Diaz Lake

Off to your right, that sheet of blue water against the brown valley floor is Diaz Lake — and it shouldn't really be here. In the high desert south of Lone Pine, open water is the exception, not the rule. This one was born in a single violent night.

At about 2:30 a.m. on March 26, 1872, one of the largest earthquakes in California's recorded history tore through the Owens Valley. Estimated today at roughly magnitude 7.4 to 7.9, it flattened Lone Pine — most of the town's adobe buildings collapsed, and 27 people died, many of them buried together in a mass grave you can still visit just north of town. Along an 18-mile stretch, a block of the valley floor dropped some 20 feet, creating a sunken trough geologists call a graben. A spring opened in the new low ground, water pooled, and roughly 80 acres of lake appeared where there had been dry land.

The name comes from a ranching family — brothers Rafael and Eleuterio Diaz, who had emigrated from Chile in the 1860s and ran cattle on this land. Their ranch eventually passed, like so much of the valley, to the city of Los Angeles and its water department, which leases the lake and shoreline to Inyo County today.

Sitting around 3,670 feet, Diaz Lake still holds water year-round — a pointed contrast to vast Owens Lake just to the south, which the Los Angeles Aqueduct drained to dust. It's now a campground and fishing hole, stocked with rainbow trout and one of the few Eastern Sierra lakes that welcomes motorboats and water-skiers in summer. A quiet recreation spot, sitting in the footprint of a catastrophe.