To some, the O'Shaughnessy Dam is a monument to the skills of the Irish-American engineer who built it. Elegant is the word that Susan Leal, general manager of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, uses to describe the curved wedge of rock and concrete that soars 300 ft. above the floor of the Hetch Hetchy Valley. But to others, the dam, constructed nearly a century ago inside the western boundary of Yosemite National Park, is a mocking tombstone to a landscape whose haunting beauty has lain for too long beneath 100 billion gallons of water.
Might the O'Shaughnessy Dam one day...