It's a River Again! Winter on the Tuolumne

All the pictures in this post are from the Tuolumne River Parkway Trail in Waterford.

All in all, it's been a good year (so far). One can judge the quality of a year on the basis of many things, and in this instance I'm talking about water. So much of the time, my part of California is at an extreme in one direction or another. Last year it was a drought up until some late storms in March that salvaged the water year. The year previous was one of floods and threatened floods, unlike anything seen in twenty years, but at least it filled the state's reservoirs after an astounding five-year drought. This year finds us in the sweet spot, kind of in-between, but a bit above average.

The rainy season started a bit slowly, just enough to make one worry a little bit about drought. No storms in September. A single small storm in October. But then in late November the pace picked up with just over 3 inches in my rain gauge, and December added more than 2 inches. The same with January, nearly 3 inches, and now February has already produced 2.5 inches with more storms coming this week. Of course my backyard is not the measure of water conditions in the state. The news reports are full of stories on the incredible snowpack that has built up in the Sierra Nevada in the last few weeks, with single storms producing six feet of snow or more.

The critical Sierra Nevada snowpack sits at between 109% and 135% of normal (measuring from north to south), with a statewide average of 123%. If no more snow fell, our season would end at 84% of normal. It's a comfortable place to be.

But no water planner is ever comfortable. With so much snow in the mountains, the reservoir water masters always have to worry about the possibility of a big atmospheric river storm, the kind that combines the extreme low pressure of an Arctic storm with a stream of extremely humid air out of the tropics. Like the one that could happen this week. In a worst case scenario, such a storm could cause rain at high elevations, melting much of the snowpack and raising the specter of flooding downstream.

And that is why the Tuolumne River came alive this week. For many months, the river has remained at an unnaturally low flow of about 200 cubic feet per second, a minimal amount. There are large reservoirs upstream, especially Hetch Hetchy and Don Pedro, and the operative mode is to save as much water as possible. During the recent storms, inflow to Don Pedro reached as high as 8,000 cubic feet per second, but outflow remained at 200 cfs.

Last week the river was dramatically higher, flowing at 2,000 cubic feet per second. The water masters are clearing out some storage space in Don Pedro in case of a flood emergency. It looks like they intend to go as high as 3,500 cfs in the next few days. Certainly not a flood (it would have to reach 9,000 cubic feet per second for that), but enough to clear the channel of invasive water hyacinth, and enough to make one feel the river is closer to a natural seasonal condition.

It's a nice time of year to walk the Tuolumne.

After the Deluge: Dam! We Almost Lost a Dam!

But for the vagaries of the weather, we would never have seen it. Running field studies courses in the winter and spring always involves an element of chance, but in the dry year that we've had, it seemed safe enough to schedule a trip to Yosemite National Park in early April. But as the previous two posts have shown, an epic atmospheric river storm, a Pineapple Express, pummeled the area last Saturday. We postponed our trip to Sunday, and had a fine day, but we reversed the direction of our trip, because we still weren't sure if Yosemite Valley would open up in time for us to visit. If the valley remained closed, we wanted the choice of going to Hetch Hetchy Valley instead, and to allow that we needed to go by way of Highway 120 through Big Oak Flat and Groveland, instead of Highway 140 through Mariposa.

I had heard that Moccasin Reservoir almost failed a few weeks earlier, but didn't give it much thought while I was bustling about trying to think of alternate field trip stops. We had left the Red Hills Area of Critical Environmental Concern and were approaching the Priest Grade when I remembered the dam episode. During an intense storm on March 22, floodwaters overwhelmed the spillway of the small earthen dam on Moccasin Creek. Moccasin Dam is about 700 feet across and about 60 feet high, holding back about 554 acre-feet of water when full.

There is one very strange fact about the dam. Even though it blocks Moccasin Creek, it doesn't hold water from Moccasin Creek! In instead contains Tuolumne River water that has been diverted into the Hetch Hetchy system and pumped through a hydroelectric plant on lower Moccasin Creek. The dam is a small forebay that feeds into the much larger Don Pedro Reservoir and Lake just a mile downstream. Moccasin Creek was heavily mined during the Gold Rush, and the sediments may be contaminated by mercury and other toxic metals related to the gold extraction process. The water of Moccasin Creek is diverted around the reservoir.

As we drove by, I commented on the radios that the flood had happened, but I saw that a lot of the damage was visible from the highway and we screeched to a stop to have a look. It had clearly been a serious storm. The flood had ripped out trees, roads, and telephone poles. The dam itself looked undamaged, but the spillway downstream had been severely eroded. Few people were threatened by the flooding, but roads were closed. If the dam had failed, the effects would have been limited because Don Pedro Lake, only a mile downstream, would have easily absorbed the extra water.

Maybe the saddest aspect of the flood was the near destruction of the fish hatchery. As can be seen in the picture below by Mark Brooks and aired on several news outlets, the entire hatchery was flooded, and all of the fish either killed by turbulent mud, or carried downstream to Don Pedro (when does fishing season start?).

Geology and weather are capricious beasts. One of the lessons of the earth sciences is that no place anywhere on this planet is free of the possibility of natural disasters. Some places are more dangerous than others, but there is always a big advantage to understanding the possible hazards where one lives and works. One may think they may never happen in one's lifetime, and they might not, but that's a dangerous gamble to make.

Photo by Mark Brooks

Touring the Underside of the Volcanoes, Part 2

Yosemite Valley and Yosemite National Park contain incredible exposures of the magma chambers that once fed eruptions of volcanoes that topped the Ancestral Sierra Nevada, the mountain edifice that graced the Cretaceous landscape of California and western Nevada (now, when is the last time you heard Yosemite introduced that way?).

As a glacially carved valley (ignoring for the moment the work of rivers and mass wasting), Yosemite doesn't really fit the stereotype of a U-shaped valley. It has a very flat valley floor, and instead of a relatively linear valley, it has many reentrants and coves. This in large part is responsible for the unique scenery of this beautiful place. The flat floor exists because lake sediments filled the trough in the area upstream of some of the valley moraines. The walls vary, because more than one kind of granitic rock is present, and in fact at least eleven intrusions are defined in the area (see the map at http://virtual.yosemite.cc.ca.us/ghayes/geology.htm).

Ironically, the rocks are not all that easily observed up close. The cliff base is often covered with loose and unstable talus, and many of the accessible exposures are covered with lichens. Hetch Hetchy Valley is often a better bet, having been more recently scoured by glacial ice (see my very first picture post: Photo of the Day).

A slide in 1982 brought down huge boulders of the El Capitan granite, one of which is pictured above. The photo shows a large number of darker colored enclaves*, blobs of dark rock that probably originated as two different intruding magmas mixed. The enclaves can perhaps be thought of as globules of oil floating in the vinegar of Italian salad dressing.

*Enclave: Body of external origin in an igneous rock. The main varieties are xenoliths (fragments of solid rocks) and microgranitoid enclaves (former magma globules derived by mingling of magmas).
Vernon, R.H., 2004, A Practical Guide to Rock Microstructure, Cambridge University Press

Photo of the Day

Photo of the day....

The "other" Yosemite. Hetch Hetchy Valley was dammed in the early part of the last century over the objections of John Muir and the newly organized Sierra Club. There is, in fact, a large and unsightly lake beyond the foreground, but I like the view better without it....