Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

The Kings, the Kaweah, the Tule, and the Kern are the southernmost rivers flowing out of the Sierra Nevada into the Central Valley of California. They are the only rivers that do not ultimately end up in either the Sacramento or the San Joaquin drainage, because a low rise of land in the upper San Joaquin Valley, south of Fresno, effectively divides the valley into two hydrologic basins. The southernmost one, which receives the runoff of the Kings, Kaweah, Tule, and Kern, is known as Tulare Basin. Historically, the four rivers of Tulare Basin went into two terminal lakes, Tulare and Buena Vista, which appeared and disappeared every year like phantoms. During the wet winters, the lakes would begin to fill; they would reach their largest size in May, after twenty feet of Sierra snow had melted into them in a matter of weeks; and, in all but the wettest years, they would evaporate so quickly under the glaring summer sun that they were dry again, or mostly dry, around September. Tulare, the more impressive of the two lakes, often grew larger than Lake Tahoe, though it was not more than a few feet deep. From year to year, its shoreline would shrink or grow by miles. It was a wonderful sight to see all of that water glimmering amid the merciless dryness of the San Joaquin Valley in summer, and the lakes were a stopover for millions of migrating ducks, geese, and sandhill cranes.