La Grange to Turlock State Recreation Area (leg 3)

As soon as we arrived a put-in, I ventured out onto the rusty Old La Grange bridge, now unfit for cars, serving as a pedestrian crossing only, and peered down into the clear, clean water below. This was it - the Tuolumne below Don Pedro - and I was surprised to see what looked like a healthy flow and vibrant riparian corridor. Swallows circled below the bridge, returning briefly to their nests plastered under the bridge's steel girders, to feed their young who prepared for flight inside their mud houses. With the water clear enough to see the river's gravel beds, I imagined them thick with the thrashing tails of salmon, which numbered once in the hundreds of thousands but who's count in recent years has resembled something more like an 80-year high school reunion.

Shortly, our guests for the day arrived at which point we carried our five boats to the water's edge and pushed off into the green water. These first 8 miles was without a doubt the most challenging class 1 section of river I have ever boated. The gradient was never steep enough the warrant the term white-water, yet the high flows created a very pushy feeling and due to years of "fish-flow" releases from Don Pedro, vegetation had completely crowded the banks forming one continuous strainer lining both sides of the river. Every few hundred yards there was another island which also hosted overgrown vegetation, often with a broken branch or two dangling in the river and bending wherever the current would direct it. This was not a place you wanted to swim; the goal was to stay away from the banks and navigate through the maze of islands. At one point the river was so constricted with vegetation that the guides had to make an S-turn which required a brief upstream velocity to avoid being swallowed by a heinous strainer.

Soon enough we floated into calmer stretches and folks began to relax into the day. A Golden Eagle soared downstream and many other birds crossed the skies calling to each other as they enjoyed the clear blue skies.

Don Pedro Passage

Just four days after being towed into Moccasin Marina at the end of our rafting trip, I found myself getting ready again to put back onto the river. The contrast between these two days couldn't have been greater. Instead of stormy weather, the sky was clear, the wind light, and the temperature comfortably warm. Replacing my drysuit and layers of fleece were swim shorts, t-shirt, and hat, reflecting the danger of sunburn rather than hypothermia. A few miles upstream the rushing, chilly rapids of the Tuolumne were subsumed beneath Don Pedro's warm stagnate water, so I carried a fourteen-foot stand up paddleboard rather than a whitewater raft.

I had left Sausalito at dawn that morning and spent most of the drive worrying about whether attempting a 20-odd mile trip was really the best idea. I had been warned about the distance, nasty headwinds, and being run down by powerboats. But all those worries were washed away with the first paddle strokes, and except for sore muscles the rest of the six-hour paddle was quite enjoyable.

Notable experiences along the way include several osprey sightings, abundant wildflowers, a floating toilet (named the "S/S Relief"), and swimming in the reservoir's warm, clear water.

Peering over the edge of Don Pedro Dam at the end of the day I was surprised to see a steep-walled canyon at the bottom. After spending all day on the open lake, I had almost forgotten that I was paddling a flooded river canyon. Before the construction of the Old Don Pedro Dam 87 years ago, I would have been suspended above a river comparable to the wild and scenic section upriver with spawning salmon and exciting rapids. While we gained to ability to irrigate several hundred square miles of central valley farmland when Don Pedro Dam was built, it is good to remember what was lost when the Tuolumne was dammed.

I owe my thanks to George Phiripes at Surftech for loaning me a paddleboard for the trip as well as to the Tuolumne Trust's Patrick Koepele for generously picking me up after I botched my shuttle for this leg.