The Kern River and the Water That Shapes the Valley

The Kern River rises in the southern Sierra Nevada near Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the contiguous United States, and descends roughly one hundred and sixty miles through two distinct personalities before it arrives at the valley floor near Bakersfield. In its upper reaches, through the Kern River Canyon, it is one of the most demanding whitewater rivers in California: a canyon nicknamed the Killer Kern for the lives it has claimed, mostly from swimmers and waders who underestimated the snowmelt current in spring and early summer. A sign at the mouth of the canyon keeps a running tally of deaths since nineteen sixty-eight. The number is specific and not small.

At Bakersfield, the river changes. The canyon opens onto the valley floor, the gradient flattens, and what was a roaring mountain river becomes, in the irrigated portions of Kern County, a managed agricultural asset. Canal diversion infrastructure developed over many decades by early water rights holders, and later the Kern County Land Company, has distributed the river's flow across an enormous agricultural network. The canals run for miles in every direction from the river's lower course, and the farms they water produce the carrots, cotton, citrus, almonds, and other commodities that make Kern County among the highest-value agricultural producers in California.

In drought years and in the drier decades that climate modeling suggests are coming, the Kern River delivers less water than the canals were designed to carry. The snowpack that feeds the river varies enormously year to year, and the legal and administrative structure governing who gets how much water in what sequence is, in the estimation of most water lawyers who work in this valley, one of the most complicated documents in the history of California water rights.

The river that starts at the Sierra crest and ends in the almond orchards south of Bakersfield is the same water doing different things at different altitudes. The canyon where people drown and the fields where water is metered by the acre-foot are connected by gravity and the same geography that Colonel Baker found in the eighteen sixties when he stopped at the place where the river came out of the mountains and decided to cut hay.