"[6] It is thought that in the late Pleistocene about 11–12,000 years ago Owens Lake was even larger, covering nearly 200 square miles (520 km2) and reaching a depth of 200 feet (61 m).

[citation needed] During the unusually wet winter of 1937, LADWP diverted water from the aqueduct into the lake bed, flooding the soda plant.

After an unsuccessful appeal to the state supreme court in 1941, LADWP built the Long Valley Dam, which impounded Lake Crowley for flood control.

[17] The lake is a large salt flat whose surface is made of a mixture of clay, sand, and a variety of minerals including halite, burkeite, mirabilite, thenardite, and trona.

Also, on especially hot summer days when ground temperatures exceed 150° F (66 °C), water is driven out of the hydrates on the lake bed creating a muddy brine.

[citation needed] As part of an air quality mitigation settlement, LADWP is shallow flooding 27 square miles (69.9 km2) of the salt pan to try to help minimize alkali dust storms and further adverse health effects.

[20] At the shore, a chain of wetlands, fed by springs and artesian wells, keep part of the former Owens Lake ecosystem alive.

As a result of dust mitigation efforts, shallow flooding of the lake bed has created habitats approximately 3 feet (0.9 m) deep.

[24] This water, although seasonally applied, is helping to buoy the lake's ecosystem causing hope in conservationists that an expanded shallow flooding program could do even more.

[25] The site is open year-round for viewing numerous bird species attracted to the ponds and wetlands as well as the ruins of a historic soda ash plant from the World War I era and the 1920s.

[26] Much of the freight it carried was silver and lead bullion from the Cerro Gordo mines, which at their height were so productive that the bars of the refined metals waited in large stacks before twenty-mule team teamsters could haul it to Los Angeles.

The trying three-week (one way) journey improved after the formation of the Cerro Gordo Freighting Company, run by ancestors of regional historian Remi Nadeau who has written of this period.

The town of Keeler, below the Inyo Mountains on the former north shore, replaced Swansea as the shipping port for the mines after the 1872 Lone Pine earthquake.

[27] In 1879 silver mining ended, but Keeler was saved when the Carson and Colorado Railroad built narrow-gauge rail tracks to the town.