Keswick Reservoir - Shasta County, California

Visited on 6/6/2018 on our way to Springfield, Oregon to visit family and to attend Jeff’s niece, Hannah’s High School graduation ceremony we stopped along the way to check out Keswick Reservoir just 5 miles west of Redding, California.  Keswick Reservoir is a 640-acre lake and the dam at an elevation of 602 feet above sea level creates a 23,800 acre foot afterbay for Shasta Lake.  The reservoir and dam are both features of the Central Valley Project - Shasta/Tinity River Divisions. Keswick Dam was named after Lord Keswick, the president of the Mountain Copper Company.  The landscape around Keswick Dam includes topographic features of the Klamath Mountains, the southern Cascade Range, and the Central Valley, including slopes characterized by a mix of pine and oak forests and chaparral and rock outcrops.  The land on which the nearby city of Redding, California, was built is primarily made up of volcanic and sedimentary rocks that are metamorphosed. Two volcanic features – Mount Shasta and Lassen Peak – can be seen from numerous vantage points throughout the area.

Keswick Reservoir is prone to rapid rises and falls, while alternately receiving releases from Shasta Dam and providing water to Keswick Dam's power generators and to meet downstream water demands.  Keswick Dam has migratory fish-trapping facilities in conjunction with the Coleman Fish Hatchery, 25 miles downstream on Battle Creek. The salmon and steelhead are trapped as they reach the dam, then transported to the fish hatchery for milking. 

The Yana and Atsigewi inhabited the Shasta region before the influx of European settlers. Because the Spanish concentrated their missions along the coast of California, much of the region remained uninhabited by Europeans until the 1840s.

The discovery of gold in California brought floods of immigrants to the state. Many immigrants' attention soon turned from the lure of the goldfields to the seemingly more stable agricultural fields. Yet unstable water supplies made agriculture in the Central Valley almost as much a gamble as prospecting for gold.

After Shasta Dam was completed, Shasta Lake placed an obstacle in the path of people commuting near the reservoir. To relieve the problem, Reclamation started a ferry operation on the lake in 1945, for businesses and individuals needing to traverse the new body of water.