So they did. An hour later they were at the trailhead at South Lake, putting packs on their backs. And then they were hiking, up onto the wild sides of California’s great backbone. Kevin and Doris glanced at Oscar, then at each other. How would Oscar handle the hard work of hiking?
As it turned out he toiled upward without complaint, sweating, heaving for breath, rolling his eyes behind Tallhawk’s back; but listening intently to her when she spoke. Occasionally he looked at Kevin and Doris, to make sure they could hear, to make sure they were enjoying themselves. They had never seen him so solicitous. The work itself didn’t seem to bother him much at all. And yet Sally Tallhawk was leading them at a rapid pace.
After two or three hours they rose out of the pine forest, into a mixed zone where patches of dark green lodgepole pine stood here and there, among humps of bare dark red granite. They came to the shores of a long island-filled lake, and hiked around it. Snow patches dotted the north faces of the peaks that towered around them, and white reflections shimmered in the dark blue water.
“You see how much water pours down into Owens Valley,” Tallhawk said, waving a wide hand, wiping sweat from one eye. “And yet under the old laws, all of it could be piped away to Los Angeles.”
As they hiked she told the old story, of how the LA Department of Water and Power had obtained the water rights for all the streams falling out of the east side of the Sierra into Owens Valley—in effect draining the yearly snowfall of the watershed off to LA.
“Criminals,” Doris said, disgusted. “Where were their values?”
“In growth,” Oscar murmured.
There had been a man working for the Federal Bureau of Reclamation, Sally said, making a survey of the valley’s water resources. At the same time he was being paid as a consultant by LA, and he passed along everything he learned to LA, so that they knew which streams to gain the rights to. And so Owens Valley was sucked dry, its farms and orchards destroyed. The farmers went out of business and LA bought up their land. Owens Lake dried up completely, and Mono Lake came close, and the groundwater level fell and fell, until even the desert plants began to die.
“I can’t believe they could get away with it!” Doris said.
Tallhawk only laughed. “They ended up with the peculiar situation of a city in one county being the major landowner in another county. This was so disturbing that laws were passed in Sacramento to make any repetition of that kind of ownership impossible. But it was too late for Owens Valley.”
Telling this story took a while. By the time Tallhawk was done they were above Long Lake, into wild, rocky territory, where the ponds were small, and bluer than seemed possible. Shadows were cast far to the left, toward a jagged skyline Sally identified as the Inconsolable Range. Oscar huffed and puffed, showing a surprising endurance. They were all in a rhythm, walking in a little line—a little line of tiny figures, hiking across a landscape of blasted stone, dwarfed by the huge bare mountains that now surrounded them on three sides.
The trail wound over a knob called Saddlerock, then turned left, up a monstrous trench in the Inconsolable Range. They were in shadow now, and the scattered junipers with their gnarled cinnamon branches and dusky green needles seemed like sentient things, huddled together to watch them pass.
They started up an endless series of switchbacks that ascended the right wall of the enormous trench, stomping through snow more and more often as they got higher. Tallhawk pounded up the trail at a steady pace, and they rose so quickly they could pop their ears. Eventually the trail was completely filled with snow, tromped down by previous hikers. At times they looked back down at the route they had taken, at a long string of lakes in late afternoon shadow; then the trail would switch back, and they stared directly across at the sharktooth edge of the Inconsolable Range, rising to the massive pyramid of Mount Agassiz. They were far above treeline now, it was nothing but rock and snow.
Finally they topped the right wall of the great trench, and the trail ran over the saddle of Bishop Pass. At the high point of the broad pass they walked by the King’s Canyon park boundary sign, and into the Dusy Basin.
To their left the broad ridge curved up to the multiple peak of Agassiz, a wild broken wall of variegated granite. Here Mesozoic volcanic sediments had metamorphosed under the pressure of rising granitic masses called plutons, and all of that had folded together, light and dark rock mixing like the batter in a marble cake. They trod over shattered fields of dark Lamarck granodiorite, and then over bands of the lighter alaskite, which zigzagged up and striped the great wall of Agassiz, and provided the thunderbolts in Thunderbolt Peak. And as they hiked Tallhawk’s voice babbled like the sound of a distant low brook, enumerating every stone, every alpine flower tucked in the granite cracks.
Not too long after they started down the other side of the pass, they came to the highest lake in Dusy Basin, which was unnamed. Its shores were fiercely rocky, but there was one tiny grassy spot suitable for a campsite, and they threw down their packs there. Sally and Doris began to put up the tents; Oscar flopped flat on his back, looking like a beached whale; Kevin got out the gas stove and cooking utensils, quick with hunger. They chattered as they worked, looking around them all the while. Oscar complained about Sally’s idea of a pretty campsite and they all laughed, even him; the place was spectacular.
In the evening light the wild peaks glowed. Mount Agassiz, Thunderbolt Peak, Isosceles Peak, Columbine Peak, The Black Giant—each a complete masterpiece of form alone, each a perfect complement to the others. Huge boulders stood scattered on the undulating rock floor of Dusy Basin, and down at its bottom there was a narrow string of ponds and trees, still half-buried in snow. The sun lay just over the peaks to the west. The sky behind the mountains was twilight blue, and all the snow on the peaks was tinted a deep pink. Chaos generating order, order generating chaos; who could say which was which in such alpenglow?
As they made camp the conversation kept returning to water. Sally Tallhawk, it was clear, was obsessed with water. Specifically, with the water situation in California, a Gordian knot of law and practice that no one could ever cut apart. To learn the system, manipulate it, explain it—this was her passion.
In California water flows uphill toward money, she told them. This had been the primary truth of the system for decades. Most states used riparian water law, where landowners have the right to water on their land. That went back to English common law, and a landscape with lots of streams in it. But California and the other Hispanic states used parts of appropriative water law, which came from dry Mexico and Spain, and which recognized the rights of those who first made a beneficial, consumptive use of water—it didn’t matter where their land was in relation to it. In this system, later owners of land couldn’t build anything to impede the free passage of water to the original user. And so money—particularly old money—had its advantage.
“So that’s how LA could take water from Owens Valley,” Doris said.
The tents were up, sleeping bags out. They gathered around Kevin and the stove with the materials for dinner.
“Well, it’s more complex than that. But essentially that’s right.”
But in the end, Tallhawk told them, the water loss did Owens Valley a kind of good. LA tried to compensate for its appropriation by making the valley into something like a nature preserve. And so the valley missed all the glories of twentieth century southern California civilization. Then, when water loss threatened the native desert plants of the valley, Inyo County sued LA, and the courts decided in Inyo’s favor. This led to new laws being passed in Sacramento, laws that gave control of Inyo’s water back to it. But by this time feelings about growth and development had changed, and the valley towns went about rebuilding according to their own sense of value. “The dry years saved us from a lot of crap.”