Crater Mountain & the Big Pine Volcanic Field

Look west across the valley floor and you'll see a broad, dark, flat-topped mountain set apart from the granite wall of the Sierra behind it. That's Crater Mountain, the largest cone in the Big Pine volcanic field — roughly 190 square miles of lava flows, cinder cones, and some 40 vents scattered across the floor of the Owens Valley. This is not the Sierra; it welled up from beneath it. Eruptions began about 1.2 million years ago and continued in pulses, with the youngest flows here laid down only around 17,000 years ago — yesterday, in geologic terms. The rock ranges from black alkali basalt to basanite, and Crater Mountain itself rises some 2,000 feet above the sage, its lava field spilling east until its edge runs right alongside the highway you're driving.

Below all that volcanic rock runs water, and water is the story of this valley. The Owens River threads the floor here, dammed just to the north at Tinemaha Reservoir and fed into the Los Angeles Aqueduct — the 1913 project that quietly drained the valley to slake a distant city. Long before that, this was Payahuunadü, the "land of flowing water," irrigated and tended for centuries by the Nüümü, the Owens Valley Paiute, whose Big Pine community sits just up the road. The aqueduct, and the land exchanges that followed it, took most of the valley out of local hands by the 1930s.

One bright legacy of that century: the tule elk. Native to California but nearly hunted to extinction, a herd of 26 was brought from Yosemite and released near Aberdeen, in the middle of the valley, in 1933, with more added the next year; today it numbers in the hundreds. In the cooler months you may spot them grazing the green pasture between the road and Crater Mountain, or a little south near the Fish Springs viewing area — a herd thriving well outside the species' original range, in the shadow of a volcano.