Owens Lake is a mostly dry lake in the Owens Valley on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada in Inyo County, California. It is about south of Lone Pine, California. Unlike most dry lakes in the Basin and Range Province that have been dry for thousands of years, Owens held significant water until 1913, when much of the Owens River was diverted into the Los Angeles Aqueduct, causing Owens Lake to desiccate by 1926. A 2004 court order required the LADWP to reestablish a small flow from the river into the lake. Nevertheless, as of 2013, it is the largest single source of dust pollution in the United States. History Owens Lake was given its present name by the explorer John C. Frémont, in honor of one of his guides, Richard Owens. Owens himself never set foot in the valley. The lake's original name, given by the Nüümü (Owens Valley Paiute), is Patsiata. Before the diversion of the Owens River, Owens Lake was up to long and wide, covering an area of up to . In the last few hundred years the lake had an average depth of , and sometimes overflowed to the south, after which the water would flow into the Mojave Desert. In 1905, the lake's water was thought to be "excessively saline." It is thought that in the late Pleistocene about 11–12,000 years ago Owens Lake was even larger, covering nearly and reaching a depth of . The increased inflow from the Owens River, from melting glaciers of the post-Ice Age Sierra Nevada, caused Owens Lake to overflow south through Rose Valley into another now-dry lakebed China Lake, in the Indian Wells Valley near Ridgecrest, California. On November 5, 1913, William Mulholland finished the Los Angeles aqueduct. Water was piped and canaled from Owens River to the Van Norman Reservoir. Fights would breakout between the farmers of Owens valley and The City of Los Angeles; the farmers would blow up the aqueduct project, go to the spill ways and divert the water back into Owens lake. Starting in 1913, the river and streams that fed Owens Lake were diverted by Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) into the Los Angeles Aqueduct, and the lake level started to drop quickly. As the lake dried, soda processing at nearby Keeler, California, switched from relatively cheap chemical methods to more expensive physical ones. The Natural Soda