Galen Rowell was the first climber to start poking around in the Fjord. He came to Hetch Hetchy in 1969, and in the following three years, with various partners, knocked off three of the biggest rocks above the reservoir: Kolana, Wapama, and Hetch Hetchy Dome. Later, he wrote about the experience for Ascent, portions of which ended up in his book High and Wild. Rowell set the bipolar environmental attitude for Hetch Hetchy climbers to come. Waking from a bad dream during a bivy high on Hetch Hetchy Dome, Rowell looked down at the reservoir and mused. “There lay the valley floor,” he wrote. “But I saw no roads, no buildings, no campfires, or smoke; heard no horns, motors, or voices. Below me was only a ‘narrow body of monotonous water’ … I repeated my environmental catechism: Yosemite was saved; Hetch Hetchy was ruined for all time. It had a hollow ring.”
On the one hand, the reservoir had spared Hetch Hetchy from becoming another Yosemite Valley. On the other, damming a valley in a national park was a colossal mistake, akin — as Rowell put it — to a Greek tragedy. The knotty ironies and questions go even deeper. Did cutting off the valley at the knees, so to speak, with an ever-present flood make Hetch Hetchy more of a wilderness setting? Had the dam’s waters destroyed the valley or were they actually preserving it for a time when we would have the better environmental sense to care for it?
Dams are not forever. Like scientists, climbers are well attuned to the differences between human time and geologic time. Mostly, we just try to avoid the intersection between the two, hollering down Rock! while enjoying our miniscule slice of time between epochs. Hetch Hetchy took millions of years of geologic engineering. The O’Shaughnessy Dam, a marvel of engineering in itself, took 20 years to complete. Do the math: Hetch Hetchy’s valley will one day return.
Yet, even now there is a groundswell of interest in speeding up the process. As we speak, California “governorator” Arnold Schwarzenegger is looking at recent studies by the University of California at Davis, as well as Environmental Defense and Restore Hetch Hetchy. All three studies offer a workable alternative to unplugging the dam without adverse loss of water or power to San Francisco and surrounding areas. The City, despite its otherwise green record of recycling programs and plans to turn restaurant grease into biofuel for municipal buses, strongly opposes the plan.