California Drought: It's Been Real (7/22)

In the the last three years I've had multiple people tell me that California does not have a drought. I have been told that California's water issues are man-made.  I have been told that this is a media misrepresentation.

California has been in drought. You could just look at drought.ca.gov to check, but that doesn't seem to be enough for some people. It's the government, and they feel that the government can't be trusted. So I want to demonstrate the facts as an eye-witness.

First a little background on California hydrology. Much of California's water comes from snowpack in the mountains.  One third of LA's water supply comes from snowpack.

For the last twenty five years I've been hiking out to small alpine lakes in the Sierra Nevadas. These lakes are fed directly by snowpack, and they drain naturally into streams and creeks.  They are unaffected by civil engineering.

Since the drought started, these have been drying up. My most recent trip was in 2020, when I visited Round Lake.  Round lake has a little peninsula at one end, which is a great place to camp. One side is the main body of the lake, and the other is a little cove. The cove itself is several feet deeper than the channel that connects it to main body.

 Here are some photos from my trip.

Looks nice huh? This looks towards the stream that drains the lake on the far side, but

we're not going to look at that. On the far side you can the brown strip of shoreline.

Here's a closer shot.  The water level is five to seven feet low. The plants used to go all the

way to the waterline. They were lush and green. Now they're yellowing.

    

Here's a few steps back. This is the cove I wrote about earlier. 

Here's another view from a bit further back. This used to be underwater the entire year.

And now we turn around, and step up on what was shore, looking at the bottom of the cove.

The red arrows point to plants growing on what was the lake bottom. This has been dry

the entire season. The water never made it over the sand bar in spring.

These red arrows point to a previous year's growth; It's getting close to the size of

the permanent growths further up the shore. The last time the water made it over the sand

bar, the lake never filled. 

It is important, so I'll say it again. This is a natural alpine lake. The water comes from snowmelt. The water leaves through a stream. There are no human constructions on this lake. There is no damn. There are no man-made channels.

These are my photos from my hiking trip in 2020. In 2020 California was in a drought. That is an undeniable fact.

What did your news sources tell you about California's drought?