Nature Noir by Jordan Smith (romantic books to read .TXT) 📗

also planned to call on a miner who'd claimed as his own fiefdom a remote beach the guides and their clients used as a campsite.

The forty-eight miles of the American River lying beneath the waterline of the endlessly delayed Auburn Reservoir had long been withdrawn from mineral status; the Bureau of Reclamation wanted its title to the land unencumbered when it was finally allowed to flood it. That meant you could look for gold but you couldn't stake a claim to the land it was on under that antique provision of western law that still allowed a few rugged individualists to appropriate a piece of public land, scar it in their attempts to make it yield precious metals, and live on it indefinitely, rent free. Nevertheless, this man seemed to believe he had claimed the beach at the mouth of Otter Creek, and the word on the river was that he might be a taco or two short of a combination plate. He had a horse and a mule down there, and he'd evidently used them to pack a considerable quantity of gear and garbage into the canyon. Will had been sending him registered letters at a post office box in Georgetown, but they'd all gone unanswered. So today we'd serve him his walking papers in person. If he balked, we might write him a ticket. We couldn't arrest him: We'd be out of radio range for most of the sixteen-mile run, so there was no getting a helicopter, and it wouldn't do to run rapids with a man in handcuffs. Then again, he didn't know that.

We left the ranger station and drove east up the Foresthill Divide. At the town of Foresthill we turned southeast on Mosquito Ridge Road, descending the two-thousand-foot north wall of the Middle Fork toward the river. Shafts of morning sun from between the high peaks up-canyon gilded each prominence in the velvety knob-cone pine forests along the far canyon wall. We passed the portal of a hard-rock mine. Air hoses for drills ran into it, but the gate across the entrance was padlocked. Hard-rock gold mining had become a romantic anachronism and knobcone pines were considered worthless by loggers. Water and electrical power were what connected this canyon to the economy now.

By the early 1950s, the race was on throughout the West. Whatever waters still ran listlessly into the sea were to be harnessed to do work and make wealth. With construction underway at Folsom Dam on the river's main stem, it became clear to the businessmen and politicians of Placer County that under the Gold Rush-era law of "prior appropriation"—whoever gets there first gets the water—the federals were going to own all of Placer County's water and power rights if the county didn't claim them first.

So Placer County moved aggressively to grab the upper Middle Fork. In 1961 local voters underwrote a $140 million bond issue to begin building what was probably the most ambitious water and power system ever devised by a nonmetropolitan county in California. When a huge storm in 1964 caused the failure of the county's partially complete Hell Hole Dam, destroying five bridges, thousands of trees, and a hundred-foot-long bucket-line gold dredge downstream, it didn't stop the Water Agency. Completed in 1967, the Middle Fork Project gathered rain and snowmelt from a 429-square-mile watershed into 7 reservoirs with an aggregate capacity of 342,000 acre-feet. From the reservoirs the water traveled through 24 miles of tunnel and over 3,600 feet of penstocks—big pipes plunging down steep canyon walls to develop the hydraulic pressure it takes to make electricity—into 4 hydroelectric power stations on the way down the mountains. Today we'd be launching our boat at Oxbow Powerplant where the river was allowed to become a river again until it reached Folsom Lake.

The last pitch of road switchbacked down cliffs of dark slate to a dirt parking lot on the downstream side of the dam supplying Oxbow Powerplant, called Ralston Afterbay. There, Will and I unloaded our boat, its aluminum rowing frame, three oars (one for a spare), two paddles, dry bags full of gear, food, and a medical kit, cam straps, helmets, rescue vests, and ammo boxes and then carried them down a dirt track to the water. The track ended at a little pool at the base of a three-story concrete wall between mossy cliffs of dark stone. A thousand cubic feet of water every second surged from a hole in the base of the wall. Drawn from the cold bottom of the reservoir upstream, it had passed through a gleaming underworld of electrical generators hidden in the canyon wall behind us, where it had just been subjected to unspeakable violence in the turbines' scroll cases. It came to light again in this small pool, as cold as ice and as clear as gin. In the three decades since the powerplant was completed, willows had established themselves around the little pool, so that it seemed to be some combination of a manmade and a wild place.

One day when I had been preparing to get on the river, I had happened to encounter the maintenance supervisor for the powerplant as he came up from underground. I spent a few minutes asking him how the powerplant worked. During this conversation, he told me that his men were working on an eroded turbine blade. Water and the tiny bits of sand it carried, he said, can literally wear away steel. So the hardened steel blades of the turbines had to be periodically restored to their original contours by welding new metal onto their leading edges and grinding it to shape.

On another occasion, an engineer for the Bureau of Reclamation at Folsom Dam had shown me photographs of some of his colleagues standing in one of the huge tunnels through which water travels to and from the turbines inside a dam. The hard-hatted men were examining enormous galls in the tunnel's walls and floor. The engineer explained that rushing