Have you ever wanted to spend the night at Hetch Hetchy? Watch the sun set down the Tuolumne River canyon? Or watch it rise over Kolana Rock while you’re sipping your morning coffee?
Restore Hetch Hetchy is working with the National Park Service on improving access of all kinds. We believe visitors should be able to spend the night at Hetch Hetchy – as Congress expected when it allowed San Francisco to build a dam in the valley.
There are three ways for visitors to spend the night at Hetch Hetchy. For most people, however, none are very practical.
There is a campground at Hetch Hetchy. But you can only stay there if you are leaving for or returning from a backpacking trip. If you simply want to camp overnight, you are out of luck. Also, the campground is very hot in summer as there is no shade. Restore Hetch Hetchy believes the campsite should be improved and open all all visitors.
Bivouac on the side of a cliff? Another option is to climb 1000 feet up a granite wall, perhaps Hetch Hetchy Dome, as Timmy O’Neill and Lucho Rivera did while filming Finding Hetch Hetchy (full video available online soon). You can’t beat the view. Some of us, however, might find it a bit hard to relax up there.
The third option (if you’re ‘connected”) is to stay in San Francisco’s Chalet or nearby cabins. There’s room for 30 or so. The facilities are rustic but functional. They look great. But there is a catch. The cabins are run by San Francisco, and the City’s website states “All registrants are subject to confirmation of eligibility by San Francisco Public Utilities Commission staff.” The list of categories of eligible visitors may not include anyone who overtly supports restoration. We do, however, know of a few supporters who have stayed at the Chalet and cabins.
Seriously, it’s an affront to the purpose of a national park that basic camping is not allowed but friends of San Francisco City Hall can book a cabin. We are asking the National Park Service to improve access at Hetch Hetchy to everyone.
NEW signs direct visitors to Hetch Hetchy – Yippee!
We’re pleased as punch to see the new signs on highway 120 which highlight Yosemite National Park’s Hetch Hetchy Entrance. After Restore Hetch Hetchy encouraged National Park Service to OK the design, Caltrans was happy to install the signs.
The signs are on both the eastbound and westbound lanes of Highway 120, both located just outside Yosemite’s Big Oak Flat entrance. The eastbound sign instructs visitors that Yosemite Valley can be reached by traveling 25 miles straight ahead on Highway 120 or the Hetch Hetchy Entrance can be reached by turning left and traveling 9 miles on the Evergreen Road.
Perhaps some travelers waiting in the long lines that often form at the Big Oak Flat Entrance will decide to make that left hand turn and explore Hetch Hetchy – we hope they do.
Photos: Peter Van Kuran
The westbound sign will catch the attention of visitors leaving the national park through the Big Oak Flat gate and show them that the Evergreen Road leads to another park entrance. The sign will encourage some people to take a side trip, either on the spur of the moment or at a later date.
We’re pleased. We want people to travel to Hetch Hetchy – to see its beauty, to learn its story, and to advocate for restoration.
After reading coverage of the connection between wastewater treatment plants and the excess concentrations of phosphorus and nitrogen in the Bay that led to the ongoing toxic algal bloom and talking with scientists at the SF Baykeeper, it seemed important to submit last week’s blog as an editorial opinion to the San Francisco Chronicle.
A few things were changed form the blog. First, we added the role of phosphorus – it and nitrogen are both harmful in these large doses. We also decreased the emphasis on San Francisco’s southeast plant, as there are nine water treatment plants south of the Bay Bridge – all of which are culprits to varying degrees (see chart).
Not also that such an algal bloom has been predictable as noted in “Nutrient Status of San Francisco Bay and Its Management Implications (James E. Cloern et al, 2021): “… our assessment includes reasons for concern: nitrogen and phosphorus concentrations higher than those in other estuaries impaired by nutrient pollution, chronic presences of multiple algal toxins, a recent increase of primary production, and projected future hydroclimatic conditions that could increase the magnitude and frequency of algal blooms.”
Please consider signing the Baykeeper’s petition to San Francisco Mayor London Breed, asking that she pursue water recycling. We have signed and will be encouraging other communities to do so as well.
There are many reasons that San Francisco, like other water agencies, will be fundamentally changing in years to come. Recycling, made possible with advanced technology including nanofiltration, provides reliable supplies and reduces pollution. It’s time has come.
Recycling will also reduce San Francisco’s reliance on the Tuolumne River and could replace the water storage function of Hetch Hetchy Reservoir. The time has also come to give Yosemite’s Hetch Hetchy Valley back to the people.
San Francisco Bay, Algal Blooms and Water Management
San Francisco Bay is sick this summer. A toxic algae bloom is happening across the Bay, with numerous reports of dead fish. Local environmental groups seeking to protect the Bay say the existing condition of the Bay is unprecedented and a result of outdated discharge policies and regulations. Some of the largest discharges into the Bay come from wastewater treatment plants operated by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, the East Bay Municipal Utility District and others.
Lake Merritt in downtown Oakland is connected to the bay. Today it is full of dead fish.
Wastewater reform in the Bay Area should drive water reform as it has elsewhere. Recycling wastewater into a potable supply could eliminate tons upon tons of nitrogen that now enter the Bay daily in the form of partially treated sewage. Should. Whether this algae bloom will soon be a forgotten moment in the history of the Bay, or a tipping point that leads to stronger protections for the Bay, remains to be seen. But the ongoing incident and the follow-up findings are very much worth watching.
