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NATURE NOIR - AMERICAN RIVER  North Fork of the American river in spring. Photo © 1991-1997 Mark Leder-Adams. The 1,900 square mile watershed of the American River has its headwaters in the nine to ten thousand foot peaks of the Sierra Nevada where it's not unusual to get more than 40 feet of cumulative snowfall in a winter. By the time the river's North and Middle forks reach the Sierra's western hills thirty to forty miles southwest, they run in canyons a thousand to three thousand feet deep. There, during the rainless summers, the icy foam of the rapids and the rich green riverside alders, willows, and cottonwoods contrast with the dry forests of oak, pine, and fir and steep brush of the canyon walls, above. The North and Middle forks join at the bridge over which State Highway 49 crosses the river. The Auburn dam site is about three miles downstream from there, and can be viewed from an overlook in the town of Auburn, California, along Interstate 80 east of Sacramento. Since 1854, when a six or eight foot high timber dam was erected on the river at Auburn to divert water to gold mines, there has always either been a dam or plans for a larger one there. By 1927 these little stone and wood dams–which had no effect on the canyons upstream–were overshadowed by proposals for concrete structures two hundred or more feet in height that would store water for agriculture and distant cities, generate electrical power, and control flooding in the poorly-sited real estate of Sacramento. Sacramento was laid out and sold as city lots in the heedless optimism of the 1849 California Gold Rush, in the middle of a perennial flood plain at the junction of the American and Sacramento Rivers. From where the American empties into it, the Sacramento River must run another sixty miles to reach salt water, yet it is so close to sea level at the Port of Sacramento that its surface fluctuates two to three feet with the ocean tides. To put it mildly, Sacramento doesn't drain very well. A big Auburn Dam was finally authorized by Congress in 1965. The finished design called for it to be the largest thin-arch concrete dam in the world, 690 feet high and over four thousand wide. When construction was underway in 1975, the revelation that there were active faults capable of causing earthquakes beneath the dam led to geological studies, a redesign, and a decade-long delay. Then, in 1986, a major Sierra storm overwhelmed existing flood control measures on the American as they were operated at the time, and the dam was resurrected. Three measures to fund its completion were introduced in Congress over the next ten years, however at present the project is still without a budget. Still, the 48 miles of canyons it would flood are owned to this day by the Bureau of Reclamation, a federal dam building agency, and the project has never been officially decommissioned. Meanwhile the 42,000 acre site, some of it over six hundred feet beneath the damˆs waterline, has become a sort of accidental wilderness from which bears, mountain lions, and bobcats occasionally sojourn into the low-density rural suburbs and small towns along its boundaries. Since 1977 the area has been managed as a unit of the California State Parks (a photograph of portion of the wrong fork of the river graces this website), albeit one without the usual protections State Park lands enjoy. Among the conservation organizations fighting for a permanent park instead of a dam there are Protect American River Canyons and Friends of the River. excerpt | ranger jobs | American River Copyright © 2005 by Jordan Fisher Smith. All Rights Reserved. "NATURE NOIR" is a trademark of Jordan Fisher Smith. No portion of this Website or the works of authorship described here may be used in any manner or for any purpose without the prior written consent of the copyright owner with the exception of brief quotes in published reviews. site by Velocity7 |
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