The Drowning of Hetch Hetchy
Near Groveland, California
About twenty miles east of Groveland, the Tuolumne River once ran through a granite canyon that John Muir and the Sierra Club considered the equal of Yosemite Valley in its beauty. The valley was called Hetch Hetchy. The United States government thought otherwise.
After the San Francisco earthquake and fire of nineteen oh six left the city dependent on a water system that had failed catastrophically, the city renewed its campaign to dam the Tuolumne River at Hetch Hetchy and create a reservoir inside Yosemite National Park. The fight that followed was one of the first great environmental battles in American history. John Muir wrote articles and letters and testified before Congress arguing that a national park was a place held sacred from development, that to dam Hetch Hetchy was to establish that no protected land was truly safe.
Gifford Pinchot, head of the Forest Service and an advocate of managed resource use, supported the dam. In nineteen thirteen, Congress passed the Raker Act, authorizing the project over the objections of the conservation movement. Muir called it the death of Hetch Hetchy.
He died the following year. Work on the project began in nineteen fourteen, and the dam itself was built between nineteen nineteen and nineteen twenty-three. The reservoir that fills the canyon today supplies water and hydroelectric power to San Francisco.
The debate Hetch Hetchy provoked helped establish the idea that national parks deserve protection from even federally approved development, a principle that has been tested many times since and never overridden in quite the same way.
