Fossil Falls & Pearsonville

Pull over at the cluster of buildings here and you've reached Pearsonville. Andrew and Lucy Pearson bought 40 acres along the highway in 1960, and over the years Lucy collected so many hubcaps off the desert shoulder — more than 80,000 by some counts — that the place crowned itself "Hubcap Capital of the World." Today it's a fuel stop and a few weathered structures, but the real spectacle sits about twelve miles up the highway to your north: drive north on US-395 roughly 12 miles to the Cinder Road turnoff, then about a mile in to the falls.

Look north and you're facing the Coso Range, a field of small volcanoes that erupted again and again over hundreds of thousands of years, flooding this basin with dark, slow basalt. Those flows — laid down roughly 400,000 to 10,000 years ago, the youngest from Red Hill — set the stage for Fossil Falls. During the last Ice Age, glaciers on the Sierra crest melted into a swollen Owens River that ran all the way down here. Where the river spilled over a lava ledge, the water carved and polished the black rock into a forty-foot dry cascade, drilling perfectly round potholes as granite cobbles spun in its eddies. The river is long gone; the sculpted falls remain.

People were here for the show. The Coso People camped along this water for thousands of years, knapping tools from the prized obsidian of the nearby Coso volcanic field — glass so valued it turns up at sites across the region. Their descendants include the Little Lake Shoshone, Numic-speakers whose petroglyph canyons (on closed military land to the east) hold tens of thousands of images. The Fossil Falls Archaeological District has been on the National Register since 1980.