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By Root 1740 0

would be increased by nearly one-half. “The total length of the aqueduct... would be about 1,020 miles, of which about 290 miles would be tunnel and 40 miles in siphon. No estimates of cost were made for this plan because the necessary length of aqueduct causes it to appear unattractive.” Most or all of these diversions, the Report of the Chief implied, would have to be built, sooner or later. “Regardless of magnitude, scope, and timing of the undertaking, if it can be shown that moving surplus waters of the Northwest to water-deficient areas elsewhere is in the realm of sound public interest, it is, in Reclamation’s opinion and half century of experience, only a matter of time before exhaustion of nearer water supplies forces the undertaking of a suitable project for that purpose.” All of this, however, might still be fifty years in the future. For now, the immediate need was in the Colorado Basin and its parasitic appendage, southern California, and the obvious river of rescue was the Klamath.

Remote, wild, half-forgotten, the Klamath was a perfect example of how God had left the perfection and completion of California to the Bureau of Reclamation. The second-largest river in the state—three times the size of the third-largest river—it was imprisoned by mountains and hopelessly remote from Los Angeles. Spilling out of Klamath Lake in southern Oregon, a huge shallow apparition cradled between mountains and desert, the river drops across the California border and bends its way westward toward the coast. Then it dips suddenly southward toward populated California, and, as if recognizing covetous intent, immediately doubles back on itself and flees to Oregon through the plunging topography of the Siskiyou Range. Diverting the Klamath would be easy along the first half of its course, but it doesn’t contain much water yet. A hundred miles from the Pacific, however, rainfall shoots up to a hundred inches, the Trinity and Scott and Salmon rivers pour in, and the Klamath is suddenly huge. On a random day late in February of 1983, after a week of rain, the Klamath was flowing at four thousand cubic feet per second below Klamath Lake and at 148,000 cfs near its mouth, a Niagara-size flow in a canyon you can bat a ball across. Small tributaries were tumbling oven-size rocks like ice cubes. To the Bureau, the Klamath’s huge and reliable winter surges were only its second greatest attraction—the first was its availability. The Klamath was wasting twelve million acre-feet to the sea with hardly a claim on it. Its principal appropriators were salmon, steelhead, and bears.

To capture the Klamath, you had to dam it twelve miles from the Pacific, then move the water in reverse across, or under, a hundred miles of the most rugged topography in the United States. The dam, which would be called Ah Pah, would occupy the river’s last gorge. It would stand 813 feet high. The Pan Am Building in New York City stands 805 feet high. A man-made El Capitán, it would pool water seventy miles up the Klamath and forty miles up the Trinity to form a reservoir with 15,050,000 acre-feet of gross storage. (The reservoir that obliterated Johnstown, Pennsylvania, held fifty thousand acre-feet.) The Klamath, both forks of the Trinity, and the Salmon River would, for all practical purposes, disappear; 98 percent of the salmon and steelhead spawning grounds would be lost; at least seven towns would vanish, including the main settlements of the Hoopa tribe, from whose language the dam’s name was borrowed, and whose reservation it would drown. “Only minor improvements [i.e., towns] exist in this [the reservoir] area,” said the United Western report. The site, in a dense metasandstone formation, was presumed to be safe, although it “probably contains minor faults.”

Trinity Tunnel, which would spin water out of the bottom back side of the reservoir and carry it to the Central Valley, would be sixty miles long, Its shape would resemble a horseshoe, and its diameter would be thirty-seven feet. There would be no tunnel remotely like it anywhere in the world. The