River City and Valley Life: An Environmental History of the Sacramento Region

12. Dreams, Realizations, and Nightmares: The American River Parkway's Tumultuous Life, 1915-2011

241 Sacramentans proudly hail the American River Parkway as their region’s crown jewel. The nearly thirty-mile-long swath of riparian habitat straddling its namesake river realizes a thinking man’s good idea dating from 1915. A second person reiterated and expanded that idea in 1927 and again at midcentury. After four decades trying to break out of bureaucratic circles, a state bureaucrat and streamside resident built a dream on the parkway idea and mobilized a cadre of fellow insiders to apply public pressure at the city and county levels when rapid suburban development encroached on the wild and ravaged lands bordering the river. Between 1961 and 1978, the American River Parkway idea and the parkway itself grew vigorously. Since then, not withstanding its merits and popularity, the parkway has suffered from financial starvation—consequences of local, regional, state, and national political machinations. In contrast to other notable urban parks such as New York’s Central Park and San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, Sacramento’s American River Parkway is for the most part a natural environment rather than a rendition of a landscape architect ’s vision of “Nature.” Far larger than other urban parks at more than forty-six hundred acres, the American River Parkway is a unique public asset offering a broad range of habitats and hosting profuse communities of flora and fauna. The American River coheres the parkway, so this discussion of that good idea begins with the river itself. The River The American River Parkway abuts the American River along its reach from the river’s mouth at Discovery Park upstream to Nimbus Dam, where it joins an additional seven miles of the Folsom Lake Recreation Area up to Beal’s Point. Along its CHAPTER 12 Dreams, Realizations, and Nightmares THE AMERICAN RIVER PARKWAY’S TUMULTUOUS LIFE, 1915–2011 Alfred E. Holland, Jr. 242 alfred e. holland, jr. twenty-three-mile course downstream of Nimbus Dam, the American River calms from a robust and rushing Sierra stream to the slow-moving but nonetheless secondlargest tributary of California’s largest stream, the Sacramento River.1 As is the case with all streams draining the western slope of the Sierra Nevada batholith, the American River has through the centuries gradually migrated northward from the higher southern end of that granitic block. The high bluffs that loom along the north bank of the American between Folsom and Carmichael, in contrast with the lower and relatively flat terrain of Rancho Cordova on the south bank, illustrate both this gradual northward migration and the consequence of the river’s erosive power.2 Like Job’s Lord, rivers give and rivers take away.3 Whether moving quickly or slowly, rivers carve at impediments to their flow, corroding and eroding material and sweeping it away in the current, but the slower they flow the less they can carry.4 Rivers are notorious litterbugs. Unless they maintain the speed at which they eroded their suspended sediment, they leave everything they carry strewn along behind as they rush headlong to their reunion with their mother, the ocean. The boulders, cobbles, gravels, sand, and silt dropped by the American River as it slowed debouching on to the Great Central Valley’s floodplains mutely mark the torrent’s transformation.5 In a major 1917 study of the consequences of hydraulic mining, Grove Karl Gilbert estimated hydraulic mining in the American River watershed excavated 170.33 million cubic yards of material, all of which became potential detritus.6 Most of that material along the American River’s course in the figUre 12.1. American River Parkway. Map by Alfred E. Holland, Jr., 2011. Base layer from USDA-FSA-APFO Digital Ortho Mosaic Sacramento County, US Department of Agriculture National Agriculture Imagery Program, 2010. dreams, realizations, and nightmares 243 Sacramento region was deposited in a four-flood sequence—one routine, two major , and one superflood—in December 1861 and January 1862. In that greatest of Great Valley floods, debris loosened by hydraulic mining in the Sierra foothills was swept downstream by runoff from both torrential rainfall and precipitous snowmelt from a series of major storms, both arctic and tropical, buffeting the central Sierra.7 The American River’s flow has varied between wide extremes during the period its flows have been recorded at Fair Oaks (1905 to the present). On several days during the summer drought of 1924, recorded flows dropped to less than 5 cubic...