something magisterial in the sensation, something opulent and restorative. I consulted my maps and atlases and plotted a route for the next day that would take me back over Highway 96 to Yreka, in the north-central part of the state. From there I would travel east through sheep and cattle country to Alturas, the last frontier, where the earth froze six feet deep in winter. Or so I’d been told.
H IGHWAY 96 FROM WILLOW CREEK to Happy Camp ran parallel to the Klamath River and its many tributaries, offering a dream of abundant water come true—muddy water dripping, spilling, and trickling down from the mountains, water in such quantity that it demanded a whole new set of gerunds to keep pace with its apparently infinite outpouring.
What a cosmic tease this gushing would have been to a farmer in the dusty, dry San Joaquin, or to a developer of the hard-baked, desert flats beyond Los Angeles, in all those places where the land was like an old washcloth that you had to wring for hours to squeeze out a few drops of juice.
In California, water was destiny, the lifeblood of empire. It had been the star player in a series of melodramatic thefts, kidnapings, and reroutings that had started around the turn of the century, when San Francisco’s water barons conspired to build a dam at the Hetch Hetchy Gorge of the Tuolumne River, in Yosemite National Park.
At about the same time, William Mulholland, an Irish immigrant who’d worked his way up from the position of ditch-tender to run the Los Angeles Water Company, had embarked on a plan to tap into the Owens River, in the Sierra Nevada, building a conduit of some 250 miles. His project was second only to the Panama Canal in its scope.
So precious and competitively sought after did the mountain rivers become that in 1945 Governor Earl Warren established a State Water Resources Board to study and control the distribution of water. The board kept absorbing other agencies, inflating itself from within, until it turned into the Department of Water Resources, in 1957, and formulated a new master plan.
The plan incorporated the already existing Central Valley Project, an intricate, hopscotching network of dams and diversions that borrowed water from one stream, only to replace it with water from another. The CVP dated from 1935. It was a federally backed, public-worksproject under the auspices of the Bureau of Reclamation, and its first phase of construction was finished in 1955. At its hub were four dams on three rivers—Shasta and Keswick on the Sacramento, Folsom on the American, and Friant on the San Joaquin.
The Trinity River was impounded at a shocking cost and joined to the system, its flow channeled under the Klamath Mountains, into the Sacramento, and finally into the CVP. All this siphoning, this immense restructuring of natural arterials, this surgery being performed on the body of California, was due to end in 2020 with virtually every drop of “surplus” northern water recycled to the south.
Water, ever more water. Ikes Creek, Slide Creek, Bluff Creek, and Slate Creek. Outside Somes Bar, the Salmon River flowed into the Klamath, glittering like an emerald. A few Whitewater rafters, the first of the season, could be heard hollering as they splashed through the spume, whacking madly at the river with their paddles.
Toward Happy Camp, the Klamath started to clear. My map was littered with the names of mines, Independence, Buzzard Hill, and Kanaka in the shadow of Frying Pan Ridge. There were still hopeful souls who worked the water with pans, sluice boxes, or hydraulic dredges, believing that it had not yet surrendered all its treasure. They could be seen wading in the shallows and searching for one last big-time strike in this region of last things, before epic California vanished forever.
T HE NEW 49’ERS STORE in Happy Camp had a coin-operated sifting jig out front that customers could use. You hauled up some dirt or sand from the Klamath, poured it in, deposited a
H IGHWAY 96 FROM WILLOW CREEK to Happy Camp ran parallel to the Klamath River and its many tributaries, offering a dream of abundant water come true—muddy water dripping, spilling, and trickling down from the mountains, water in such quantity that it demanded a whole new set of gerunds to keep pace with its apparently infinite outpouring.
What a cosmic tease this gushing would have been to a farmer in the dusty, dry San Joaquin, or to a developer of the hard-baked, desert flats beyond Los Angeles, in all those places where the land was like an old washcloth that you had to wring for hours to squeeze out a few drops of juice.
In California, water was destiny, the lifeblood of empire. It had been the star player in a series of melodramatic thefts, kidnapings, and reroutings that had started around the turn of the century, when San Francisco’s water barons conspired to build a dam at the Hetch Hetchy Gorge of the Tuolumne River, in Yosemite National Park.
At about the same time, William Mulholland, an Irish immigrant who’d worked his way up from the position of ditch-tender to run the Los Angeles Water Company, had embarked on a plan to tap into the Owens River, in the Sierra Nevada, building a conduit of some 250 miles. His project was second only to the Panama Canal in its scope.
So precious and competitively sought after did the mountain rivers become that in 1945 Governor Earl Warren established a State Water Resources Board to study and control the distribution of water. The board kept absorbing other agencies, inflating itself from within, until it turned into the Department of Water Resources, in 1957, and formulated a new master plan.
The plan incorporated the already existing Central Valley Project, an intricate, hopscotching network of dams and diversions that borrowed water from one stream, only to replace it with water from another. The CVP dated from 1935. It was a federally backed, public-worksproject under the auspices of the Bureau of Reclamation, and its first phase of construction was finished in 1955. At its hub were four dams on three rivers—Shasta and Keswick on the Sacramento, Folsom on the American, and Friant on the San Joaquin.
The Trinity River was impounded at a shocking cost and joined to the system, its flow channeled under the Klamath Mountains, into the Sacramento, and finally into the CVP. All this siphoning, this immense restructuring of natural arterials, this surgery being performed on the body of California, was due to end in 2020 with virtually every drop of “surplus” northern water recycled to the south.
Water, ever more water. Ikes Creek, Slide Creek, Bluff Creek, and Slate Creek. Outside Somes Bar, the Salmon River flowed into the Klamath, glittering like an emerald. A few Whitewater rafters, the first of the season, could be heard hollering as they splashed through the spume, whacking madly at the river with their paddles.
Toward Happy Camp, the Klamath started to clear. My map was littered with the names of mines, Independence, Buzzard Hill, and Kanaka in the shadow of Frying Pan Ridge. There were still hopeful souls who worked the water with pans, sluice boxes, or hydraulic dredges, believing that it had not yet surrendered all its treasure. They could be seen wading in the shallows and searching for one last big-time strike in this region of last things, before epic California vanished forever.
T HE NEW 49’ERS STORE in Happy Camp had a coin-operated sifting jig out front that customers could use. You hauled up some dirt or sand from the Klamath, poured it in, deposited a
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