Snow Mountain East is the southernmost subalpine peak in the Coast Ranges, and the closest one to the Bay Area. It isn't very close though--it takes about four hours of driving to get to the trailhead, and about an hour of that is on dirt or curvy roads. You can get there from the west through the watershed of the Rice Fork of the Eel River, whose waters are diverted to the Russian River below Pillsbury Reservoir. Or you can get there the way I did, from the east, via the Stony Creek drainage, and just to the east of that, the proposed Sites Reservoir.
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| View from Snow Mountain of the Sacramento Valley. The Sutter Buttes can be seen at the top right. East Park Reservoir is visible in the middle, and the much larger area proposed for Sites Reservoir is just behind the hills behind it. |
I turned off Interstate 5 in Maxwell, just north of Williams, onto Maxwell Sites Road. This dry autumn, the Glenn-Colusa Canal, to be fed by the proposed reservoir, was brimming as full and wide as the California Aqueduct. There didn't seem to be enough room for any more water. After passing some impressive rock cliffs associated with quarries on either side of the road, I went through a narrow canyon, and emerged at Sites, the site of the proposed Sites Dam and 14,000-acre reservoir.
At the end of a third drought year, the ranches in Antelope Valley looked parched and in need of rain. Apparently some local landowners here are excited about the possibility of a windfall--hoping tax dollars rain from the sky. If we buy the ranches, I think we should create a pronghorn antelope refuge instead of flooding them with a reservoir (a friend of mine saw a pronghorn antelope on the wildlife refuges near here a year or two ago).
Friends of the River has a pretty succinct and informative August 2013 briefing about the proposed reservoir on their Website, however there is now more recent information in the 2014 Administrative Draft EIR. I haven't read it, but in my opinion, the last thing the Sacramento River, Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, San Francisco Bay, and Gulf of the Farallones need is another reservoir scraping off the rare flood flows that we've already severely truncated, which energize downstream ecosystems as far as the nearshore ocean, past the Golden Gate. The cold water would have to be pumped uphill to get there, putting even more greenhouse gases into the air, and then warm water would be released back into the river from the reservoir in summer and fall when it would hurt the salmon most.
That water would probably get rediverted in the Delta (contrary to the Delta Reform Act which requires reduced reliance on the Delta), feeding the unsustainable and insatiable water demand to the south and west. The thing about trying to build more reservoirs to meet water demand, at least at this point in California's history, is that it can't be done. Just like adding a lane to a freeway doesn't eliminate traffic jams in the long run, adding a reservoir to our water system doesn't eliminate water shortages. The only way to avoid adding concrete to the 12-lane freeways and 1400 large dams (that California already has) is to manage the endless and increasing demand. Supply-side solutions generally won't work--they just encourage more growth--and are very expensive, both financially and for the environment.
Plus, the water these new dams divert from natural rivers and make available to us is insignificant and expensive. I was making muffins with my son this weekend, and after enough muffin mix was removed from the bowl for a dozen blueberry muffins, he wanted to scrape the bowl and eat what was left. Well, naturally, it looks like there is a lot left coating the bowl, and it is just going to go to waste if we don't eat it. But the effort it took to scrape the bowl increased as the scrapings diminished. We probably only got about three spoonfuls out after working on it for five minutes. But the effort to get that last half-spoonful was enormous! Pretty soon he had the bowl tipped over his head to try to lick it out.
Yes, I am saying that California's dam lobby is acting like a 3 year old with no self control. A dozen muffins is not enough. The dam builders complain that we aren't building enough dams. But there will never be enough when there is still a drop of water left. Why not try to get the public to pay for the herculean effort required to take that last, tasty bite?
And if we do build a new dam, what is stopping water users from using the "extra" water in wet years and running out anyway in dry? Without reducing demand in wet years, there is nothing in the reservoir at the end of a three-year drought. Which will mean, of course, that we need yet another dam.
