Welcome to Long Valley!

The Long Valley Caldera, located at the northernmost part of Owens Valley, is the remains of a large-volume volcanic eruption from around 760,000 years ago. The edges of the caldera can be clearly traced as a circular image in the satellite image.

During the eruption an ash flow tuff (called the Bishop Tuff) flowed south across the landscape and can be seen in the satellite image as a light-colored, flat, south-dipping surface incised by the narrow gorge of the Owens River. Running north of the Caldera is a linear string of rhyolite domes, called Mono Domes, that are the youngest volcanic features of the area.

One can see in the sattelite image that Mono Lake has left visible "bathtub rings" reflecting the falling lake levels since the last ice age.

Finally, glacial carving of the Sierra Nevadan mountain front has left good examples of multiple moraines flanking what were once glacier-filled valleys (near Crowley).