Stanislaus National Forest: Sonora Pass, Hetch Hetchy's Shadow, and the Miwok Corridor

Sonora Pass at nine thousand six hundred twenty-four feet is the highest highway pass in the northern Sierra, a tight, switchbacking road that closes each winter and requires nerves on the steep eastern descent even in summer. The Stanislaus National Forest wraps around it: approximately nine hundred thousand acres of central Sierra terrain running from the San Joaquin Valley foothills to the Alpine County border, a forest that includes the Emigrant Wilderness, the Carson-Iceberg Wilderness, and the Mokelumne Wilderness in its northern reaches.

The Tuolumne and Stanislaus rivers rise in this forest. Both were dammed. The Tuolumne feeds Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, which supplies drinking water to San Francisco from a valley that John Muir spent years arguing should be preserved alongside Yosemite Valley. Muir lost. Hetch Hetchy was flooded in nineteen twenty-three. The dam that created it, the O'Shaughnessy Dam, sits at the western boundary of Yosemite National Park, which means that San Francisco's water supply flows from inside a national park. That arrangement has never been reversed despite periodic political movements to restore the valley.

The Miwok and Yokuts peoples whose ancestors occupied this forest's foothill and mountain zones are represented today by several federally recognized tribal governments in the Sierra foothills, including the Tuolumne Band of Me-Wuk Indians, who maintain their rancheria near Sonora. The Tuolumne River canyon and the pine forests along its upper reaches were seasonal hunting and gathering grounds long before the gold rush mining economy carved up the streambeds. The river carried that name before any miner arrived. It was a Miwok name.