A lawsuit to get Hetch Hetchy back?

Sitting in a Fresno coffee shop just after the Nov. 6 election, I heard a conversation that was just too delicious to ignore. I'm paid to be nosy anyway. And it was a pubic place.

OK, so I felt like I was peeping.

But this was just too good. Two guys -- I'm sure they were lawyers -- talked about San Francisco voters rejecting a study to restore Hetch Hetchy in Yosemite National Park.

To me, it was no surprise -- the vote, not the conversation. SF has used water from Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in the national park for nearly a century now. Why should they vote to give it back and pay higher rates for water from a lower reservoir.

Who volunteers for something like that?

It's a volatile subject and far more complex than I just stated it, but you get the picture. The only upside for SF would be a claim to be top greenies in the country. Well, that didn't happen. 

You need to know Hetch Hetchy bitterness runs very deep among some environmentalists. This is a gorgeous glacial valley filled with Tuolumne River water. San Francisco gets some of the purest big-city water in the country. It's a stinging environmental loss that has festered a long, long time.

You need to put that emotion in context every time you talk about Hetch Hetchy. Now, I'll play back the conversation from memory.

Says one lawyer: “Well, I’m not surprised San Francisco turned it down. Do you think people living here would vote to even consider restoring the San Joaquin River?”

Answers the other: “No, but …”

“Do you think Los Angeles would vote to restore the Owens Valley?”

“No, but there are big differences between those examples and San Francisco," says the second guy. "The San Joaquin is a mess downstream. It needs fresh water. It needs to be restored.

"And LA stole the Owens Valley water. People in the Owens Valley were put out of business over it. There’s no comparison to Hetch Hetchy.”

“You don’t think Hetch Hetchy damaged anything?” asks the first guy.

“Not legally. Show me the damaged party, and we can suggest they file suit. The San Joaquin River and the Owens Valley were both settled by lawsuits. I don’t see a lawsuit here.”

First guy: “But don’t you think people have a right to see Hetch Hetchy Valley? It’s a national park, for crying out loud. People are fighting mad about it.”

Second guy: “I’m with San Francisco on this one.”

"So the public's right to see that valley doesn't matter? We need a lawsuit to restore something important to us?”

“Yeah.”

"Even something as big as a glacial valley that the whole world would see?"

"Yeah. And, yeah. You need a lawsuit."

Yeah. Pretty much.

Darwin Canyon, a mysterious, jagged, glacial countryside

This is Darwin Canyon, just below Mendel Glacier in the Southern Sierra. We came through here on our way to look for ice mummies on Mendel, which is several hundred feet -- maybe 1,000 feet -- above this canyon.

It's in my top five Sierra destinations because you can't here without a lot of work. Stark, wind-blown, jagged. We camped next to a glacial tarn near these others. They are ice-cold, beautiful and pure. It's a granite paradise on the trail less traveled. And that's because there is no trail to this spot.

You have to love this for the sheer size and primitive surroundings. We moved up and down canyon head walls that were more up and down than anything else. The Southern Sierra is breathtaking. We slept at about 11,500 feet -- an elevation where us flatlanders have trouble breathing the first night. We scrambled past house-sized boulders strewn all around as glaciers retreated 12,000 years ago.

 I pitched my small tent on a little ledge above the tarn. Turns out, I was on someone's turf -- a pika who let me know about it for hours. Whistling and carrying on. These little mouse-like critters with big ears are slowly running out of high country to live as the climate warms up.

Among the people who work on California water issues, I wonder how many have come up to these places. Climate change will take its toll up. Up here in the subalpine, the little glaciers will melt. There will be less snow. But it will remain the last stronghold for the snowpack, which provides more than two-thirds of California's summer stash of water.

By the way, we climbed up the rocky moraine, picking our way through Class 3 bouldering to get onto Mendel Glacier, one of the spookiest places I've ever hiked. We didn't find ice mummies from that ill-fated 1942 crash. But was saw engine parts, a wing and plenty of debris that was surfacing from the melting glacier above. We scrambled the next day over the Sierra crest in a hail storm and went back to our lives. But we will not soon forget this place.

Huntington Lake in February

You need snowshoes to get here, but it's really one of the nicest hikes I've ever had.

I did it regularly over the last decade. I used to drop my son off at Sierra Summit so he could snowboard with his friends all day. Then I'd walk across Highway 168 and start down the snowy access road to Huntington Lake.

 In late December, January and most of February, the snow is fluffy and fresh. It doesn't turn firm -- Sierra cement, as it's called -- until March and April.

 The snowshoes help you just float over the road and down to what would be the water's edge in summer. But the lake is drastically lower in winter.

 This is a hydroelectric lake, part of Southern California Edison Co.'s chain of lakes up here. You can see the stumps of red fir and lodgepole pine in the lake bottom. This is not a natural lake, but it's certainly part of California's water picture. Hydro power is an important part of the state's energy portfolio.

 Sitting on a snowy edge of a rock, listening to Big Creek flow into the lake, I once drifted to sleep early one afternoon and a snow shower woke me. There's nothing like waking up in the middle of silence by the sound of little popcorn snow balls pelting you. As the squall line moved in above the western ridge, I strapped the snowshoes back on and made my way to Sierra Summit.

