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That sharp hydrographic boundary between the rain and the desert looks to the bureau's engineers like the most important fact about the Western U.S. They long to punch a hole and let the water of Oregon flow south through graceful canals. In 1948, the bureau got congressional authority to make a "preliminary reconnaissance," which has now produced a fat printed report packed with figures, maps and diagrams. It has not been made public, probably because California is afraid of the effect the report may have on its struggle with Arizona for the last dribbles of water in the lower Colorado River; it may point out too clearly that California can always draw on the water of the northern rain country, while Arizona's future growth must come from the Colorado. The report itself pays no attention to political bickering. With scientific detachment, it estimates what the new tools of irrigation engineering could do with (as a starter) the Klamath River, which rises in Oregon and enters the Pacific just south of California's northern boundary.
Under the Bully Choops. The Klamath does not look like much on a map, but its annual flow is 10 million acre-feet, about equal to one of the poorer years of the Colorado. According to one plan, an 813-ft. dam at Ah Pah, near the mouth of the Klamath, will back it far up its southern tributary, the Trinity. A tunnel 60 miles long under the Bully Choop Mountains will export 6,000,000 acre-feet into the Sacramento. After getting a boost from a battery of pumps, the water will follow a canal to Bakersfield. Then another tunnel under the Tehachapi Mountains will take it to Los Angeles, and to needy areas from Santa Barbara to San Diego.
Three water exchanges will spread the benefit of the Klamath water. About 100,000 acre-feet of it can take care of farmers with claims on the American River. Then some of the American's upper tributaries can be used for irrigation in bone-dry Nevada.
Near Los Angeles the Klamath water can replace 300,000 acre-feet now drawn from the Owens Valley. Then the Owens water can be turned into the flat and potentially fertile Mojave Desert. The biggest exchange will be with the Colorado, for Klamath water can replace one million acre-feet of Colorado water now consumed by Los Angeles, and this could be used in Arizona. Part of it might be diverted from a Colorado tributary, the San Juan, and turned into the Rio Grande watershed for desperately water-short New Mexico. It might be exported to eastern Colorado, or to the Bonneville Basin around Great Salt Lake, where the growing industries of Utah are screaming for water. Thus the abundant flow of the Klamath could bring new life to dry lands more than 1,000 miles away.
Defense for 20 Days. The Klamath has been studied in detail; its total cost would be $3¼ billion, less than the defense cost of 20 days of the cold war as it is planned for 1952. In return, the U.S. would get at least 2,000,000 acres of new land, as productive agriculturally as a middle-sized state.