Owens Valley

Catherine Mulholland, a historian whose biography of her grandfather William Mulholland sought to correct the image of the man who was sometimes vilified for his central role in bringing water to Southern California, died of natural causes Wednesday at her Camarillo home. She was 88 and had been in decline for several months, her family said. Mulholland was one of the last two grandchildren of the rugged Irish immigrant who oversaw the construction of the 230-mile aqueduct that carries water from the Owens Valley to Los Angeles.

My brother, John, tried to sleep during the boring part of the three-hour trip from Los Angeles to Convict Lake in the Eastern Sierra. Fortunately, I was driving. Besides, I don't think there's a boring part, especially once you get on U.S. 395 in the Owens Valley. To keep him awake, I recounted some of our past misadventures in the great outdoors. Remember when we ran out of food backpacking across the Haleakala crater on Maui? Whose idea was it to take a motor boat up Lake Powell in a snowstorm?

The populace of Owens Valley should be grateful for William Mulholland. If all that water were still there, the place would be developed to hell and back. JANET HASSLER San Buenaventura

It's an open house. No, it's a hike. No, it's a nature walk. Yes, it's all these things, and they're all in the White Mountains above Bishop, which don't attract the same attention as their Sierra Nevada cousin across the Owens Valley. On Aug. 7, you can do all three. First, take a journey to the Barcroft Station. This  laboratory, a unit of the White Mountain Research Station , perches high above the timberline at 12,500 feet, at the end of 20 miles of dirt road sprinkled with boulders.  The gate that usually bars access to Barcroft Station will swing open at 6:30 a.m. to allow hikers bound for 14,242-foot White Mountain Peak, California's third tallest, an early start.

First it was silver ore that streamed to Los Angeles from the rim of the Owens Valley, then the water from the valley floor. Now, L.A. has come back for the sunshine. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the agency responsible for turning Owens Lake into a dusty salt flat and snatching up nearly every acre from Lone Pine to Bishop, has its sights on transforming the Owens Valley into one of largest sources of solar power in America. Interim DWP Chief S. David Freeman says the valley on the dry side of the Sierra Nevada is blessed with the "best sun in the country."

Re "Protest Greets Riordan in Owens Valley," Aug. 21: How nice that Mayor Richard Riordan made a trip out to the Owens Valley to meet with residents concerning L.A.'s so-called "water rights." It seems a shame that the real sin in this century-long debate has been completely ignored, and that is the fact that one of our country's most exquisite scenic stretches of natural beauty has been completely decimated in the interest of building one of the ugliest cities in America. Our family has owned a cabin in the High Sierra for more than 35 years and every time I pass through that area along Highway 395 on the way to our place, it sickens me to think of people so greedy, so power hungry and so shortsighted that they would even think of tampering with such natural beauty.

The city of Los Angeles, contrary to the implication of your Sept. 7 editorial, "Aussie Water Lesson," remains committed to the environmental restoration of the Owens Valley. About one-third of the water from the eastern Sierra that has traditionally been available to and historically met the water needs of the city has been reallocated for mitigating the environmental impacts of the city's operations. This has been made possible by the outstanding water conservation efforts of the residents of Los Angeles.

I would like to take issue with your March 3 story about Anheuser-Busch ranching practices in the Owens Valley. The article focuses on size, and gives short shrift to the quality of our operations. We have cooperated over the years with the U.S. Forest Service and California Department of Fish and Game to protect the land. Here are some examples that could have been included in the story, but were not: We've developed a rotating grazing plan that reduces the impact on the land. This was achieved by significantly increasing the grazing area--meaning fewer cows per acre.

In winter the lonely towns in Owens Valley are mostly food and fuel stops for Southland skiers racing along U.S. 395 to the slopes of Mammoth and June mountains. But travelers who detour for a while in Independence will discover much about the intriguing past of the eastern Sierra. Long before ski resorts enticed visitors to the area, pioneers were establishing farms and ranches at the base of the majestic mountain range.

Solar and the Owens Re "L.A. takes shine to another Owens Valley product: sun," Feb. 2 Periodically, the hidebound Los Angeles Department of Water and Power shakes off its inertia and undertakes a project worthy of its size and of the times. Not coincidentally, Interim DWP Chief S. David Freeman seems to ride into town just in time with his ability to think big and to understand the long-term benefits of renewable energy. I encourage the residents of Owens Valley and Los Angeles to move with all deliberate speed on this project.

