The Owens Peak Wilderness is a 73,767-acre (298.52 km2) wilderness area comprising the rugged eastern face of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Owens Peak (8,445 ft) is the high point. The land was set aside with the passage of the California Desert Protection Act of 1994 (Public Law 103-433) by the US Congress.
The mountainous terrain has deep, winding, open and expansive canyons, many which contain springs with extensive riparian vegetation. This area is a transition zone between the Great Basin, Mojave Desert and Sierra Nevada ecoregions. Vegetation varies considerably with a creosote desert scrub community on the bajadas, scattered yuccas, cacti, annuals, cottonwood and oak trees in the canyons and valleys and a juniper-pinyon woodland with sagebrush and digger/gray pine on the upper elevations.
Wildlife includes mule deer, golden eagle and prairie falcon. Evidence of occupation by prehistoric peoples has been found throughout the wilderness.
The Pacific Crest Trail passes through the wilderness along the crest and western side.
Read more about Owens Peak Wilderness: Area Restoration, Mountain Peaks
Famous quotes containing the words peak and/or wilderness:
“In the mountains, the shortest way is from peak to peak: but for that you must have long legs. Aphorisms should be peaks: and those to whom they are addressed, great and lofty.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“What a wilderness walk for a man to take alone! None of your half-mile swamps, none of your mile-wide woods merely, as on the skirts of our towns, without hotels, only a dark mountain or a lake for guide-board and station, over ground much of it impassable in summer!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)