LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Owens Valley
built 631 days ago
Prior to groundwater pumping, most of the floor of Owens Valley was an alkali meadow grassland/shrubland with a high water table keeping the vegetation lush despite less than 5 inches of annual rainfall. Imagine the valley floor as a bathtub full of groundwater--it doesn't take much recharge to keep the bathtub full if you aren't taking anything out. The recharge comes from the Sierra Nevada and flows through the ground. Since the pumping began, the water table has declined and lush alkali meadows have retreated to a few areas away from the pumps. The hardest hit areas are mostly barren of grass and look as dry as Death Valley.
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The Owens Valley, a long, narrow valley along the east side of the Sierra Nevada in east-central California, is the main source of water for the city of Los Angeles. The city diverts most of the surface water in the valley into the Owens River-Los Angeles Aqueduct system, which transports the water more than 200 miles south to areas of distribution and use. Additionally, ground water is pumped or flows from wells to supplement the surface-water diversions to the river-aqueduct system. Pumpage from wells needed to supplement water export has increased since 1970, when a second aqueduct was put into service, and local residents have expressed concerns that the increased pumping may have a detrimental effect on the environment and the native vegetation (indigenous alkaline scrub and meadow plant communities) in the valley. Native vegetation on the valley floor depends on soil moisture derived from precipitation and from the unconfined part of a multilayered ground-water system. This report, which describes the evaluation of the hydrologic system and selected water-management alternatives, is one in a series designed to identify the effects that ground-water pumping has on native vegetation and evaluate alternative strategies to mitigate any adverse effects caused by pumping.
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Not that there ever was any trout in the Owens Valley to begin with. All the game fish here were created by the state run Department of Fish and Game to generate a recreational industry, which is now supported largely through fees collected for fishing licenses. The Owens Valley, while it drains the snowy eastern Sierra, is dry, and has been connected to the ocean for less than a hundred years, through the plumbing constructed by the DWP. Its drainage channel, the Owens River, historically terminated at Owens Lake, or in the desert beyond. The fish that are indigenous are more like those found in desert waterways, small pup fish and suckers, left over from the larger lakes and rivers of the last ice age. Trout, and other game fish now in the streams and lakes of the valley were artificially introduced to the watershed in the 1870s, brought over from the western Sierras or elsewhere.
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The Owens Valley, in Inyo County, stretches about 100 miles, bounded by the Sierra Nevadas and the Inyo Range; it is approximately 250 miles from Los Angeles. Encapsulating the enormous variety of California, at one end of the valley lies Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the continental United States. At the other end is Death Valley, the lowest point in the United States. The Owens River drains the mountains of their melted snow, and at one time itself drained into Owens Lake. The valley, river and lake were named in 1845 by John C. Fremont for Richard Owens, one of Fremont's guides.
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[E]nvironmentalists have scored a major victory in the Owens Valley. Under court orders and fines of $5,000 a day, the DWP is restoring 62 miles of the Lower Owens River it drained to near-extinction a century ago. A riverbed once thriving with fish, game and hundreds of species of birds and waterfowl became a long, brown gash in the high desert landscape.
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Owens Valley is a graben; a downdropped block of land between two vertical faults. Owens Valley is the westernmost graben in the Basin and Range Province. It is ... part of trough which extends from Oregon to Death Valley called the Walker Lane.
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Owens Valley