Lake Berryessa - Napa County, California

Visited on 3/24/2018 while Jeff and I along with our two dogs, Summer and Skye took a Saturday drive from our Ranch over to Napa Valley.  This is a lake that we have taken our boat and spent a few weekends on the Lake because it is only about 50 minutes from our home.  Lake Berryessa is a 20,700 acre lake in Northern California located at 443 feet above sea level.  It is approximately 15.5 miles long but only 3 miles wide. It has approximately 165 miles of shoreline.  This reservoir is in the Vaca Mountains is formed by the Monticello Dam, which provides water and hydroelectricity to the North Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area.  Lake Berryessa supplies water to several communities such as Vacaville, Suisun City, Vallejo, and Fairfield as well as Travis Air Force Base located south of Lake.

Lake Berryessa is a monomictic lake, which means that the waters of the lake turnover once a year. For monomictic lakes that turnover time is somewhere in the Fall. Lake turnover happens when the warmer surface water starts to cool to match the lower cooler water. Once the lake is all the same temperature, water can freely circulate all around and oxygen replenishes parts of the water where it has been diminished. Fishing during the turnover time or after can be difficult because the monotone temperature and oxygen level of the lake allows for the fish to go anywhere in the lake.

The reservoir was named for the first European settlers in the Berryessa Valley, José Jesús and Sexto "Sisto" Berrelleza (a Basque surname, Anglicized to "Berreyesa", then later respelled "Berryessa"), who were granted Rancho Las Putas in 1843.

Near the dam on the southeast side of the reservoir is an open bell-mouth spillway, 72 feet in diameter, which is known as the Glory Hole. The pipe has a straight drop of 200 feet , and the diameter shrinks down to about 28 feet at the bottom. The spillway has a maximum capacity of 48,000 cubic feet per second. The spillway operates when there is excess water in the reservoir; in 2017 after heavy rains it started flowing, for the first time since 2006.  In 1997 a woman was killed after being pulled inside the spillway.

When we visited the lake level was about 7-8 feet from going over the Glory Hole.  The picture below was taken in February 2017 after we had tremendous rainfall and the Glory Hole was dropping water to the bottom.

The spillway at Monticello Dam, Lake Berryessa, in operation, February 19, 2017.

Prior to its inundation, the valley was an agricultural region, whose soils were considered among the finest in the country. The main town in the valley, Monticello, was abandoned in order to construct the reservoir. This abandonment was chronicled by the photographers Dorothea Lange and Pirkle Jones in their book Death of a Valley. Construction of Monticello Dam began in 1953, completed in 1958, and the reservoir filled by 1963, creating what at the time was the second-largest reservoir in California after Shasta Lake. The Monticello Dam with Lake Berryessa, Putah Diversion Dam with Lake Solano, and associated water distribution systems and lands are known collectively as the Solano Project, which is distinct from other water projects in California such as the Central Valley Project.

Monticello residents opposed the government and the Solano Project but were unsuccessful. Residents abandoned their homes, the Monticello cemetery had to be relocated, and houses were destroyed. Monticello ranchers were evicted as equipment was auctioned away and the fertile land destroyed and flooded.

The discovery of gold in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada caused an influx of people to the central valley. Communities in Solano County grew quickly in the gold rush. More water was needed to accommodate the rising population, so around the 1940s the Solano County Board of Supervisors organized the Solano County Water Council to search for the best place to develop a water project. Monticello Dam and Lake Berryessa were the result.

Monticello, a small farming town was founded by Ezra Peacock in 1867. By the time of the evacuations for the dam it had a population of about 250 with some scattered on the outskirts in the valley. Putah Creek was the town’s life source, it provided them with close access to water for both crop and livestock raising. Cattle and grain were the main products but orchards, pigs, and sheep were among some of the other things that belong to Monticello residents. Monticello was a small but relatively sustainable little town, connections with nearby towns such as Winters, Dixon, Vacaville, and Davis help completed life for the residents at Monticello. Though at the time, Monticello’s residents began to decline. Despite a small population, residents of Monticello along with Napa County fought against the creation of the dam all the way to Washington D.C. All evidence of a little town in the valley were demolished; either removed or destroyed except for one. For reasons that is yet to be known the Bureau of Reclamation they left behind a bridge crossing over Putah Creek although that bridge is far deep under water by now.

Just a few years after the completion of the dam, Governor Edmund G. Brown proposed a new project to build an even bigger dam and a larger lake. The “Greater Berryessa Project” was envisioned to be a Goliath of the original project; the 304 feet dam would be replaced with a 600-foot dam that would be capable of holding ten times the amount of water, expanding the lake to three times the current size, flooding productive farmland at the time. The cost would have been substantial to say the least. Governor Brown’s plan to enlarge to lake was to take water from northern California and share it down south to southern California. The proposal definitely caught attention but was too big to become reality.

The lake is fed by the head waters to the 576-square-mile Putah Creek watershed. It has a storage capacity of 1,602,000 acre feet, making it one of the larger reservoirs in California.

A study in 1986 showed that it is highly unlikely that Lake Berryessa will overflow. Few times has it actually gone over 440 feet, but did on February 17, 2017.  In the study, the probability of the lake level reaching 450 feet. is about one percent and probably only to happen once in a hundred years. The highest water level ever recorded at Lake Berryessa was 446.7 feet. Raising Monticello dam is highly unlikely but one possible way to increase water storage at the lake is to raise the height of Glory Hole.

In 1969, the lake became the site of one of the infamous Zodiac murders. On the evening of September 27, Pacific Union College students Bryan Hartnell and Cecelia Shepard were picnicking at Lake Berryessa on a small island connected by a sand spit to Twin Oak Ridge. A man approached them wearing a black executioner's-type hood with clip-on sunglasses over the eye-holes and a bib-like device on his chest that had a white 3-by-3-inch cross-circle symbol on it. He approached them with a gun, which Hartnell believed to be a .45. The hooded man claimed to be an escaped convict from Deer Lodge, Montana, where he had killed a guard and stolen a car, explaining that he needed their car and money to go to Mexico. He had brought precut lengths of plastic clothesline and told Shepard to tie up Hartnell, before he tied her up. The killer checked and tightened Hartnell's bonds, after discovering Shepard had bound Hartnell's hands loosely. Hartnell initially believed it to be a weird robbery, but the man drew a knife and stabbed them both repeatedly. The killer then hiked 500 yards (460 m) back up to Knoxville Road, drew a cross-circle symbol on Hartnell's car door with a black felt-tip pen, and wrote beneath it: "Vallejo/12-20-68/7-4-69/Sept 27–69–6:30/by knife", the dates of the killer's first two crimes and the date and time of the crime he had just committed.

At 7:40 p.m., the killer called the Napa County Sheriff's office from a pay telephone to report this latest crime. The phone was found, still off the hook, minutes later at the Napa Car Wash on Main Street in Napa, only a few blocks from the sheriff's office, yet 27 miles (43 km) from the crime scene. Detectives were able to lift a still-wet palm print from the telephone but were never able to match it to any suspect.

After hearing their screams for help, a man and his son who were fishing in a nearby cove discovered the victims and summoned help by contacting park rangers. Cecelia Shepard was conscious when law enforcement officers from the Napa County Sheriff's office arrived, but lapsed into a coma during transport to the hospital and never regained consciousness. She died two days later, but Hartnell survived to recount his tale to the press. Napa County Sheriff Detective Ken Narlow, who was assigned to the case from the outset, worked on solving the crime until his retirement from the department in 1987.