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.
