Since the dam was built, there have been folks that wanted to get rid of it. Looks like another effort is underway. I hope they succeed, as I'd like to walk with my grandkids down that valley and try to imagine what it was like when Muir was there. Not to mention, it is one of the crown jewels of our national park system. _________________ An Effort to Undo an Old Reservoir in Yosemite By DEAN E. MURPHY, New York Times YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK, Calif., Oct. 8 — An old black and white photograph hangs behind the bar at the Evergreen Lodge, a rustic roadside establishment just outside this park. It shows wildflowers dancing in the thick grass. A river glides between a pair of imposing granite walls. To visitors here, the scene from 1914 looks instantly familiar. "People think it is Yosemite Valley," said Dan Braun, the lodge's proprietor. "But it is not. They have no idea that Hetch Hetchy looked like that, too." For most of the past century, the Hetch Hetchy Valley, 15 miles north of its more famous and bigger sibling within the park, has served as a 300-foot-deep bathtub holding melted snow from the High Sierra for people and businesses in San Francisco and its suburbs. Now a group of environmentalists wants to drain the eight-mile-long reservoir and restore the valley to what John Muir once described as a "grand landscape garden, one of nature's rarest and most precious mountain temples." The proposal has generated excitement among employees of the national park, consternation among San Francisco's water interests and political feuding between the environmentalists and City Hall. A citywide ballot measure in November calls for raising $1.6 billion to improve the Hetch Hetchy water delivery system, which several studies have shown to be outdated and vulnerable to a big earthquake, but environmentalists are opposing it. The environmentalists want to dismantle the 80-year-old O'Shaughnessy Dam on the Tuolumne River and release the 117 billion gallons of water behind it in the Hetch Hetchy Valley. More than 1,900 acres of submerged valley floor would be uncovered, an area that Muir liked to call the "Tuolumne Yosemite." "People say this is a radical idea, but wasn't it a radical idea to put a dam in a national park?" said Ron Good, executive director of Restore Hetch Hetchy, which was formed to raise money and support for the restoration plan. "Imagine the opportunity we have to allow nature to recreate another Yosemite Valley." To start, the environmentalists are thinking small and are not proposing any specific way of replacing the reservoir. Instead, they have asked San Francisco to help pay for a study to determine the cost of the proposal and to come up with alternatives — perhaps building or expanding reservoirs or using aquifers. The study would also seek a replacement for the hydroelectric power generated by the system. Mr. Good and the other proponents say they do not want to take water or power away from San Francisco, but rather rework the network "so it is a win-win for everyone." So far the city has refused. But San Francisco's top water official, Patricia E. Martel, said the door was not entirely closed, even though she and many other officials consider the idea far-fetched and suspect it would cost billions of dollars. Ms. Martel, who is general manager of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, said the agency would cooperate with a study that was paid for and undertaken by some other organization. She also said the general notion of replacing the reservoir would be explored in environmental reviews that would soon be needed as part of repairs and upgrades planned for the system. "We are willing to cooperate with the environmental groups, but we are not willing to take the lead and say our mission is to restore Hetch Hetchy," Ms. Martel said. "We don't believe we have a requirement to fund that study." Another leading water official, Art Jensen, also expressed willingness to consider the proposal. Mr. Jensen is general manager of the San Francisco Bay Area Water Users Association, which represents 29 cities, water districts and a private water company that buy Hetch Hetchy water from San Francisco. "It is a fascinating idea," Mr. Jensen said. "I would like to think I have an open mind and never turn my back on a fascinating idea." In the old days, Hetch Hetchy — it was named by the Ahwahneechee and Paiute Indians for the type of grass that once grew there — was a breathtaking glacier-carved valley in a newly established national park, not unlike Yosemite along the Merced River. But Congress voted in 1913 to allow San Francisco, 160 miles to the west, to flood the valley in an effort to secure a reliable water supply. Richard