Plumas National Forest: Feather River Canyon and the Water PG&E Built Its Empire On

The Feather River Canyon is one of the most dramatic gorges in California, a thousand-foot-deep slot through the Sierra Nevada foothills where the Western Pacific Railroad built its mainline in nineteen oh nine, following a route that the local Maidu had known for centuries and that engineers had declared impractical until they actually walked it. The railroad is still there. The canyon is the reason Interstate Seventy follows the Sierra to the north, not through here. This was the harder way, and the railroad took it because it was the only mountain crossing low enough to allow a continuous grade.

The Plumas National Forest surrounds the canyon and the headwaters of the Feather River, approximately one point two million acres of mid-elevation Sierra forest, oak woodland, and high meadow in Plumas and Butte counties. But what defines this forest economically and hydrologically is not timber. It is water.

Pacific Gas and Electric built its hydroelectric empire in these drainages across the first half of the twentieth century. Lake Almanor, the largest reservoir in the Plumas forest, was created when Great Western Power, later absorbed into Pacific Gas and Electric, built the Big Meadows Dam in nineteen fourteen, flooding a valley the Maidu had occupied for thousands of years. The Maidu Summer Institute and the Roundhouse Council have documented the cultural loss represented by that flooding, which erased village sites, ceremonial grounds, and burial areas beneath water that now generates electricity for the grid. PG&E controls most of the significant water storage in the upper Feather River basin. That control, locked into federal licenses that required periodic renewal, became a point of extended legal negotiation with the Maidu over land and cultural rights in the twenty-first century.

The canyon you may be driving alongside is genuinely spectacular. What you are also looking at is the infrastructure of someone else's power.