California Highway 395 roughly runs north south through the eastern side of California above the Cajon Pass. Highway 14 runs from the San Fernando Valley through Mojave to join it west of RidgeCrest. It has long been a path from Los Angeles to the Owens Valley and Lake Tahoe and Carson City and Reno. Before the gold seekers and those who grew crops and supplied the miners came in 1849, the land was mostly inhabited by native american tribes from the Mojaves to the Pauite Shoshone. Their combined history contains the past of the eastern side of the Sierra Nevadas and the ebb and flow of product and people across a well trodden path to its sprawling and ravenous neighbor, Los Angeles, to the south.
California is a large and varied state from any perspective but perhaps terrain speaks loudest on the eastern side of the sierra nevada range. The 395 near Lone Pine bisects the highest point in the lower 48 United States in Mount Whitney and the lowest point in Death Valley at Badwater with close to three vertical miles separating them and 85 as the crow flies.
As most highways do, these follow the footpaths of the first human inhabitants, around 10,000 years ago. The Paiute Shoshone and Mohave natives navigated the great valley and mountains on either side of it and traversed the often harsh desert to the south as the seasons and trade with other tribes invited.
The spaniards and californio families had a pastoral life of cattle raising and farming on the western part of what would become California and did not inhabit the owens valley. The great influx of men from all over the globe after the discovery of gold in 1848 saw the first real volumes of non-natives traversing the valley on their way to eldorado on the western side of the sierras. Most moved right on through
Geology,
flora and fauna history to present,
mines and mineral extraction through decades,
outlaws and lawmen and crime
settlers and their towns
agriculture then and now
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Small town south of Lone Pine and North of Coso Junction and Ridgecrest/China Lake.
Old mining town north of Kramer Junction and south of China Lake/Ridgecrest and Trona. Famous for the Yellow Aster gold mine and nearby Atolia for tungsten and silver production around Red Hill and Johannesburg. Founded in 1895 and suffers devastating fire in 1897
The Van Norman dam was built in 19XX to create a reservoir higher than the san fernando valley floor.
Where water from the owens valley meets the sunshine of the san fernando valley north of the san fernando mission.
The meeting of two different and distinct mountain ranges and their geologic collision.
Newhall and Placerita Canyon
U.S. Highway 395 is a north–south United States Numbered Highway that traverses the inland areas of the western states of California, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington. It travels for over 1,300 miles (2,100 km) from a junction in the Mojave Desert at Interstate 15 (I-15) in Hesperia to the Canada–U.S. border near Laurier, Washington.
State Route 14 (SR 14) is a north–south state highway in the U.S. state of California that connects Los Angeles to the northern Mojave Desert. The southern portion of the highway is signed as the Antelope Valley Freeway. Its southern terminus is at Interstate 5 (I-5, Golden State Freeway) in the Los Angeles neighborhoods of Granada Hills and Sylmar[2] just immediately to the south of the border of the city of Santa Clarita. SR 14's northern terminus is at U.S. Route 395 (US 395) near Inyokern.
Lone Pine is a small town at the southern end of the Owens Valley just north of Owens Lake.
Traversing the border between Newhall and Valencia, and stretching from the fast food restaurants of "Hamburger Hill" along Interstate 5 to the tracks at Railroad Avenue, is a road named after two brothers from Maine who became early pioneers of the Santa Clarita Valley.
An historically and current important junction of routes north - south and east - west.