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Owens Lake, California, 2024.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Owens Lake in California’s Owens Valley was a large 100 square mile blue-water saline desert lake fed by mountain streams and rivers. Then Los Angeles’s thirst took over, and as part of the California Water Wars, by the 1930’s the Owens Valley had been bled dry to help feed Los Angeles’s relentless expansion (LA is about 175 miles to the south).

As a result, Owens Lake was turned into a toxic dust bowl, with alkali dust storms blowing up from the dry lake bed. By 2013 it was the largest single source of dust pollution in the US. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) has lately been forced by legal action to try to mitigate the worst effects of its hundred years of deliberate neglect. The LADWP’s attempts don’t appear to have a lot of effect, and have resulted in bizarre landscapes in and around the lake.

I first saw what was left of Owens Lake in the late 1980’s, I think, when it was much worse than it is now — the LADWP mitigation efforts over the last few years have had some impact on air and ground quality, I guess — but even still, the current state of Owens Lake generally has to be seen to be believed. There’s really no lake left, just various expanses of flat dusty poisonous wasteland, with, to the LADWP’s tiny credit, pockets of green here and there where birds seem to be thriving in the (tiny) wetlands again (the restored bits are maybe 1% of the original lake’s area, I believe). I’ve long felt a stupidly burning desire to show the world (or Californians, at least) what the lake really looks like, to show a view that’s generally hidden from the public (you’re only allowed on a tiny, very closely-curated bit of the old lake nowadays; the rest if off-limits by order of the LADWP). So here’s my attempt to give you some idea what’s behind the wire fences and “Trespassing Prohibited” signs.

This video was taken from above and shows the bizarre landscape that’s the result of the LADWP’s mitigation efforts — a bunch of things like sprinklers or ditches or weird little islands in shallow ponds of strangely-colored water, or matting, or small flooded areas. Everything you see in this video should be under water — a lot of (mostly blue) water.

Soundtrack © Relay For Death; used by permission (despite YouTube’s stupid content ID flagging this as a copyright hit…).