At the moment, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission has no plans to modernize its primary wastewater plant and purify the resource into a potable supply for its service area. Its discharge permit issued in 2019 allows it to do so. But these permit conditions are subject to change with new and better science.
Algae blooms are fueled by two primary ingredients. One is higher temperatures, which seems a guarantee going forward. Another is nitrogen. All accounts suggest that San Francisco Bay is artificially loaded with high levels of nitrogen due to the wastewater discharges of San Francisco and other communities surrounding the Bay. The Regional Water Quality Control Board of the San Francisco Bay Region has allowed these discharges to continue based on what it has considered to be insufficient science to justify upgrades at the wastewater facilities.
The city of San Diego provides a notable case in point when the regulators finally decide that is time to end decades-long discharge practices and begin cleaning up one’s proverbial act. San Diego had a choice: Spend considerable money to clean up the wastewater before sending it to the Pacific Ocean. Or spend an increment more to convert it into a resilient new water supply.
Concern for the health of its beaches helped drive the Pure Water San Diego program to recycle wastewater.
Pure Water San Diego is now in the process of converting its wastewater stream into more than a third of its water supply upon buildout. The city of Los Angeles isn’t far behind with a similar project known as Operation Next. The same holds true for the rest of Los Angeles County with Pure Water Southern California, via a partnership with the Metropolitan Water District. Orange County is already there.
If this algae bloom in San Francisco Bay and other science ultimately prompts our regional water board to revise discharge permits to prohibit today’s partially treated sewage from entering tomorrow’s Bay, San Francisco and many other dischargers will face the same question:
Is wastewater something to forever get rid of?
Or is it something to use over and over again?
San Francisco’s Southeast Wastewater Facility, according to its web site, discharges about 57 million gallons of wastewater into San Francisco Bay every day. San Franciscans, meanwhile, consume about 82 million gallons every day. A gallon of purified wastewater does not produce a gallon of potable water. But it gives you a sense of just how massive this resource potentially is for water supply.
The health of San Francisco Bay is a core issue for millions of us who love it and don’t want to harm it.
“Pure Water San Francisco” and similar potable reuse projects, if they ever come to pass, would revolutionize the region’s water management. Options scarcely considered by today’s water leaders will be well within the mainstream by their successors tomorrow.
The thrill of whitewater: A dory and its passengers run the Grand Canyon’s Crystal Rapid in 1983, a high water year when unexpected late snowmelt threatened to destroy Glen Canyon Dam.
For almost 100 years, scientists, water agencies and environmentalists have known that the status quo on the Colorado River is not sustainable. Over the last two decades, population growth and especially low runoff have exacerbated an already untenable situation.
The dire conditions and impending changes in the Colorado basin are all over the news. The U.S. government and the many water agencies involved are negotiating future management decisions. Everyone will be doing some serious belt-tightening; some more so than others.
How did we get here?
The Colorado River Compact(aka the Law of the River) was signed in 1922 after an uncommonly wet 16-year period, when the river’s average annual flow measured 18.0 million acre-feet (18.0 MAF). (A single family home might use 1/2 an acre-foot per year).
The Compact’s hallowed text apportioned 15 MAF of river flow among 7 southwestern states (see below). An additional 1.5 MAF per year would be be provided to Mexico. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation built huge storage reservoirs, including Lake Mead (holding up to 29 MAF behind Hoover Dam) in 1936 and Lake Powell (holding up to 24 MAF behind Glen Canyon Dam) in 1963, which together lose about 1 MAF to evaporation. So the total use of the Colorado’s flow plus expected evaporation would be about 17.5 MAF
The Colorado has long been fully subscribed – it has been many decades since its flows reached the Gulf of California.
Between 1922 and 1999, however, Colorado River flows averaged only 14.6 MAF. Oops.
It’s surprising that the current crisis did not occur sooner. But some of the States were not using their full entitlements during the mid 20th century. And, as diversions increased at the end of the 20th century, there were a series of very wet years in the early 1980’s and late 1990’s (in 1983, high water threatened Glen Canyon dam – see the Bureau’s video or better yet read “The Emerald Mile”).
In the 21st century, however, there have been few high water years. In fact, the river’s flow has dropped further – to only 12.2 MAF. The system has been relying on withdrawing water stored in Lakes Powell and Mead. In 1999, these two mega-reservoirs held close to 50 MAF; today they are down to 20 MAF – a decrease of 60%
Whether the recent decline is the natural hydrologic cycle or has been caused by climate change is open to debate. What is not debatable is that cities and farms that depend on the Colorado must make major adjustments.
We are all concerned about water in the west. The situation at Hetch Hetchy is very different in that the Tuolumne River is a stream that feeds the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta – a system that depends on water going out to sea, not only to sustain the environment but also to allow transport of water within California from the wetter north to cities and farms in the south.
Restore Hetch Hetchy does not take a position on how divide Tuolumne River’s water between diversions to the Bay Area, supply for farms in Turlock and Modesto and downstream flow to the Delta. We are committed, however, to replacing the storage that the O’Shaughnessy Dam provides so Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National park can be restored to its natural splendor.
