Today is Friday, and we have to get home on Saturday, so we decided to leave Death Valley and go see the Owens Valley. Owens Valley has interested me since I moved to L.A., because it’s the first place that L.A. raided for water. You can read about it if you like, but the gist of it is that William Mulholand, by hook, crook, and politics, managed to get the city of Los Angeles to acquire most of the water rights in the Valley. He then had an aquaduct built to bring the water to L.A. Actually, he brought it mostly to the San Fernando Valley where he and his cronies owned land. Of course this left no water for the Owens Valley farmers, so the valley, which was once lush, is now becoming a desert.


 We left Death Valley by the Western Route, across the Panamint mountains and valley. It was lovely, but the roads were narrow enough that Flo got a bit nervous. Actually, the camper did pretty well despite its size, but it did seem awfully big on some of those curves. We stopped at a place called Father Crowley Point which overlooked the valley. While we were there, a jet from one of the air bases came barreling down the canyon to the left into the larger valley at its end. He was actually below us as he went by. We tried to see where he had gone when he came back the same way. He was incredibly loud and so fast that by the time we heard him he was by. scary!


We entered the Owens valley by the lake, which has been dry for many years. Mulholand didn’t dry it out, nature did that long before he came. Thats the Sierra Nevada in the background. One of them is Mt. Whitney, which is about 14,000 feet high. The valley is about 4,000 feet up, so this is one of the biggest reliefs you’ll ever see. You can also see where the water comes from. What we mainly noticed is that it was cold! There was some company gathering chemicals from the lake bed, and they apparently have trouble with chemical dust pollution from the lake. I know we saw some dust-devils with chemical dust as we were leaving the area.


We went up the valley because I wanted to see where the Owens River got diverted to L.A. We couldn’t get there, because there’s a project to divert some water back to the River and there was big equipment running around. We did get to see the aquaduct, though it wasn’t easy. We talked with one of the workers who was going in to the construction site and she told us where we could cut across to see it.


The aquaduct looked pretty big, didn’t it? Well, the river looks like it once was about the same size. See those golden weeds in the middle of the picture? That’s whats left of the river. After we saw this, I decided that I’d seen what I came to see, and we left for home.

We had planned to stop at Inyokern, a small town at the mouth of the valley. We stopped to get gas, and it was so cold, with such a strong wind blowing, that we decided we didn’t want to stay there. We kept on South, and eventually spent the night on a vacant lot next to an Arco station. They let RV’s and trucks overnight there for free. It was close to a highway, and the railroad wasn’t that far away, but hey, it was there when we needed it. I came to appreciate the small bubble of warmth and light that the camper offered

To top it all off, the cat took this opportunity to get sick and start throwing up. Sometimes, things just seem to conspire to tell you that it’s time to go home.