It's a short walk. The elevation is about 7,000 feet. It's perfect for me what I'm feeling like I need to get out of the city for a day.

Thousand Island Lake, at 10,000 feet

My top five Sierra destinations are going to be published here over the next few weeks. They all have something to do with water. Really, there is very little in the Sierra that does not have anything to do with water.

 The picks are in no particular order. The first one is a sentimental favorite. It's in the photo above: Thousand Island Lake.

 It's sentimental for me because it is the headwaters of the San Joaquin River main stem. From here, the river flows more than 350 miles to the Bay-Delta and Pacific Ocean.

 The headwaters was so compelling for me when I wrote a 14-page section about the San Joaquin's revival. The section came out in 1999. The restoration agreement was signed in 2006. I was a tad premature, but the story was correct.

 This place is so gorgeous. About 10,000 feet, it is one of the best hikes I've ever experienced in the Sierra. We saw it during a backpacking trip that started at Red's Meadow and ended at Tuolumne Meadows in Yosemite National Park.

It's not far from Rainbow Fall, another wonderful Sierra landmark associated with the San Joaquin River. While the restoration gets most of the media attention, the water comes from up here. Without this part of the equation, there is no multibillion-dollar farming industry and no downstream debate about what has happened since Friant Dam was built in the 1940s.

When it starts to look like this in Yosemite...

This is the view from Sentinel Dome above Yosemite Valley this week. Half Dome is always the landmark you want in the middle of these shots. Everybody knows what it looks like.

But not everybody understands how important it is to see the dome covered with snow. It's an indicator of the Sierra snowpack. If you don't see snow up there most of the winter, you've got a water problem.

And if you followed the webcam that takes these photos, you know we have a problem. Most of November, December and January, there was no snow up there. The snowpack stands at about a quarter of the April 1 average.

The state had a monster year last winter, so it's not a statewide emergency yet. The reservoirs are still fairly full. That's why people aren't making a scene about this yet. But they will worry next fall. A second dry year will make life very difficult for farmers, cities, industries and hydroelectric power producers.

One more time: Look out across the rooftop of California in the background of this photo. That's where your water comes from. More than half of the state's water supply melts slowly and thunders through these granite canyons down to 37 million people.

No place like this on Earth in deep winter

When I saw this photo a few years ago, I remembered scenes in Yosemite Valley like this from the 1990s when I started covering Yosemite National Park as a beat for The Fresno Bee. It's the best place on Earth in deep winter. This photo tells you why.

The photographer, Kenny Karst, works for park concession, but not as a photographer. He was head of the public relations department when he took this shot. I think his photo work is really nice.

Anyway, Yosemite Valley is fascinating in winter. There are very few tourists in the valley when it snows like this. Sometimes the temperature drops into the teens after a big storm, and it really is a slice of icy heaven.

Surrounded by the ancient, granite cliffs, you can sense what it was like when this valley was filled with ice during glacial times. The largest glacier in the Sierra was in the next watershed north of Yosemite Valley. It's called Hetch Hetchy Valley on the Tuolumne River.

We'll talk a little more about the dam and the reservoir stashed in Hetch Hetchy.

Might not need to worry about snow patches this August

Last August, there was still snow all over the place in the high Sierra. This photo was in the Southern Sierra, just east of the crest.

Trust me, unless the winter gets rolling a little bit soon, this snow patch will not be around.

The hiker's name is Tim Crosse, a 20-something guy who likes seeing nature up close. By the time we were finished with this backpack, he knew what a Sierra glacier looked like. He had listened to the gentle drip at night as the snow and ice melted. He drank ice-cold water from a glacial tarn.

He's one of those youngsters who likes to check things out before he makes decisions -- like casting a vote. I won't get into the connection between water and California voting. That's a subject for a different blog.

Back to the high Sierra, I think it's really important to show the next generation what's up here and connect the dots. I know plenty of people, young and old, whose world is inside four walls. That was true for me when I was 20 years old.

I'll have a few more blogs soon about seeing California up close. And you don't have to put your phone on vibrate. I'm hoping to get you into places where there is no cell coverage.

Southern Sierra may hold a climate key

I'm heading again into the glacier belt in the Sierra Nevada to get a closer look at where California's water starts.

I'm not saying exactly where I'm going yet, but you will definitely recognize it a lot easier than the photograph I've loaded with this blog item. The photo was taken in August at Dusy Basin in Kings Canyon National Park.

The glacial wilderness above 10,000 feet in the Sierra is often quite arid during the warmer months. But the Southern Sierra is the highest part of the mountain range. The snow tends to stick around all season long on many years, no matter what's going on elsewhere.

What does that mean for California as the planet warms?

I asked a fishery biologist who has had a lot of influence around the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. Peter Moyle told me these wind-blown plateaus and peaks may be the last place where a decent snowpack remains in the future.

And that means what to the state? Remember, there are two rivers flowing to the delta. The vastly more important Sacramento River carries a lot more water, while the San Joaquin is considered a kind of murky mess.

But a restored San Joaquin with real snowpack 70 years from now might become a more important piece for conservation.

More later. And, by the way, I've decided not to take experts with me this year. Instead, I'm going with a fresh-faced young man who represents our future. Again, stay tuned.