Hetch Hetchy Restoration Examined in Publication

Rocklin, Calif.- The Sierra College Press has launched its most recent electronic journal issue focused on the possible resurrection and restoration of Yosemite’s Hetch Hetchy Valley.

Volume 6, number 1 of “Snowy Range Reflections” is a comprehensive and close-inspection of the possible removal of O’Shaughnessy Dam in Yosemite National Park and the restoration of “Yosemite’s twin valley” now below hundreds of feet of water and drowned by a reservoir. 

Hetch Hetchy Valley on the Tuolumne River was already within Yosemite National Park when the City of San Francisco succeeded in convincing congress to pass the Raker Act in 1913.  The Act allowed the damming of the free-flowing Tuolumne and the construction of the keystone dam later to be named for the City’s engineer, Michael O’Shaughnessy.

The famed California naturalist John Muir and the fledgling Sierra Club mounted its first major environmental campaign while hundreds of newspaper editorials around the country deplored the potential destruction within the Park.

The newly released Sierra College Press e-Journal publishes eleven new and original articles by authors, engineers, scientists and professors regarding the history of the Hetch Hetchy Project, the feasibility of the removal of O’Shaughnessy Dam and the mechanisms of ecological restoration.  Political realities are reviewed in detail.

John Muir’s great-great-grandson, Robert Hanna, contributed the foreword to this unique collection of articles.

The Sierra College Press publishes books and electronic journals related to the history, natural history and arts within the Sierra Nevada region. The Press co-publishes some of its titles with Heyday Press of Berkeley, California.