Talk:Hetch Hetchy Valley

Name

Does anybody know why is it called Hetch Hetchy? jengod 21:02, Feb 10, 2004 (UTC)

Added info to article -- hike395 17:25, 11 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Who is this California state geologist C.F. Hoffman was the first person to survey Hetch Hetchy Valley. Hoffman quoted Joseph Screech, the first European to live in Hetch Hetchy, that the Paiutes were the owners of Hetch Hetchy Valley. They would gather seeds, acorns and berries in Hetch Hetch Valley. Porcupine grass in Paiute is called Huki. Pural of Huki is Huk'Huki in Paiute. -- User:24.10.19.245

"Hetch Hetchy" (from Farquhar Place Names of the High Sierra) says "Named from a Central Miwok word denoting a kind of grass or plant with edible seeds abounding in the valley.” No acorns were involved or harmed in this name. Acorn is a completely differenent word, waty'k.a Dananderson 17:41, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

Actually the Paiutes also called Hetch Hetchy "Aweaha", pronounced "Ah-wey-ah". Aweaha is acorn in Paiute. Paiutes used food names to describe certain areas. The dictionary linked above is to the Central Miwok dictionary. It is recorded that Paiutes were the Indians of Hetch Hetchy, not Miwoks.

Joseph, Nate and William Screech encountered Paiutes when they entered Hetch Hetchy Valley around 1850. Hetch Hetchy is northwest of Yosemite Valley inside Yosemite National Park. In 1851 Savage and the Mariposa Battalion went after Chief Tenaya just miles souheast of Hetch Hetchy. Then is it possible that Tenaya was part of the Paiutes that the Screeches encountered? Remember that Tenaya was documented to be 1/2 Mono Lake Paiute.

Definition of Hetch Hetchy Valley

I think the definition of the valley in the article as it now stands is incorrect. Hetch Hetchy is just part of the Tuolumne River valley --- it is the flat part below the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne. Check out the topo map at [1]. Above Glen Aulin is Tuolumne Meadows, between Glen Aulin and (about) LeConte Point is the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne [2], and below that is Hetch Hetchy, which used to be a beautiful flat meadow, but now is flooded.

So, all of the good new material about the upper part of the valley should probably be moved to the Tuolumne River article.

The reservoir and the valley are not completely coincident --- the reservoir overlaps into the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne. But, if we move the material over to the Tuolumne River, I'm not sure if there is enough left for separate articles on Hetch Hetchy Valley, Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, and O'Shaughnessy Dam -- hike395 01:50, 10 Oct 2004 (UTC)

More evidence that Hetch Hetchy is not the whole Tuolumne valley. John Muir, in Chapter 16 of his book The Yosemite [3] (chapter titled "Hetch Hetchy Valley"), writes

The floor of the Valley is about three and a half miles long, and from a fourth to half a mile wide. The lower portion is mostly a level meadow about a mile long, with the trees restricted to the sides and the river banks, and partially separated from the main, upper, forested portion by a low bar of glacier-polished granite across which the river breaks in rapids.

Thus, Hetch Hetchy cannot stretch from O'Shaughnessy Dam to Tuolumne Meadows: they are at least 20 air miles apart. LeConte Point is about 3.5 miles upstream from the dam, so that is the eastern end of Hetch Hetchy Valley.

-- hike395 03:52, 10 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Gack! Thank you for pointing out this mistake. When I made my changes to this article, I assumed by analogy with Yosemite Valley that a single name applies to both the upper part and the lower part. (I must also admit that I was ignorant of any difference - I thought the terrain of the underwater western part was the same as that of the eastern part.) I Googled the name "Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne River", as printed on USGS maps, but came up with only a few hits, so I dismissed it as an aberration. I've been having nagging doubts about that assumption myself, but you've demonstrated that there are indeed two separate entities. I'll have to undo the mess I've made here, but unfortunately I don't know when I'll have the time for it. For now, I'll mark it with an accuracy dispute message. --Smack 05:46, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)

No worries --- Wikipedia eventually fixes errors, that's the beauty of it. I don't know if you saw it, I had already refactored the article to separate the dam-specific stuff into O'Shaughnessy Dam, the stuff about the Grand Canyon into Tuolumne River (I made a little stub at Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne), and kept the valley-specific stuff here. I see that you moved the material back over from O'Shaughnessy Dam, but now it's duplicated in two places, which tends to lead to divergence as time goes on (two places to fix bugs, rather than one). I liked how you recreated the O'Shaughnessy Dam article, because that is now in Category:Dams --- people can find it that way. Can we keep the O'Shaughnessy Dam article distinct from this one? Or, if people think that's bad, can we fully combine the articles and put a redirect from there back to here? Thanks!! -- hike395 06:53, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I didn't put much thought into the proper division of content - I was mostly focused on adding new content. The question is fairly difficult; we have to deal with the philosophical issue of whether a reservoir is an adjunct to a dam or vice versa. In this case, I think the reservoir deserves the bulk of attention. I propose this division:

• Content relating to water usage and management at Hetch Hetchy Reservoir
• Historical matter also at Hetch Hetchy Reservoir
• No more than stub content at O'Shaughnessy Dam, unless someone posts technical details
• The content I wrote at Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne
• Tuolumne River remains more or less as it stood before.

--Smack

Let's look at Wikipedia precedence: it looks like there are articles about the dams, instead of the reservoirs behind them. For example, see Reservoirs and dams in California or Reservoirs and dams in the United States. So, it looks like Wikipedia puts the reservoir adjunct to the dam, and we should keep O'Shaughnessy Dam as the main article, Hetch Hetchy Reservoir as the redirect.

I believe that the history, water usage, management stuff is already at O'Shaughnessy Dam, so I don't think we need to shuffle things from here to there. There is a tiny bit of history here, but I think it reads well --- removing it would detract from the article.

If you'd like to move your material from Tuolumne River to Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne, I wouldn't mind. I'm not 100% confident that Glen Aulin is the exact eastern boundary of the Grand Canyon, it may be Muir Gorge. I'd like to keep your photo in both the River and the Canyon article, because it is illustrative of both.

-- hike395 05:03, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Ah, the USGS defined the Grand Canyon to stretch east to at least Glen Aulin [4], so you are safe in moving all of your material over, if you like. -- hike395

BTW, the only reason that I didn't list the reservoirs on Reservoirs and dams in California is because I don't know what they all are. They were not listed in the source information I used, and I am not familiar enough with them to fill in more than one or two. If you have the relevant information, please feel free to add it to that page. Thanks. --ChrisRuvolo 03:00, 5 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Political info

Please don't remove information on the politics of the power generated from this dam. The Raker Act is a significant part of the Hetch Hetchy story. 02:30, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

Yes, it is, but it's already covered at O'Shaughnessy Dam, and the "History" section already links there. Maybe we should make the link more prominent. --Smack (talk) 03:36, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

I agree with Smack --- controversy about the dam is covered by the dam article, that's how we decided to split things up (see above) -- hike395 05:23, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

I disagree with smack. There's no reason to not include information in this article as well. Considering that Hetch Hetchy's primary historical significance is as a sight on controversy over the damming it makes little sense to not include that information in this article.--136.167.69.184 (talk) 18:12, 29 June 2009 (UTC)