Stanislaus River

About

Stanislaus River and the 1848 Gold Rush. Long before European contact, the Stanislaus River canyon was home to Northern Yokuts and Sierra Miwok peoples, who fished its waters, gathered along its banks, and used the corridor for trade between the Central Valley and the Sierra Nevada. The river's name honors Estanislao, a Miwok leader who led an uprising against Mexican colonial authority in 1828 and was ultimately defeated along these same banks.

The Gold Rush transformed the watershed almost overnight. In 1848, a gold discovery on the Stanislaus's South Fork at Robinson's Ferry became the basis of the Stanislaus Mining District and the founding of the town of Sonora. The rush that followed in 1849 devastated Native communities throughout the watershed. Even as miners arrived, loggers were already at work: the Stanislaus watershed was cut from the 1830s through the 1920s to feed the regional timber industry and the railroad expansion of the 1860s through 1910s, with sawmills, logging drives, and downstream lumber operations as the major operators. By 1910 the old-growth stands were exhausted; state forestry conservation began in 1915, and the establishment of state forests in the 1930s ended large-scale logging.

The river drew scientific and industrial attention in the same decades. The first comprehensive hydrological studies came with the USGS survey of the 1870s through 1890s and the gauging stations established between the 1880s and 1910s. In the 1890s the Hetch Hetchy Railroad — later the Sierra Railway — ran up the Stanislaus Canyon. The upper watershed gained lasting protection when the Stanislaus National Forest was created on February 22, 1897, among the oldest of the National Forests, a designation that has shaded the headwaters for more than a century.

The river's defining modern conflict arrived with the federal New Melones Dam. Completed in 1978 and stretching 5,100 feet, the dam impounded the 12,500-acre New Melones Lake and drowned the original Camp 9 canyon prized by boaters. The fight to stop it, waged in the late 1970s and early 1980s, became one of the most significant environmental battles in California history; activist Mark Dubois chained himself to rocks in the canyon in protest. The river sections that survived the reservoir became symbols of river conservation, and in 1983 the California Wild and Scenic Rivers Act protected 20 miles of the Stanislaus.

Today the Stanislaus runs Class III–IV out of the Sierra Nevada foothills, with an optimal flow window of 500 to 3,000 cfs and averaging about 980 cfs at USGS gauge 11302000. It remains one of California's popular commercial rafting rivers, threading mild family floats and wilder whitewater through the foothill canyons before meeting the San Joaquin River in the Eastern Central Valley of Northern California. The 10-mile Camp 9 Run is the most popular whitewater, rated Class III–IV; the Class III Goodwin Canyon drops in below Goodwin Dam within the BLM Goodwin Canyon Recreation Area; and the Class I–II float past Knights Ferry passes a historic covered bridge. Sunshine Rafting Adventures runs guided raft and kayak trips on the river.