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

sue if the Bureau didn't move forward with restoring the river through the dam site and allowing the public to use it. The Bureau's lawyers evidently thought the state could win, so the process was set in motion to put the river back in its course.

For a while John Doolittle continued to blockade any federal legislation to improve flood control for Sacramento that wasn't an Auburn dam. But eventually, with no dam in sight, he came to an agreement with Sacramento congressman Robert Matsui to back improvements to levees in Sacramento and modifications to Folsom Dam, which would give the city protection from any flood large enough to have less than a one in two hundred chance of occurring in any given year.

By 2003 the Auburn Dam site resounded with the roar of earth-moving equipment as contractors took down remaining portions of the cofferdam, prepared to close the diversion tunnel, and began installing a manmade rapid with cemented-in boulders and a complex system of manifolds to pull Placer County's water out of the river without sucking up kayakers, protected fish, or the huge cargo of rock and mud the river carries at high water—a feat of engineering that, as far as anyone knew, had never been done anywhere in the world. Stork and Estes were as ecstatic as such quiet, studious men ever get. Some members of PARC had been suggesting that State Parks name the restored stretch of river the Frank Olrich Confluence Parkway. So far State Parks has not said it will do it. But it is safe to say that in the short run the future looks bright for the American River.

***

The river's long-range future is less certain. By 2000 an eminent panel of experts from government and top universities reported that the complex human-caused climatologic changes for which the term "global warming" had for some time been an inadequate handle was well under way. Most other studies concurred.

Among the effects forecast for California by the 2000 study was a generalized increase in total precipitation; others disagreed, saying California would become dryer. But there is general consensus that warming temperatures will raise the altitude at which rain becomes snow on the mountains, and as a result more precipitation will fall as rain and run off immediately, instead of sitting in the snow pack and percolating off the mountains during the spring months. Further, studies agree that winter rains will arrive less reliably, and that as the weather's heat engine revs up, there will be an increase in warm, high-energy events like the Pineapple Express storm of 1986. If the second half of the twentieth century is any indicator this may be true; these storms seemed to grow larger between 1955 and 1997. Such storms would raise rivers to flood stage more often, and the floodwaters would have to make their way to the sea through a Central Valley with ever greater population and property values. Turning from the question of floods to that of water supply, a diminished snow pack melting earlier in the year and more precipitation running off as rain would give agriculture, cities, and industry a smaller annual period during which to gather their water, so they may demand more space in which to store it. Environmentalists hope that groundwater storage may to some extent offset the need for more dams.

Most studies agree that under current climate change scenarios, droughts and heat waves will lead to greater demand for hydroelectric and other power to run air conditioning and higher water use for landscaping and crops. At this writing California has not had a serious drought for a decade and the two worst dry spells in the twentieth century were only six years long. Yet studies of ancient tree stumps found on lake bottoms show that California experienced a two-century drought at the end of the first millennium and another one nearly as long around A.D. 1200. And for the present and foreseeable future—unless something changes—the forty-two-thousand-acre dam site called Auburn State Recreation Area will continue to be owned by a government agency whose purpose has always been to develop water storage. The writer John McPhee visited the Auburn Dam site in the course of his research for his book about geology, Assembling California. While there, he learned about the timber dam that had existed on the site as early as 1854. McPhee would remark dryly, "[At Auburn,] environmentalists have discovered to their eternal chagrin, a dam site is a dam site forever, no matter what the state or nation may decide to do about it in any given era."

Nevertheless, the American River canyons are resurgent and bursting with life. In 2001 the city of Auburn—a freeway burg just over half an hour by car from the capital city of the most populous state in the union—had a new problem. Bears coming out of the American River canyons at night had been rampaging through the streets, knocking over garbage cans and startling residents awake. By 2003 Auburn was being fortified with a firebreak along the canyon rim to defend the town from brushfires that periodically sweep the canyon's fire-adapted chaparral. Deer, foxes, and bobcats had been leaving footprints in the dust of the firebreak as they joined the bears in the streets of town. Biologists conducting a reconnaissance of the North Fork had found legions of foothill yellow-legged frogs, Rana boylii, whose decline elsewhere in the Sierra had been worrying herpetologists for some time. And Lake Clementine Road, which runs from just above the Auburn Dam's waterline to four hundred feet beneath it, appeared in a guidebook of the best spots to see wildflowers in the Sierra Nevada.

A couple of months before his death, Frank Olrich had come to the ranger station with an idea about forming a group of volunteer docents he called the Canyon Keepers, who would offer the sort of nature walks that the beleaguered rangers didn't have time to do. Today, Canyon Keepers is an official state park