A quiet canyon with a powerful past — and a vision for its future
Next time you’re snarled in traffic at the entrance to Yosemite National Park, or pulling out your hair trying to figure out the reservation system just to drive through the place, consider that only 15 miles north lies Yosemite’s seldom-visited sister valley. Soaring granite walls, cascading waterfalls, alpine meadows, a roaring river, miles of trails to ramble. John Muir called Hetch Hetchy Valley “one of nature’s rarest and most precious mountain temples.”
In 1923, that rare and precious mountain temple was flooded by the O’Shaughnessy Dam, to provide drinking water for San Francisco. Building a reservoir inside a national park required an act of Congress; the controversial Raker Act passed in 1913 after a nationwide political battle over the purpose of public land. Ever since the dam was first proposed in 1901, it’s been a symbol of the conflict between preserving public resources and extracting them. And ever since 2000, the non-profit Restore Hetch Hetchy has worked to preserve what’s left of the natural beauty of the valley and bring more visitors to this forgotten flooded gem, with the ultimate goal of returning the valley to its natural state and removing the dam.
Restore Hetch Hetchy grew out of a Sierra Club Restoration Task Force.
When members wanted to devote more energy to the project, they decided to form their own group. A ballot measure and a lawsuit failed, so the group turned their attention to enticing visitors to the inundated valley.
“We continue to advocate politically,” explains Executive Director Spreck Rosekrans. “But we are also trying to improve the profile of Hetch Hetchy, encouraging more folks to go there, and encouraging the park service to welcome them.”
Only 50,000 people visit Hetch Hetchy every year, compared to five million eager tourists who flock to Yosemite Valley. That means Hetch Hetchy Valley has 99% fewer advocates than Yosemite Valley.
Natives lived in the valley for over 6,000 years before Europeans arrived. There were no permanent villages, because the valley often flooded in the spring, but during the summer Miwok from the west and Paiute from the east lived there to escape the summer heat of the Central Valley and Great Basin. They hunted, fished, and gathered material for winter food, trade, art and ceremonial objects. Their descendants still gather plants in the valley for baskets and medicine.
Natives used low intensity fire to prevent forest from encroaching on the 1,200 acre alpine meadow nestled between sheer granite walls over 3,000 feet tall. The valley, eight miles long and between 1/8 and 1/2 mile wide, is now buried beneath 360,000 acre feet of water with an average depth of 300 feet. Indigenous people considered the enchanted glacially carved valley sacred. Europeans considered it a water source for a growing city over 150 miles away.
And the glittering alpine lake created by the O’Shaughnessy Dam is off limits to recreation. “There are 38 reservoirs in California larger than 200,000 acre feet, and virtually all of them provide drinking water to somebody,” explains Rosekrans. “Thirty-seven of them allow boating and fishing. Hetch Hetchy is the only one that doesn’t. It’s in a national park, which is partly for public recreation, but it’s still the only large reservoir in California with no recreation on it.”
It’s also the only reservoir ever built within an already existing national park. “The National Park Service (NPS) was established less than three years after the Raker Act passed, and they prioritized preserving parks for public use, not for the benefit of any one city,” explains Rosekrans. “Since that time, attempts to put a dam in a national park — Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon, for example — have failed.”
“But when Congress passed the Raker Act in 1913, they assumed there would be boating on the reservoir,” continues Rosekrans. “NPS has lost any interest in allowing that. We speculate that it’s a management problem; they would need more rangers to regulate the safety of additional visitors and possibly build additional infrastructure.“
Right now, the only activities permitted at Hetch Hetchy are hiking, climbing and backpacking. A 26.5-mile loop starts and ends at the dam, passing gorgeous alpine lakes and waterfalls, some of which cascade more than 1,000 vertical feet before reaching the valley floor. The hike reaches a maximum altitude of just over 7,000 feet, making it accessible in early season when a lot of Yosemite backpacking is still buried under snow.
“You’re only allowed to camp at the reservoir if you’re leaving for or returning from a backpacking trip,” says Rosekrans. “And those sites are nowhere near as nice as the rest of the ones in Yosemite.”
“We would never want Hetch Hetchy to be developed the way Yosemite is,” continues Rosekrans. “But we do want it to be accessible so more people can enjoy the wildlife and the canyon.”
Because anything we love can be saved, but in order to love something we need to know it. “Yosemite is sort of a gateway drug; people learn about and start to care about the environment there,” explains Rosekrans. “If we can restore this lost landscape, that will inspire a whole new generation of conservationists not only to care about parks, but also to have the courage to tackle bigger environmental issues wherever they are in the world.”
SIDEBAR
Where a tourist sees a flooded valley, a climber sees adventure. While most of Hetch Hetchy’s granite walls will remain inaccessible until wilderness boating is allowed on the reservoir — imagine the deepwater soloing! — a dedicated crew is exploring the potential for rock climbing in the area.
“There’s some bouldering, but mostly in the upper areas before you descend down,” explains climber and Restore Hetch Hetchy board member Mecia Serafino, who was part of Restore Hetch Hetchy’s 10-minute documentary Finding Hetch Hetchy: The Hidden Yosemite. “Once you go down, there are some established routes on different formations. Some friends and I have been putting up new multi-pitch routes at the base of this one formation. There’s just so much potential for sport climbing, trad climbing bouldering….”
Unlike Yosemite, they’re usually alone when they climb at Hetch Hetchy. “There’s not a lot of infrastructure, I mean there’s barely even bathrooms,” says Serafino with a laugh. “And there’s not a lot of info. You have to know who to ask and where to look, a lot of it is word of mouth.”
She started exploring the area with her partner Lucho Rivera. “We would go out there with a ton of extra ropes and gear, hauling like 5000 feet of static line to the top of some formation,” she explains. “But I like how hard it is, it feels so remote, so wild, so serene. When you’re on the wall and you look around, you just think, ‘who wouldn’t want this?’”
Despite her love of the adventure and climbing, she’s cautious about how to move forward with development of new climbing routes in Hetch Hetchy. “I want people to enjoy this place, but I don’t want it to turn into another Yosemite,” admits Serafino. “I have trouble admitting that humans aren’t the best when we enjoy these places, because not everyone treats them as sacred. I just hope that when people visit they will want to give back and not just take.”
MAIN PHOTO: Hetch Hetchy Reservoir sandwiched between Hetch Hetchy Dome on the left and Kolana Rock on the right. Photo by Joe Braun
