The Return of Owens Lake: From the South Side

Mjollnir

Just got back yesterday from two more days of riding around the dry lake bed with members of the Audubon Society of the Eastern Sierra; they were doing their annual bird population count. This series of photos is completely of the southern part of the lake, where the distances are even more extreme between elevated roads, pump stations, etc....

These are meant to show the sheer monstrous size of the lake, the distances and sightlines involved, the wasteland that it's become over the decades, and the scope of the imprint of man and machine on it. Given my little Panasonic point-and-shoot and lack of any software other than that which came with it, I tried to compose interesting shots with those limits in mind.

Heading out onto the lake from the extreme SW, roughly 0900 hours.





One of the multitude of pump stations at various points on the plain.


Transformer boxes and flow redirect points


One of hundreds, if not thousands, of irrigation lines intended for dust abatement


Worksites are simply left in mid-construction for period of months at times


Some of the hundreds of earth movers that are scattered all over the lake bed


Same earth movers, more than a mile away

magicbastarder

the pump stations shot is easily the best there.

magicbastarder

actually, i'd remove some of the photos from here - not saying any specifically, but 12 decent sized images of similar style one after the other is a bit of overload...

Mjollnir

magicbastarder wrote: »

actually, i'd remove some of the photos from here - not saying any specifically, but 12 decent sized images of similar style one after the other is a bit of overload...

Ah, good call. Done!