Unplugging the dam has sparked a fierce debate, reigniting Muir’s last stand. Admittedly, it won’t be easy or cheap. Estimates vary depending on whom you talk to, but somewhere in the billions of dollars is a good place to start.
“The naysayers say we have a mountain to climb,” says Ron Good, executive director of Restore Hetch Hetchy (hetchhetchy.org). “I respond by saying we have some of the best climbers in the world on our team. [Yvon Chouinard is on their advisory committee, and the late climber, conservationist, and former Sierra Club Executive Director David Brower was on the founding board of directors.] People ask me if I think it’s a radical idea to tear down the dam and restore Hetch Hetchy. Well, wasn’t it a radical idea to put a dam within a national park?”
In a nutshell, the idea would be to enlarge the existing downstream dam on the Tuolumne River, the Don Pedro Reservoir, and the Calaveras Reservoir in the Bay Area. As San Francisco prepares to spend $4.5 billion for capital improvements on the Hetch Hetchy reservoir’s 162 miles of leaky old pipeline and infrastructure in the near future, advocates for tearing down the dam say the time to start acting on a restoration project is now.
Good and others believe that when the dam is unplugged, Hetch Hetchy can be brought back to life in a responsible manner, without the lodges, cabins, tours buses, curio shops, and overcrowded campgrounds that plague Yosemite. There’s no doubt a restored Hetch Hetchy Valley would attract thousands of tourists, taking some of the heat off that overcrowded other valley. Ultimately, the park service would be charged with creating and maintaining a re-established Hetch Hetchy, but Good believes the valley can be restored with a 21st century environmental lens rather than the late-nineteenth and early 20th century mindset that created modern Yosemite.
Restore Hetch Hetchy’s feasibility study offers two visions for how to turn the reservoir “back to nature.” One would be simply to let nature take its course. The other is to encourage the growth of native grasses, shrubs, trees, and even lichen on the granite based on early photographs and Muir’s extensive writings.