An environmental crime

Back in the early part of the 20th century, Los Angeles was growing like crazy, but they had a big problem--the city was located in a desert.  To continue their growth the city needed water, so they looked north to the Owens River.  The Owens River drains the entire Eastern side of the Sierras, nearly 200 miles long. Los Angeles began quietly buying up land and water rights in the Owens Valley until they were able to legally build an aqueduct and in 1924 divert all the water from the Owens River to Southern California.  In the 1800s, Owens Lake was NINETY FEET DEEP.  This is what it looks like today:

The lake is essentially a dry salt flat that blows toxic dust containing heavy metals as far as Utah. It is the largest single source of dust pollution in the country. The little bit of blue you see in the middle of the picture is the paltry amount of water that the courts just recently FORCED the city to allow to flow down to the lake to try to mitigate some of the toxic dust and rebuild some wetlands.  The Owens Valley is basically a place people drive through to get to Lake Tahoe from Los Angeles, but one wonders what the valley would be like if it still had its water.

Windstorm blowing dust from Owens Lake

Night sky

My interest in photography has been steadily growing as I get further from my "working" life and we fall deeper into this traveling life. We are seeing so many wonders that I have to try to capture the essence, the feelings that these places evoke.  So I've had my Canon DSLR for about three years now and 95% of the pictures I've taken are with the camera set on P (full "auto").  I have been really clueless about how to use the literally hundreds of combinations of settings that this camera has.  Finally, I downloaded a full users' guide for the camera and have spent the last couple weeks, starting in Death Valley, learning how it all works and trying to use more of its capabilities.  And today I downloaded some software from Adobe (Lightroom) that will let me organize, correct and enhance the photos I've taken, so stay tuned for some improvements and hopefully some links to more of my photo libraries for those who want to see more than just the few shots I put on the blog posts.

All that is by way of introduction to these shots.  I have been awestruck by the effect of the moon lighting on the snow-covered mountains near us and have been working on capturing that.  I finally have some that do these beautiful nights justice.

Millions of trout!

We visited the historic Mt. Whitney fish hatchery and loved the building but were disappointed to find out that they don't actually raise fish there any more since a big fire and flood in 2008.

The stone hatchery building was built in 1916 and has granite stone walls 2 feet thick

 So we headed a bit further up the highway to the Black Springs fish hatchery and were rewarded with huge concrete tanks of trout, from little six-inch guys to 15-inchers that would be a challenge to land.  Here is a clip of Lynnae feeding some of the big boys:

Wildflowers in the Owens Valley

Driving through Independence from the fish hatchery we saw this field of yellow at the base of the Sierras!

A sad piece of history

In 1942, over 100,000 Japanese immigrants and US citizens of Japanese descent were ordered to 10 interment camps, where most of them would stay for the duration of World War II. One of the first and largest of these camps, Manzanar, was located just north of Lone Pine.  Over 10,000 people were herded here and during their imprisonment, they built a community as best they could.  Initially housed in hastily-assembled barracks of wood and tar paper, the people built gardens, grew vegetables, made tofu and soy sauce by the barrel full, built beautiful furniture from fruit crates--essentially did what you would expect the Japanese people to do when forced to fend for themselves. We visited the Manzanar site, now a national historic landmark, and listened to the dozens of personal histories and accounts recorded over the last several years. This was a very moving and unique experience.

Not called a concentration camp, the barbed wire and guard towers must have made Manzanar feel like one.

A very sad time in our history.

The buildings having been sold for surplus during the housing shortage after WWII, nothing much remains but the signs showing the location of the hundreds of barracks, each of which housed 24 people in three 20 x 20 rooms.

A sad and ironic story.

Remains of a baseball field, popular with the residents.

"Pleasure Park"

Remnants of the Japanese garden created by the inmates, over 400 of which were landscape gardeners by trade.

Monument at the small cemetery

God's country

The views of the sky and mountains from the Alabama Hills has been an ever-changing display of amazitude.  We have seen sunsets, cloud patterns and lighting on the mountains that cannot be described!

 

  

Alabama Hills

If you have ever seen a western movie from the 40's, 50's or 60's, then you've seen the Alabama Hills.  This area has been a favorite of Hollywood since the 20's, when Hopalong Cassidy rode the dusty trails on his trusty horse. Over 400 movies and countless TV shows and  commercials have been filmed here because of the fantastic shapes of the rocks and the scenic backdrop of the Sierra Nevada mountains.  From Gunga Din and How the West Was Won to the Lone Ranger tv series and more recently Django Unchained and Iron Man, so many films used this unique place to represent the West.

This is BLM land (Bureau of Land Management) and they allow what is called "dispersed camping" here.  This means you can find a spot you like and drop anchor for up to 14 days for free.  We took advantage of this and found ourselves a place in paradise for five nights.  This is truly one of the most magnificent places we have ever had the privilege to camp.

 

The rocks here are amazing.  They are about the same age as the nearby Sierras, but are composed of sedimentary rock instead of the granite of the Sierras. They were subject to chemical erosion that carved them into the rounded and cracked forms we see today.  Climbing around on the boulders is so much fun.