The Times' editorial board meets around a long table in a room hung with images of the interlocking histories of this newspaper and its city — of Otis Chandler and the election of Ronald Reagan, our endorsement of Barack Obama and the burial of President Nixon. At the head of that table is a reprint of the front page from Nov. 6, 1913. It memorializes the opening of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, the defining event of this city's early existence, a fact recognized by the day's headline: "Silver Torrent Crowns the City's Mighty Achievement.

Catherine Mulholland, a historian whose biography of her grandfather William Mulholland sought to correct the image of the man who was sometimes vilified for his central role in bringing water to Southern California, died of natural causes Wednesday at her Camarillo home. She was 88 and had been in decline for several months, her family said. Mulholland was one of the last two grandchildren of the rugged Irish immigrant who oversaw the construction of the 230-mile aqueduct that carries water from the Owens Valley to Los Angeles.

Reporting from Bishop, Calif. Two redheads got the feathers flying. Lucy and Goose were just tending to their business of clucking, laying eggs and pecking up bugs in Laura Smith's backyard. "They're like vacuum cleaners," Smith said. "There isn't a bug or a spider out here." But not everyone was enamored of the industrious exterminators. A neighbor of Smith's in the J Diamond mobile home park complained to city officials, pointing to a 1966 ordinance that prohibits "any poultry or animal yard" within 100 feet of a residence.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power's ambitious plan to put solar panels on 80 square miles of dry lake bed and flatlands east of the Sierra Nevada range has run into a daunting problem: extremely caustic mud in an area where it hoped to build an 80-acre pilot project. Preliminary engineering tests show that if solar panel platforms were placed at the southern end of the nearly dry 110-square-mile Owens Lake, they would sink as much as several inches into extremely corrosive soil.

Solar and the Owens Re "L.A. takes shine to another Owens Valley product: sun," Feb. 2 Periodically, the hidebound Los Angeles Department of Water and Power shakes off its inertia and undertakes a project worthy of its size and of the times. Not coincidentally, Interim DWP Chief S. David Freeman seems to ride into town just in time with his ability to think big and to understand the long-term benefits of renewable energy. I encourage the residents of Owens Valley and Los Angeles to move with all deliberate speed on this project.

First it was silver ore that streamed to Los Angeles from the rim of the Owens Valley, then the water from the valley floor. Now, L.A. has come back for the sunshine. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the agency responsible for turning Owens Lake into a dusty salt flat and snatching up nearly every acre from Lone Pine to Bishop, has its sights on transforming the Owens Valley into one of largest sources of solar power in America. Interim DWP Chief S. David Freeman says the valley on the dry side of the Sierra Nevada is blessed with the "best sun in the country."

Nov. 5, 1913: Forty-thousand people were on hand in the San Fernando Valley to witness the long-awaited moment when water from 200 miles away in the Owens Valley reached Los Angeles via the city's new aqueduct, The Times reported under the headline "Silver Torrent Crowns the City's Mighty Achievement."

Nearly a century after Los Angeles drained Owens Lake by diverting its water to the Los Angeles Aqueduct, the city now hopes to generate solar energy on the dusty salt flats it left behind. The Department of Water and Power's board of commissioners Tuesday unanimously approved a renewable energy pilot project that would cover 616 acres of lake bed with solar arrays -- a possible precursor to a mammoth solar farm that could cover thousands of acres. City utility officials hope that, along with generating power for L.A., the solar panels would reduce the fierce dust storms that rise from the dry lake bed. To comply with federal clean air standards, the DWP must control the dust that has plagued the Owens Valley for decades.

When politics, race or religion prevents people from talking or even shaking hands, it's left to sports competition to save the day. And so it was, 65 years ago, in the middle of World War II, that courage and what was right came through on a makeshift high school football field in Manzanar, Calif., in the Owens Valley. Manzanar High School, made up of sons and daughters of Japanese Americans interned by Executive Order 9066 signed by President Franklin Roosevelt, played their first and only interscholastic athletic event, a football game against Big Pine High on Oct. 25, 1944.