Stop #8a: Lake Palmdale and the LA Aqueduct

Lake Palmdale is currently a reservoir serving the needs of the city of Palmale. However, it didn't always look the way it does now.

Movement along a fault causes numerous changes to the rocks on either side, including tilting and folding of the rocks, grinding the rock into small peices (called fault breccia if large and fault gouge if very small), and even metamorphosing the rock. Faults can also form features on the ground surface, such as shutter ridges, offset streams, hills, low cliffs, and even mountains. If there is a sufficient amount of groundwater, the water can follow the fault plane to the surface, forming a sag pond. Thus, before Lake Palmdale was a reservoir, it was a sag pond and an important source of water for the Tataviam people.

The river-like feature in front of Lake Palmdale is the Los Angeles Aqueduct. The Aqueduct brings water from the Owens Valley south to the city of Los Angeles. Two of the pioneers of Los Angeles - Frederick Eaton and William Mulholland (Mulholland Drive is named after him) - realized that for the city to be anything more than a stop on the railway, infrastructure such as water and power was needed. The Los Angeles basin averages 11 inches of rain per year - not nearly enough for a large city. Thus, they began to buy up the water rights along the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada, beginning in the Owens Valley and continuing south to Los Angeles. Construction of the aqueduct began in 1908 and finished in 1913. The project was - and still is - highly controversial.