Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

The most interesting curiosity about the plan, however, was the obvious discrepancy between the amount of new water the Trinity River could deliver and the looming shortfall in the Colorado River. At the moment the plan was released, the second-largest reservoir in California, Clair Engle Lake, was beginning to fill on the upper reaches of the Trinity. Its capacity of 2,448,000 acre-feet was not much less than the river’s annual flow of 3,958,000 acre-feet. Clair Engle Lake was a main feature of the Central Valley Project; its water, therefore, was exclusively for California’s use. According to the Pacific Southwest Water Plan, only 1.2 million acre-feet would be left in the Trinity to augment the Colorado River—and that was assuming the Trinity, one of the world’s great salmon and steelhead rivers, would be bled virtually dry before reaching the sea. But the shortfall which the Bureau was projecting in the Colorado Basin, privately if not publicly, was at least 2.5 million acre-feet. Where would the other 1.3 million acre-feet come from? The Pacific Northwest Water Plan said nothing about it. It only hinted that it “does not provide an overall solution for the region’s water needs,” then failed to mention what such an ultimate solution would be. The Bureau’s maps had other reservoirs all over the place, drawn in gray—several on the Eel River, one on Cache Creek, the huge Ah Pah reservoir on the Klamath—but referred to these as “alternative storage possibilities,” as if th...