Today we head up the road to Shasta Lake and Shasta Dam. Which got me thinking about my Chico childhood.
My family had a huge, and hugely ugly, beat-up green plywood box filled with pots, pans, kerosene lantern, cook stove, matches, marshmallows, and all other camping essentials, always stocked. On Fridays we’d throw the camping box into the station wagon and set out.
During our water skiing days, the destination was always Lake Shasta. We’d boat over to “our” secret campsite—a sheltered cove in the woods, complete with fresh stream—then tidy up the camp kitchen and put up the family tent plus pup tents for us kids. We’d leave it all there, all summer, coming back almost every weekend to pick up where we’d left off. No one stole any gear while we were gone, either, though one time we were shocked when, in our absence, some thief towed off our makeshift dock.
Yes, it was another time. But in many ways, Lake Shasta is the same lake it was then, in the early 1960s—great for fishing, boating, and family fun. House boating has become a big thing in recent years, with Shasta said to be the nation’s house boating hotspot. All the better to putt on over to those secret campsites, I say. For all I know there may be secret boat-in sites still, given that there’s a lot of water in Shasta—some 4.5 million acre-feet—at least when it’s full, and 365 miles of shore.
Shasta Dam is the second largest dam in the U.S., in the shadow of only Washington state's Grand Coulee Dam.
But there would be no lake without the dam. Shasta Dam is the second largest dam in the U.S., in the shadow of only Washington state’s Grand Coulee Dam. Centerpiece of the Central Valley Project, designed to hold back devastating winter floods and provide farmers with summer irrigation water, Shasta Dam is much grander than anything President Ulysses Grant and the early U.S. Corps of Engineers had in mind when the idea of “moving the rain,” as a Shasta Dam laborer put it, first drew federal attention after the Civil War.
Take the free dam tour when you get the chance, to get a feel for just how huge huge can be. Tours are free, usually offered four to six times daily, but you’ll need to show up in person to get your ticket and, before descending into the dam, pass security screening. (Absolutely no bags or handbags, but cell phones, cameras, and bottled water are allowed.). The ceramic-tiled “hall of echoes” is sure to impress any kid. Plus, on a hot summer day, it’s very cool inside.
Standing at the base of the massive dam, taking in the immensity of the penstocks that funnel lake water to the power plant, you almost get a water’s-eye view of the Sacramento River, which has always carried the flows of the three rivers and one creek that now feed into the lake. Sometimes, from the viewing platform, you’ll see river otters and other wildlife. You can certainly imagine them here, where the Sacramento River starts up again after having been so rudely interrupted by all that camping, swimming, water skiing, and house boating.
It’s more difficult to imagine the lake’s underlying landscapes, the interconnecting river valleys, before they were inundated, as the dam went up, or the valleys’ towns and sacred Wintu lands. And impossible to imagine the rivers of salmon and steelhead that once packed the Sacramento.
California’s increasing demand for water has encouraged the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and other interested parties to dust off old goals—imagine that—such as raising the dam’s height by 200 feet, as per original plans, before World War II materials and labor shortages cut back expectations. Will we support more modest height increases? Who gets the water if we do? What do we all lose? So many dam questions to consider.