Owens Lake — Patsiata, the Lake That Was Taken

Off to the east lies one of the saddest landscapes on this drive: the vast, pale bed of Owens Lake. It was not always dry. For thousands of years this was a deep blue lake — the Paiute called it Patsiata — fed by the Owens River and alive with brine shrimp, waterfowl, and the people who fished and gathered along its shores. Steamboats once crossed it carrying silver down from Cerro Gordo.

Then, beginning in 1913, the Los Angeles Aqueduct carried the Owens River south to the growing city. Starved of its source, the lake shrank and, within little more than a decade, simply dried up — leaving a 100-square-mile flat of salt and alkali.

The bare lakebed became an environmental disaster. Winds lifted its fine, chemical-laden dust into towering storms that for years made this the single largest source of particulate air pollution in the United States. Only after decades of lawsuits has Los Angeles been forced to spend well over a billion dollars re-wetting and planting the lakebed to hold the dust down. Today shallow ponds and shimmering salt flats have coaxed the birds back — a fragile, hard-won truce on a lake that was taken.