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Mixed legacy mars Melones milestone; Free celebration coincides with event lamenting loss of rafting

Posted by: Maven on April 23, 2009 at 7:26 am

From the Stockton Record:

New Melones Dam is turning 30, an event that will be both celebrated and mourned here in coming weeks.

The celebration will come Saturday, when the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation will admit visitors free to New Melones Lake recreation areas and also open the normally closed road to the dam overlook. A more solemn observance will come June 7, when whitewater recreationists who remember the pre-dam glory days of rafting on the Stanislaus plan to hold an event in Angels Camp at which they will view a historic documentary on the Stanislaus.

The dam itself is vast, standing 625 feet above the Stanislaus River stream bed, and creates California’s fourth largest on-stream reservoir, with a capacity of 2.4 million acre feet. (Only Shasta, Oroville and Trinity are larger.)

But Melones looms even larger in California water history. It drowned what was once the most popular whitewater rafting run in the Western United States, as well as the West’s deepest limestone canyon. And though the lake’s capacity is huge, it has rarely been full and some entities holding water rights on the river, notably Stockton, have rarely received their share, triggering years of lawsuits and bickering over the merits of providing water for fish, farms and cities.

“The battle over construction of New Melones Dam was a signal that the end of the era of large dam construction had come,” according to the official account of the dam posted on a U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Web site.

Read more from Stockton’s Record by clicking here.

April 23, 2009 · Filed Under San Joaquin Valley

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