Where Is the River?
When it comes to being far from past conditions, though, the San Joaquin River has the Sacramento beat hands down. The Sacramento is now essentially a managed conveyance channel, bringing 75-80 percent of the river’s natural flow to the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The San Joaquin, however, has had a different fate: there, 75-80 percent of its natural flow has been removed from the system. And of course, a dam is involved. At 319 feet, the Friant Dam, completed in 1942, is diminutive compared to Shasta Dam, and the reservoir it creates, Millerton Lake, much smaller. But its impact on the natural river system is huge. At Friant Dam alone, some 95 percent of the natural runoff of the San Joaquin River is diverted for irrigation.

Both Shasta and Friant dams, and dozens of others besides, are part of the federal Central Valley Project, established in 1933 to store and divert water from Central Valley rivers for agriculture in the San Joaquin Valley. More infrastructure was built beginning in the late 1950s, with the launching of the State Water Project. Of the amount of water captured today statewide, some 80 percent is used for agriculture, according to the Pacific Institute.

Much of that water is delivered by canals, ditches, bypasses, aqueducts--and as I drove across the San Joaquin Valley on Highway 152, I was struck by all the gleaming ribbons of water. Peter Vorster told me to watch for a bridge over the San Joaquin, commenting that “there may not even be a sign--it’s almost a joke.” There was a sign, fortunately, because it was immediately obvious what he meant about the “joke”: the river channel, while nice and wide, was full of . . . tire tracks in the sand. Not a hint of water, although immediately adjacent to the riverbed a canal was merrily coursing along. In fact, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council, thanks to diversions such as this, more than 60 miles of the 330-mile-long San Joaquin are completely dry in all but the wettest years.

And so I set off on a detective hunt: with my map in hand, I wanted to see how many “representative” faces of today’s San Joaquin River I could find. After taking a gander at Millerton Lake, which was abustle with boaters, fishers, picnickers, jet-skiers, kayakers, and swimmers, I headed down past Friant Dam and along Millerton Lake Road. The San Joaquin Fish Hatchery reminded me that the river once supported the southernmost Chinook salmon run in North America--until sections of the river went dry in the late 1940s, after the dam was completed. Since then, only the wettest years have seen salmon spawning beneath the dam, though early this year a $400-million project, battled over for two decades, was approved by Congress to increase the amount of water released from the dam to help resurrect the river’s salmon fishery.

The abundant gravel of the San Joaquin is perfect for the salmons’ redds--and also for human building projects. Along Millerton Lake Road are many aggregate mining operations that remove sand and gravel by the ton, and leave behind large pits. Even in a river that isn’t running at five percent of its natural capacity, such pits interfere with sediment travel and cause flow rates to slow, making it more difficult for anadromous fish to reach their spawning grounds; they also harbor non-native predatory fish, which prey on young salmon returning to the sea.

My next stop was about 35 miles west of Fresno at Mendota Pool, a reservoir just north of the town of Mendota, “Cantaloupe Capital of the World.” It was late on a Saturday afternoon, and families had gathered to sit with their fishing poles and visit by the small expanse of water surrounded by waving reeds. At the northwest corner of the pool I noticed a lock and a canal, the Delta-Mendota. At first I thought this canal led out of the pool, but no: perversely enough, it brings water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and delivers it (back) to the San Joaquin River. Its purpose: to “rewet” the river, by replacing some of the water that was diverted at Friant Dam into the Friant-Kern Canal heading south and the Madera Canal heading north. In between Madera and the pool is the first stretch of river, 17 miles in length, that is bone dry. Without the backward-flowing canal, it would simply stay that way. Which would take the San Joaquin out of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta rather definitively.

Stranger and stranger: a river with no water; a river that is replenished by water taken from its mouth. Driving from Mendota Pool, zigzagging on township-and-range roads north and west, I kept a lookout for the river, not entirely trusting that it wasn’t some figment from Alice in Wonderland. In the distance, across flat fields of alfalfa, wheat, grapes, dry beans, and other crops, I could see a riparian corridor snaking: willows and other trees that relish a reliable supply of water. My map showed the river twisting and turning, accompanied by the straight legs of canals, bypasses, and ditches. I found a few places that may have been the San Joaquin--some were just depressions thick with vegetation but no open water, though as I worked my way north the river came into its own more and more. But then, in Patterson, I lost it: it simply disappeared. A culvert had whisked it underground.