Will the valley ever return?

kw: observations, musings, nature

Last evening we watched the new PBS show on national parks, "America's Best Idea". It is the first of six two-hour weekly shows.

In a long segment on Yosemite, the first piece of land set aside, when they mentioned the 1890 legislation setting aside the larger Park, they mentioned that the Hetch Hetchy Valley was included, but didn't go into the later battle over damming up the latter valley.

This is about half the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir and its dam in 2006, clipped from Google Maps. At that time, the water depth was about 230 feet. There are two nearby reservoirs ("nearby" means they are roughly as far away as the size of the reservoirs), Lake Eleanor, also inside the Yosemite Reservation, and Cherry Lake, just outside. I wonder if they also drowned beautiful valleys.

From an economic standpoint, it is easy to see why Hetch Hetchy was chosen for a dam. It has the narrowest neck of the local valleys. Of the three sister reservoirs, Hetch Hetchy has by far the greatest ratio of water to dam. It was dammed in 1913, Eleanor in 1918, and Cherry Lake in 1956. The last of these has a dam with about ten times the volume of the others.

There is an ongoing effort by the Sierra Club and others to restore Hetch Hetchy. I would like to see that, but I don't expect it to happen. Growing populations need ever-larger amounts of water; increasing prosperity (yes, it is still increasing) requires more water per person. More people keep moving to California; not many people think as I do, that it is too crowded for comfort (I call L.A. County "the anthill").

I wasn't in favor of the much more recent formation of Lake Mead, but I'll say this for it. Getting around by boat, and visiting some pretty spectacular side valleys, is a lot easier now than it was before, by car on bad roads. I'll have to visit HH Reservoir in my circuit of National Park visits, and see what beauties still remain for someone boating around.