Owens Valley

Owens Valley is an arid valley in eastern California, lying between the Sierra Nevada to the west and the White and Inyo Mountains to the east, on the boundary between the Great Basin and Mojave deserts. The valley is a graben, a block of crust dropped down between two vertical faults, built up over roughly three million years of repeated earthquakes; gravity surveys suggest as much as 10,000 feet of sediment fills the trench beneath the valley floor. Its floor sits around 4,000 feet above sea level while peaks on the Sierra Nevada side, including Mount Whitney, rise past 14,000 feet, making it one of the deepest valleys in the United States. The Sierra Nevada casts a rain shadow over the valley, and large-scale water diversions to Los Angeles have left Owens Lake at its southern end mostly a dry alkali flat.