Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

To capture the Klamath, you had to dam it twelve miles from the Pacific, then move the water in reverse across, or under, a hundred miles of the most rugged topography in the United States. The dam, which would be called Ah Pah, would occupy the river’s last gorge. It would stand 813 feet high. The Pan Am Building in New York City stands 805 feet high. A man-made El Capitán, it would pool water seventy miles up the Klamath and forty miles up the Trinity to form a reservoir with 15,050,000 acre-feet of gross storage. (The reservoir that obliterated Johnstown, Pennsylvania, held fifty thousand acre-feet.) The Klamath, both forks of the Trinity, and the Salmon River would, for all practical purposes, disappear; 98 percent of the salmon and steelhead spawning grounds would be lost; at least seven towns would vanish, including the main settlements of the Hoopa tribe, from whose language the dam’s name was borrowed, and whose reservation it would drown. “Only minor improvements [i.e., towns] exist in this [the reservoir] area,” said the United Western report. The site, in a dense metasandstone formation, was presumed to be safe, although it “probably contains minor faults.”