New Melones Lake - Calavares & Tuolume Counties

Visited 8/18/2012, Jeff and I went boating with our boat on New Melones Lake a couple of years ago.  New Melones is a reservoir on the Stanislaus River in the central Sierra Nevada foothills, the New Melones Dam and reservoir are a water collection and transfer unit of the Central Valley Project. New Melones Lake provides irrigation water, hydroelectric power, flood control, and wildlife habitat. Recreation uses include fishing, camping, and boating within the Glory Hole Recreation and Tuttletown Recreation Area.

The reservoir is impounded by the New Melones Dam, and is the fourth largest reservoir in the State of California at 12,500 acres.  When full, the shoreline is more than 100 miles long.

The reservoir and dam are located west of Jamestown and Sonora, and south of Angels Camp. The Archie Stevenot Bridge, completed in 1976, carries Hwy 49 across the lake and border between Calaveras and Tuolumne Counties.  At an elevation of 1,088 feet above sea level, New Melones Lake is part of Reclamation’s Central Valley Project. It is located off of Highway 49, some 8 miles north of Sonora and 6 miles south of Angels Camp, in the Mother Lode.  Each year, approximately 600,000 visitors enjoy New Melones’ numerous recreational opportunities. Facilities include day use areas; boat launch ramps; more than 300 campsites; hiking, biking and equestrian trails; a visitor center and museum; and abundant water-based recreation.  New Melones Dam is an earth and rock filled embankment dam on the Stanislaus River, about 5 miles (8.0 km) west of Jamestown, California in the United States, on the border of Calaveras County and Tuolumne County. The water impounded by the 625-foot tall dam and is in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada east of the San Joaquin Valley. The dam serves mainly for irrigation water supply, and also provides hydropower generation, flood control and recreation benefits.
The dam was authorized in 1944 as a unit of the federal Central Valley Project, a system designed to provide irrigation water to the fertile agricultural region of the Central Valley. It would be built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps), and transferred to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (Reclamation) upon completion. In 1966, work began to clear the foundations for a high dam that would replace an earlier, much smaller structure built by two irrigation districts. Construction of the main embankment began in 1976, and was topped out in late 1978. Water storage in New Melones Lake commenced in 1978, and the dam's hydroelectric station produced its first power in mid-1979.

New Melones was the focus of a long environmental battle during the 1970s and early 1980s; critics protested the flooding of a long scenic stretch of the Stanislaus River, which flowed over whitewater rapids through the deepest limestone canyon in the western United States. The protestors employed a variety of methods, some extreme, to prevent the filling of New Melones Lake until 1983, when record-setting floods filled the reservoir and nearly breached the dam's emergency spillway. The fight over New Melones galvanized the river conservation movement in California and influenced major water policy changes on the state and federal levels; since its completion, no other dams of its size or importance have been built in the United States.

Picture taken on our boat on New Melones Lake in August 2012 with our old girls, Star on the left and Sadie on the right.  We sure miss those pups...