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.

As I headed out of Mt. Shasta City on I-5, the options for seeking--or even seeing--the Sacramento River down in its gorge were limited by both the rugged topography and the fact that offramps and side roads are few and far between. One of my first chances was at Pollard Gulch, a Forest Service day-use site 20 miles south of Mt. Shasta City. There I encountered another extractive industry on the river--not of water, or even of fish, but of gleaming, glistening gold.

In the 1850s, this spot was known as Portuguese Flat and was the site of a rough mining camp. I saw no evidence of that past on my visit, but on the railroad bridge spanning the river I did encounter a fellow, maybe 60, wearing rubber boots and carrying a big white plastic bucket and a wide, flat green pan: an actual gold prospector. He pointed out a clump of rocks on the other side of the river, said a few weeks earlier he’d pulled up some boards that had gotten lodged there and found a dozen gold nuggets. He showed me their size on the tip of his pinky, said he was “excited as a boy.” But then, he wasn’t sure how, the “snuffer bottle” (a small plastic bottle that sucks gold out of a pan) he’d put them in ended up upside down, floating away on the river. And so today he was back, to look again. He explained that he grew up in Mt. Shasta City and used to walk from there to Shasta Lake, all along the river--a distance of 30 miles. “I’m an Indian,” he said. “That’s what we do.” I wished him luck as he clambered down the opposite bank.

For my next stop I planned to visit Shasta Dam, 602 feet high and 3,460 feet across, the second largest in the United States (after the Grand Coulee). Built between 1938 and 1945, it creates the many-fingered Lake Shasta, third largest lake and largest reservoir in California. Or more accurately, the lake is created by the inflow of the Sacramento, Pit, and McCloud Rivers, as well as several smaller tributaries, whose flow is stopped short by the dam. When water exits the lake over the dam’s spillway, it has the dubious distinction of forming the largest manmade waterfall in the world. Somewhere in that torrent, too, it regains the name Sacramento River.

But before I made my way to the dam, I was eager to see the lake behind it. Some wayward, muddy driving brought me near to (but not within sight of) the river, but eventually a friendly couple walking their dog pointed me in the right direction: toward the appropriately named Lakehead. Because Lake Shasta is popular with houseboaters and other recreational boaters, I sought out Lakehead’s marina. Two sightseeing boats were tied up next to the small office, but otherwise the floating docks were empty. A pair of men were doing repairs, and two others were readying rods and tackle to do a little fishing. Nobody paid me any mind, short of quick nods. Looking north, I saw that the river had broadened and slowed beneath low bluffs; to my right, the water spread out, probing with deep fingers into the steep, reddish lakebank laced with manzanita and pines. In the distance, cars on I-5 poured across a bridge.

From where I stood, the dam was 20 miles south and west as the crow flies, maybe 30 as the car flies. I hopped back in my car and headed south on I-5, exiting at Shasta City. Half an hour later I was looking north at stunning views of the dam, lake, and, rising grandly in the distance, Mt. Shasta itself, but unfortunately, I was half an hour too late for the dam tour--the perils of road-tripping sans guidebook.

Into the Valley
As I drove back on Shasta Dam Boulevard toward I-5, I was able to survey the Sacramento River Valley from a slight elevation. Although I couldn’t see the river from here, the spectacle of that broad, flat valley that extends as far as the eye can see--and a few hundred miles farther--made me feel as if I were smack in the middle of a giant relief map of California. The Central Valley, that great depression cradled by mountains, is what so much of the state seems to look in toward, to flow into.

Not all that long ago, it was a place defined by oak-studded grasslands and great tracts of wetlands--as much as five million acres--that invited ducks, geese, and swans to alight and rest on their long journey from and to wintering and summering grounds. Now, some 95 percent of those wetlands are gone, and the river has been tamed of its natural tendency to flood. The lands of the Central Valley have been tamed as well, to feed not birds but us humans. It is very much a cultural landscape, with little sign of the wild past. As I continued into the valley, I forgot about the tumbling river in its Mt. Shasta-shadowed gorge, and started thinking about food.

No, I wasn’t hungry. But all of a sudden I was surrounded on all sides by food--or the promise of food, anyway. For today, what gives order and definition to the Central Valley is not the exuberance of nature, but the well-ordered industry of agriculture. In the Sacramento Valley, primary crops include rice, wheat, nuts (almonds and walnuts), olives, tomatoes, prunes, and apricots. (The valley controls more than two-thirds of the worldwide prune market, and together with the San Joaquin Valley it produces 80 percent of the world’s almonds.) As I wove my way back and forth between I-5 and Highway 99 from Redding south toward Sacramento, everywhere I turned there were gnarled trees, marching in perfectly ordered lines and grids.

