The folklore has it that early travelers used to be able to cross Sierra Nevada rivers by walking across on the backs of spawning salmon. And the foremost expression of that ecological fertility were the Central Valley's majestic salmon runs. ![]() It was the second-largest river entering the Pacific in the Lower 48, after the Columbia, and it was as fertile and productive as a huge, wild river system can be. The Sacramento-San Joaquin river system, in other words, was truly a thing to behold. As they shrank under the summer sun, vast plains of riparian wetlands and wildflowers took their place. In wet years the waters would flood the Central Valley, creating vast inland seas where Sacramento and Stockton now sit. Imagine, for instance, an unregulated, un-diked Bay and Delta, full of water from a dozen major undammed rivers.īefore 1860, all the rain and snow that fell in a watershed of 58,000 square miles - more than a third of California - would make its way to the Delta, and then the Bay, and then the Pacific, without so much as a concrete curb to slow it down. So much change has come to California in the last 150 years that it's sometimes hard to picture the state's previous natural landscape. ![]() ![]() Stay with /baydelta for all the project's stories. And at its core is the Sacramento-San Joaquin Bay Delta. An explanatory series focusing on one of the most complex issues facing California: water sharing.
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