Sonora to Stockton
We had finished walking across the mountains. The next day, on the autumn equinox, we biked down through the Stanislaus National Forest, aware that all of us on the 38ºN latitude line saw the noon sun that day at 52 degrees (90º-38º) above the horizon. The 40-mile stretch to Sonora was a forested and scenic route that was extremely hilly. At one point I was pedaling uphill so slowly that a butterfly heading the same direction passed me by.

In Sonora, at the house of Kurt Stegen, we took our first showers in nine days, and then Kurt drove us to the New Melones Reservoir visitor center. He has been a volunteer with Friends of the River for about 35 years. The height of the dam to be built on the Stanislaus River, as well as how much of the canyon was to be flooded, were issues of passionate contention. In 1974, Friends of the River sponsored Proposition 17, a ballot initiative to prevent the reservoir from inundating nine miles of a popular river rafting stretch at the upper end of the canyon.

Another group, Friends of New Melones, formed expressly to defeat the ballot measure, posted billboards proclaiming: Stop “Wild River” Hoax! Stop Pollution of the River! The Los Angeles Times editorialized that “the billboards seem an absolute betrayal of the truth to us. We, too, oppose Proposition 17. But to call it a “wild-river hoax” and to suggest that the proposition would result in pollution is a resort to tactics that have no place in responsible democratic campaigning.” Proposition 17 lost, 47 percent to 53.

An exhibit in the visitor center summarizes some of that history, which Kurt and so many others lived first-hand. From there we drove to the viewpoint overlooking the dam, a massive earthen plug 625 feet high, spanning 1,560 feet across the canyon. A parking lot, restroom building, and shade shelters sit abandoned at the canyon rim about a half-mile downstream from the dam, at the end of an access road that is now closed to the public.

In 1979, as the reservoir began to fill, Mark Dubois, then director of Friends of the River, chained himself to a boulder in a secret location that would be flooded. Several others joined that protest, forcing water to be released from the dam to avoid drowning the protesters.

In 1980, the California State Water Resources Control Board set a low limit for the reservoir level, but heavy runoff after the record winter of 1982 trumped political will and filled the reservoir to its spilling point. In 1983, the Board lifted its filling restrictions; a full reservoir was a fait accompli. Despite its defeat, Friends of the River has played a significant role in river protection ever since.

Toward sunset, we stood at the Parrot’s Ferry site, where the whitewater rafting stretch once began, and looked at tree snags poking up above the water (the reservoir was at only 46 percent of capacity). For Kurt, that low level opened up an intriguing possibility: perhaps the reservoir could be managed such that the whitewater stretch could be restored, while still ensuring emergency flood storage capacity in high-water episodes like those forecast to occur more frequently with global warming. The Stanislaus River story may not be finished.

In the morning we began an all-day bike ride from Sonora to Stockton. There were too many trucks and no bike lane on Highway 4, so we dropped out of the foothills through Salt Springs Valley, passing scattered ranch houses, cattle, and fields remote from the busy travel routes. We saw white pelicans, pied-billed grebes, and assorted ducks on the reservoir at the bottom of that valley. As we approached Highway 26, the road we were traveling was lined with tailing piles, the gravel debris left by miners who had seemingly chewed their way across the surface of the land.

The hard physical part of this trip was over once we reached Stockton, since we would embark by boat in the morning. Hiking and biking had given us a new, physical appreciation for the size of this state.