W. Sellars, a longtime National Park Service historian, describes the decision as "the most famous and egregious invasion of a national park." Muir was a fierce opponent of the reservoir, and was said to have died of a broken heart in 1914 after failing to block it. "Dam Hetch Hetchy!" he wrote in his book "The Yosemite." "As well dam for water-tanks the people's cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man." Among Restore Hetch Hetchy's supporters is Donald P. Hodel, the former secretary of the interior under President Ronald Reagan, who floated a similar restoration proposal in the late 1980's. Though the dismantling of productive dams is not common practice, Mr. Hodel said he got the idea from Rocky Mountain National Park, where a damaged dam was taken down a decade ago. Since then, there have been other dismantling of dams, especially ones that interfered with fisheries. Like Muir before him, Mr. Hodel was silenced by powerful water interests. Mr. Hodel said he had little in common with the new group pushing for the Hetch Hetchy study, but he was willing to lend his name to the cause because he still believed in it. He also remained incensed at what he described as the duplicity of many San Franciscans. They are known to champion environmental causes, he said, but seem blind to the destructiveness of their own water policies. "All of the arguments made against a study of Hetch Hetchy were about San Francisco's birthright to flood that valley — that it is our vested economic right," Mr. Hodel said in telephone interview from Colorado, where he lives in semi-retirement. "Those are the same arguments made by slaveholders in opposition to abolition." Mr. Hodel was especially critical of Senator Dianne Feinstein, who was instrumental in sinking his proposal when she was mayor of San Francisco and a fierce opponent of any tinkering with the reservoir. "You would think she would say, `Let's look at the facts, let's look at the merits of this,' " he said. "But she had determined to her satisfaction that it would never work and it was unsuitable." Ms. Feinstein said that whether mayor or senator, the idea of tearing down the O'Shaughnessy Dam looked the same to her. "It makes no sense to destroy the source of the highest-quality drinking water around," Senator Feinstein said. The Hetch Hetchy environmentalists said their overall strategy was to persuade and cajole, but they have gotten off to a rocky start with officials by taking a stance against the November ballot measure. The measure, Proposition A, would allow the city to borrow $1.6 billion to help pay for about $3.6 billion in repairs and seismic improvements to the Hetch Hetchy water delivery system. The system brings water from the valley through 280 miles of pipes and 60 miles of tunnels to about 800,000 people in San Francisco and 1.6 million in its suburbs. The proposition is supported by the San Francisco water utility, Senator Feinstein, Mayor Willie L. Brown and a majority of the city's usually fractious Board of Supervisors. Ms. Martel, the utility's general manager, said large stretches of pipeline are more than 75 years old and desperately need to be replaced. But A. Spreck Rosekrans, a senior analyst with Environmental Defense, one of the groups behind the effort to restore the Hetch Hetchy Valley, said that with billions of dollars in improvements ready to be spent, the moment was right to re-think the entire system. Environmental Defense and the Planning and Conservation League wrote to city officials asking them to study the feasibility of restoring Hetch Hetchy Valley. When the officials balked, the groups vowed to fight Proposition A. Other influential environmental organizations, including the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council, have joined in criticizing the proposition. Win or lose on Proposition A, Mr. Rosekrans said the struggle for Hetch Hetchy had only begun. Because of the great interest in national parks around the country, and the particular popularity of Yosemite, Restore Hetch Hetchy is looking to support from outside California to counter and eventually overwhelm the local resistance. In the meantime, Mr. Good lectures to civic and community groups and leads interpretive tours around the reservoir, where he suggests the submerged rocks "are holding their breath" and the Tuolumne River is "crying out for life again." Standing atop the 312-foot-high concrete dam, water sprinkling from two eyelets behind him, Mr. Good quoted Muir as a source of the environmentalists' resolve: "Imagine yourself in Hetch Hetchy on a sunny day in June, standing waist-deep in grass and flowers as I have often stood, while the great pines sway dreamily with scarcely perceptible motion."