Farther south, rice fields became the norm; during much of the year, these fields are full of water, yielding rice of over a dozen types. Rice is one of the few crops that grows well in the clayey soils of the Sacramento River Valley. It’s a summertime crop, though, and requires irrigation, so each year the 500,000 or so acres of rice fields in the Central Valley are flooded. Following the autumn harvest, past practice was to burn the rice stubble to eliminate disease. The resulting haze and associated health concerns led in the early 1990s to California’s Rice Straw Burning Phase-Down Law; instead of burning, farmers began increasingly to flood their fields during the fallow months. At the same time, the late environmental writer Marc Reisner--who once called California’s rice industry “a monsoon crop in a desert state”--cofounded the Ricelands Habitat Partnership, a coalition of rice farmers, conservationists, and waterfowl protection groups, to reform rice-growing practices to create more wetlands habitat for wildlife. Now each winter more than 350,000 acres of rice fields are flooded, and while they are not a true substitute for the natural wetlands that have been drained in the Central Valley, they do provide some significant feeding and resting benefits for migrating waterfowl.

Burning is still allowed, but today it applies to only 15-25 percent of the acreage that 20 years ago was routinely put to the torch. South of the town of Willows, just off I-5, I watched some flames lick their way through a small field near a giant grain silo. Behind me I’d left 10,000 acres of pond-studded marshland/upland, the main unit of the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) Complex. Another 25,000 acres are distributed through almost 30 units of the complex, most of them along the Sacramento River.

To my uneducated eye, the large ponds with small grass- and reed-covered islands at the Sacramento NWR, with great egrets skirting the edges and various species of duck dabbling free, looked pretty “natural.” So did the two stretches of river I visited at the Pine Creek and Llano Seco units of the refuge. I was surprised to learn, therefore, that these units rely on managed water just as much as the rice farmers do, with draining, discing, and even burning, as well as managed planting and irrigation, aiding in the creation of habitats beneficial to birds, and carefully monitored water flows (thanks in part to Shasta Dam and the Red Bluff Diversion Dam) now also helping in the recovery of salmon stocks.

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.

I abandoned my quest and headed to I-5. There, on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley, I reencountered the 117-mile-long Delta-Mendota Canal, which between the San Luis Reservoir (on Highway 152) and Tracy parallels the California Aqueduct--two shining ribbons of concrete-encased lifeblood: water for us to drink, and water for our food to drink. At Tracy are two pumping plants, each of which ministers to one of these conduits, hoisting water 200-plus feet from the Delta and sending it on its way south.

At Antioch I found myself high in the air on a toll bridge that connected me to the leveed islands of the agricultural Delta. Looking down, I saw the spot where the San Joaquin flows gracefully into the Sacramento, and from there into Suisun, San Pablo, and San Francisco Bays.

My trip wasn’t finished yet, though. Peter Vorster had told me that if I wanted to see what the San Joaquin might have looked like near its mouth before its water was stolen for agriculture, I should visit the 46,000-acre Cosumnes River Preserve. The 80-mile-long Cosumnes River is the last remaining unregulated river on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada. As such, it continues to flood each year in its natural cycle, and it still supports thousands of acres of wetlands, along with native upland vegetation and wildlife.

At the Preserve, just north of Galt, I took a loop walk, enjoying the diversity of plant life. Cottonwood, willow, ash, and other flood-resistant trees edged the river itself, and valley oak riparian forest gave me a glimpse of flitting birds. Near the visitor center, a bridge allowed a view of a seasonal slough. A large proportion of the Central Valley’s greater sandhill crane population stops at the Preserve, and river otters ply the current of the Cosumnes--though the only mammal life I saw was in kayaks.

The lush tangle of greenery, both in the slough and along the river’s banks, was such a contrast to the ordered neatness of the walnut orchards and wheat fields of the tamed rivers of the valley, not to mention the tire-marked stretch of sand labeled “San Joaquin River” on Highway 152. I felt grateful for this preserve, for providing a hint of what once was. And I felt hopeful for the Chinook salmon that, perhaps before too long, will again find water to swim in all the way to Friant Dam. Their ancestral home will never return, no; but we can at least create an environment that is healthier, and more sustainable, not only for the fish but for us as well.