An arid stretch of land about four hours’ drive from Los Angeles, the Owens Valley is bounded by two parallel fault lines: the snow-capped Sierra Nevada mountains to the west and the White and Inyo Mountains to the east. Among urbanites, the valley is largely known as a scenic route to nearby northern ski slopes and wilderness backpacking, fishing, and rock climbing. Since the 1920s, the region has drawn countless film crews from Hollywood, who have used the rocky terrain as scenery for movies like Gunga Din, Iron Man, and Django Unchained.
The valley is also home to a shameful chapter in US history when Japanese Americans, most of them citizens, were rounded up and interned in camps by the wartime administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. One of those detention facilities, Manzanar, was constructed on the site of an old Paiute village in the shadow of the Sierras. The camp today is a place of memory, empty and stripped bare, save for a few reconstructed barracks and a guard tower, a museum, and the now-dry koi ponds once tended by the detainees.
Geologists have given a clunky technical term—“graben,” from the German for “ditch”—to the action of tectonic movement in the Owens Valley’s ancient formation. But I prefer a description from the writer Mary Austin, because it hints at the effect of human agency in modern times, as well as the region’s perplexing allure. “A land of lost rivers,” she wrote, in 1903, “with little in it to love; yet a land that once visited must be come back to inevitably.”
Those lost rivers are, of course, the Paiute irrigation canals. But they are also the valley’s major watercourse, the Owens River, diverted by the Los Angeles Aqueduct—a project that Austin opposed in its initial phase. With her prescient embrace of environmentalism, along with her defense of indigenous peoples’ rights and her feminism, Mary Austin seems a fitting guide to the region’s history and its connection to our troubled present.