Playa Works: The Myth Of The Empty

A Tour of the Playa, Coda: Owens Dry Lake

A Tour of the Playa, Coda 113 ATour of the Playa Coda:Owens Dry Lake 114 PlayaWorks Ahead of us the dirt road dwindles to a strip of desiccated alkali pushed up six inches above the surface of the Owens Dry Lake. Should we fall off the track, we’ll never escape from the muck that awaits on either side. “We’re heading out to the dead center of what is, on some days, the largest single point source of particulate air pollution in the United States,” declares Matt, glee written all over his face. The Owens Lake is just barely dry, and only on the surface, groundwater flowing within a few feet beneath our shoes. It’s not late enough in the spring for the sediments to have dried out, and we can see standing water here and there on the playa.Once again we’re venturing out against better judgment , but ever since Matt made a comment on our first day in the van about Owens Lake being the anti–Los Angeles, I’ve had the notion we should visit it. Fed by the watershed of the eastern Sierra Nevada, this was once a healthy perennial lake sixty miles long and 325 feet deep that had existed for 800,000 years before the drying of the climate began after the Pleistocene. Its modern travails started with agricultural withdrawals from the Owens River at the turn of the twentieth century. By 1905 the lake was only ten feet deep, but steamboats were still hauling ore across the water from the Inyo Range to the east. The lake’s doom was sealed, however, when William Mulholland, an Irish ditchdigger who rose to become chief engineer and then superintendent of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, began excavating the Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1906 with the help of five thousand fellow pick-and-shovel enthusiasts. With its headgates situated thirty-five miles upstream on the river, construction was finished in 1913, and the 233-mile-long straw began sucking out 27 million gallons per hour from the valley. Needless to say, not only did the complete diversion of surface water doom the lake, but the drilling of groundwater wells to augment the aqueduct’s flow in drought years meant that the salt-tolerant biotic community, which was rooted in subsurface water, also died. By 1926, the lake had A Tour of the Playa, Coda 115 dried up and the surrounding area desertified into what is now more than eighty-five square miles of playa inimical to every living thing. Residents in the small mining community located on the eastern shore of the lake have for decades complained about “Keeler fog,” which the usgs notes is an “unusually fine-grained alkaline dust that infiltrates the smallest cracks and contaminates residences.” The particles , which include trace minerals such as arsenic, are so fine that they are taken deep into the lungs when inhaled and cause a variety of respiratory ailments. The dust storms that rip off an average of 300,000 tons of particulates from the playa every year can be seen from satellites and are severe enough to shut down operations in the middle of the China Lake Naval Weapons Center, sixty-five miles south. Particulate emissions from the playa have been known to exceed federal health standards by as much as 2,300 percent, and the dust has settled as far away as Los Angeles and the Grand Canyon,respectively and as the crow flies (or the dust blows), 160 miles south and 320 miles east. This is America’s version of the Aral Sea. The ladwp is a founding member of the Metropolitan Water District ,the mwd to which the clui van once belonged.Driving out onto a lake destroyed by a municipal water organization in what was once one of their sister agency’s vans is guaranteed to provoke some thought. Matt and I had discussed visiting Owens Lake while in Wendover, and after standing by the evaporation ponds there, thought it would make a nice symmetry to move from a playa where dessication was used for profit to one where it was inadvertently causing loss. Two days later, having spent a day writing up notes and exploring more of the airfield, including the Enola Gay hangar, we headed back south. First we retraced our way back to Tonopah, then jogged...