed Owens River. That backed-up water carved the polished gorge of Fossil Falls just to the north and left the marshy pond that gives Little Lake its name. The Coso people — ancestors of today's Paiute and Shoshone — camped along this water for thousands of years, and the nearby Coso Range holds one of North America's greatest concentrations of petroglyphs.

In 1905 the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power dammed Little Lake while surveying its aqueduct, and the Southern Pacific's Jawbone Branch threaded the gap soon after. A rock-faced hotel rose at Little Lake in 1923, a vital overnight stop when reaching Lone Pine from Los Angeles took two or three days. Then the cars got faster: US 395 was realigned in the 1960s, the town was bypassed, the rails pulled up by 1981, and the old hotel burned in 1989.

The roadside settlement here, Pearsonville, came in 1960, founded by Andy and Lucy Pearson around a wrecking yard. Lucy collected hubcaps — tens of thousands of them — earning the nickname the Hubcap Queen and the town its half-joking title: Hubcap Capital of the World.