Exploring and Informing: Fossil Falls

Fossil Falls with the Sierra Nevada backdrop.

Ancient Owens Valley had a bustling population center here, at Fossil Falls. Fossil Falls is a series of cascades along the ancient Owens river, when it was fed by a series of melting glaciers from the Sierras and by a much larger Owens Lake. At this point along the river, a series of basaltic lava flows impounded the valley between 400 and 10 thousand years ago. During the most recent period of glacial Owens River, the waterfall poured over the lava flows and slowly eroded upstream, and an increase in eruptions from nearby Red Hill may have spurred pothole formations in the upper falls. These potholes, formed when rocks or sand get caught in a hole and spin around in a vortex that gradually bores a hole in the rock, are what Fossil Falls are best known for today. Some of them form chimneys over twenty feet deep that open up at the bottom, and many interconnect. The upper falls today is a convoluted maze of these potholes. When the river flowed here, the noise would have been cacophonous and the mist blinding.
The rocks here are about 10,000 years old at the youngest, recent enough that the earliest inhabitants in the region would have witnessed their formation as people moved in between ten and twenty thousand years ago. Most Coso people remains here date to after 4,000 years BP and are found as occasional sleeping circles, grinding slicks, and plentiful obsidian flakes. Deep inside the falls are also petroglyphs and plenty of evidence that people were here before us.

The local tribe, the Little Lake Shoshone, were first contacted in the early 1800s with a local population of about 150 individuals, though historic numbers were certainly much higher. The petroglyphs here are Coso in style and are most often bighorn sheep.