Tailings, nothing more than tailings

Poking around the ravaged riverbed of the Tuolumne River yesterday, I saw tailings everywhere I looked. In the area between Waterford and La Grange the floodplain was obliterated in the 19th century by industrial-scale hydraulic mining. It was part of the unsung, dark second chapter of the California gold rush. The Tuolumne was also dammed many times, drowning among other things the beautiful Hetch Hetchy Valley within Yosemite National Park. That dam is said to have broken the heart of John Muir, and no act in the national parks since then, not even the changes enacted by the current administration, has matched it in evil.

Yesterday I saw a backhoe at La Grange carrying loads of stones into the riverbed, a tiny step toward restoring the Tuolumne's channel and only a century late.