A road trip! It’s one of my favorite things: to load the car with a few essentials--detailed maps, certainly, and my camera gear--and wander out into the world with no particular goal in mind, except to see the land, maybe meet some people, and with luck, find a local coffeehouse or two with character. The road trip I undertook last spring did have a goal of sorts, or at least a theme: I wanted to get acquainted with the San Francisco Bay watershed.

The Bay’s watershed, or drainage basin, is--well, it’s almost half of California, extending from the Klamath Range in the north to the Tehachapis in the south and east to the Sierra crest. That whole terrain drains to the Bay. Myriad streams, creeks, rivers, and forks of rivers course westward out of the Sierra Nevada and, to a lesser extent, eastward from the coast ranges, meeting and merging like the veins in our bodies, ultimately emptying into two great rivers: the Sacramento and the San Joaquin. These are the pumping heart of much of the state of California, water being the flowing blood.

To keep things simple, I decided to focus on those two waterways. My plan: to visit the source of the Sacramento and follow the river south. The San Joaquin’s headwaters, high in the Sierra, were still under snow, so I chose to pick up that river 15 miles north of Fresno at Friant Dam, a formidable obstacle that has changed the nature of the San Joaquin River for good and all.

My idea was to stay away from the main highways and seek out the shores of the rivers often. For the San Joaquin, I also had some tips from a hydrogeographer with the Bay Institute, Peter Vorster--spots that would give me a glimpse of the varied nature of that river as it exists today. I did the trip in two parts, spending three days on the Sacramento and a weekend on the San Joaquin, putting over 1,200 miles on my trusty 4Runner. That was too short a time to allow for more than a nodding acquaintance with either river, but I did get an intriguing glimpse of California’s heartland, with its two life-giving rivers and, in their way even more impressive, the vast waterworks that divert much of the rivers’ flow for human uses long before they reach the sea. Two-thirds of the San Francisco Bay Area depends on this elaborate system of dams, canals and ditches, and pumping plants for drinking water, but the entire state--indeed, much of the country--relies on it for food. Yet few of us ever see much of it, or have any idea how thoroughly we have altered the landscape by harnessing the Sacramento and the San Joaquin.

Cool, Clear Water
The purported source of the Sacramento River is a shady grotto in Mt. Shasta City Park--a squat layered rock outcropping out of which gushes water. According to the Mt. Shasta Recreation and Parks District website, “The crystal clear water flowing through the park begins its journey high on the snow-covered peaks of majestic Mt. Shasta, flowing through underground lava tubes until finally gushing forth into daylight at the City Park’s headwaters area.” It then tumbles into a small stream, through lush greenery, and ultimately, after 447 miles, into Suisun Bay and thence to the Pacific. In fact, several forks of the Sacramento originate farther north and at various elevations up to almost 8,000 feet. The U.S. Geological Survey cites the river’s source as the confluence of the South and Middle Forks. Wherever the official origin of all this water, it flows into Lake Siskiyou before finding a gorge that, conveniently for the builders of Interstate 5, heads south toward the immense valley of the Sacramento.

While I was visiting the gusher in City Park, a man and a woman arrived toting two five-gallon plastic containers each and proceeded to fill them with this fresh, clear water. The geology here acts as a big water filter--a quality that has attracted beverage companies to the area. Crystal Geyser and Coca-Cola both have bottling plants nearby, and in 2003 a controversy arose when the Swiss-based Nestlé proposed building what would have been the largest bottling plant in the world in the depressed former lumber town of McCloud, 15 miles from Mt. Shasta City.

Tapping into three natural springs on the flanks of Mt. Shasta, Nestlé planned to bottle 521 million gallons a year, which it claimed would create more than 100 jobs in a region hard-hit by unemployment--though skeptics pointed out that these jobs would be largely low-paying production work. Opponents feared that such a large operation could harm local water supplies and kill the appealing character of McCloud for retirees and recreational users of the river; many also objected to the amount of energy and plastic materials used to create and transport a product that is available to most Americans free from the tap. Nestlé subsequently scaled back the size of the proposed plant, and hearings have continued; an environmental impact study is under way.