Okay, I'll support public funding for Sites Reservoir on one condition--we take down Shasta Dam. A fair trade. Salmon will once again return to spawn in the cold water streams where they were born before Shasta Dam blocked their migration home. And we are going to need to do it anyway to save the salmon from climate change, so we might as well make this a deal now.
It is kind of scary that in 2014, two Draft EIRs for new large dams in California were released. Temperance Flat Reservoir on the San Joaquin River would be an even worse investment than Sites Reservoir. Luckily they don't pencil out economically, and won't as long as we don't throw public funding at them. Doug Obegi argues that the era of big dams is still over, and I want to believe him, but it is still scary what happens when politicians and water users get together with agencies that like to build dams.
Especially during a drought--when the public is more prone to rash decisions, such as deciding to build totally uneconomical and energy-wasting "solutions". In 1992, during a drought, Morro Bay built a desal plant, and when it got wet again, essentially mothballed it for almost two decades because was too expensive to run (and it was still expensive to maintain while it produced no water). Like a rich desert traveler dying of thirst, Morro Bay also signed up for the State Water Project, which does not provide much water in dry years, and is also very expensive. Instead of reducing demand by investing in more efficiently using and reusing the water it already had--conservation and the currently-planned water reclamation plant (Finally! --although location- and cost-challenged)--they invested in shiny new expensive sources of water. Which is what humans do when presented with the ability to do things with technology--we have a hard time resisting that urge (listen to this podcast--it is excellent!). But the expensive nature of these sources makes them unreliable, and we get dependent on them, and we expand our needs yet again as far as our wet-year water supply allows. This means we have to cut back anyway in dry years, which is what we are trying to avoid--we always try to avoid adapting to the cycles of nature and engineer our way out of feeling like living animals responding to a changing environment. But doesn't responding to our environment--the limits of land and climate--give us knowledge, adaptability, and a valuable sense of place? We should embrace those limits instead of making California like everywhere else. Sure we want to take the painful dips out of supply fluctuations, but we should do it like this.
My sister's mother-in-law used to own a walnut and almond orchard in Chico that was irrigated with well water. They sold the orchard after the Bureau of Reclamation paid the farmers across the river to drill new deep wells that could threaten their water supply. Instead of using their senior water rights to divert Sacramento River water, those farmers now pump a lot of deep groundwater, lowering the water table for their neighbors, and allowing the Bureau to use the river water downstream. Unfortunately, one of the major uses of water downstream is to export it from the Delta to farms in the San Joaquin Valley. That not only causes problems in the Delta as 15 MILLION fish per year get sucked into the pumps, but shifts agriculture to a much drier place than the relatively wet Sacramento Valley. Another supply-side solution with unintended consequences.
The thing we need isn't more of the same. That will get us more of the same expensive problems--and extinction and a warmer climate. What we need are creative, smart solutions for how we manage water. For some reason, paying for new wells and new dams is easier than paying for farmland fallowing and taking down dams.
The reason? Politicians never seem to be able to make the hard choices. They are like parents who can't say no to a 3-year-old. But we clearly have unsustainable water use occurring. Unsustainable means it can't be sustained in the long run. We need to start implementing policies now that make that transition as smooth as possible. Instead of using public funds to take Sacramento Valley farmland and ranch land out of production, we should be using those funds to fallow marginal farmland south of the Delta--in the dry and saline parts of the San Joaquin Valley. Either way, farms are going to go out of production. Do we want to use the shiny new toys, the State Water Project and Central Valley Project, to move water around, just because we can, even if it has devastating consequences? Or are we willing to ratchet those projects back and let water flow where economics and efficiency and common sense--and nature--intended?
From the top of Snow Mountain East, I looked west to the struggling Eel River, and east to the struggling Sacramento River. The snow-capped peaks of Shasta and Lassen mixed with the clouds in the northeast. We can mess things up, but we can also make smart, forward-thinking decisions. I hiked back to my car through the Snow Mountain Wilderness, a 37,000-acre area set aside by congress to remain untrammeled by us. How creative, smart, and sustainable was that political decision!
Colorful dwarf black oaks carpeted the hillside.
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