Tulare Lake

Tulare Lake
Location	San Joaquin Valley Kings County, California
Coordinates	36.0666184°N 119.7509624°W / 36.0666184; -119.7509624
Lake type	Flat
Primary inflows	Kaweah River Kern River Kings River Tule River White River
Basin countries	United States
Max. length	130 km (81 mi)
Surface area	1,780 km2 (690 sq mi)
Average depth	10 m (33 ft)
Surface elevation	56 m (184 ft)
References	U.S. Geological Survey Geographic Names Information System: Tulare Lake

Tulare Lake, named Laguna de Tache by the Spanish, is a fresh-water dry lake with residual wetlands and marshes in southern San Joaquin Valley, California. Until the late 19th century, Tulare Lake was the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi River and the second largest freshwater lake in the United States based upon surface area, but it dried up after its tributary rivers were diverted for agricultural irrigation and municipal water uses.

The lake was named for the Tule Rush (Schoenoplectus acutus) that lined the marshes and sloughs of its shores. The lake was part of (approximately) a 13,670 sq. mi. (22,000 sq. km.) partially endorheic basin, at the south end of the San Joaquin Valley where it received water from the Kern, Tule and Kaweah Rivers as well as from southern distributaries of the Kings. It was separated from the rest of the San Joaquin Valley by tectonic subsidence and by alluvial fans extending out from Los Gatos Creek in the Coast Ranges and the Kings River in the Sierra Nevada (U.S.). Above a threshold elevation of 207 to 210 feet, it overflowed into the San Joaquin River. This happened in 19 of 29 years from 1850 to 1878. There were no overflows after 1878 due to increasing diversions of tributary waters for agricultural irrigation and municipal water uses and, by 1899, the lake was dry except for residual wetlands and occasional floods.

Tulare Lake was the largest of several similar lakes in its lower basin. Most of the Kern River's flow first went into Kern Lake and Buena Vista Lake via the Kern River and Kern River Slough southwest and south of the site of Bakersfield. If they overflowed it was through the Kern River channel northwest through tule marshland and Goose Lake, into Tulare Lake.

History

Tulare Lake once supported vast populations of deer, elk, antelope, grizzly bear, migratory waterfowl, and aquatic species. During wet years, the rivers feeding into the lake were the terminus of the western hemisphere's southernmost chinook salmon run.

For centuries the Tachi tribe or Tache, a Yokut people built reed boats and fished in this lake in their homeland, until after the arrival of Spanish and American colonists. Robert F. Heizer and Albert B. Elsasser (1980), suggested that the Yokut had once numbered about 70,000. They had one of the highest regional population densities in pre-contact North America, which was possible because of the rich habitat.

Even well after California became a state, Tulare Lake and its extensive marshes supported an important fishery: in 1888, in one three-month period, 73,500 pounds of fish were shipped through Hanford to San Francisco. It was also the source of a regional favorite, Western pond turtles, which were relished as terrapin soup in San Francisco and elsewhere. The lake and surrounding wetlands were a significant stop for hundreds of thousands of birds migrating along the Pacific Flyway. Tulare Lake was written about by Mark Twain.

Once the largest freshwater lake west of the Great Lakes, in 1849, the lake measured 1,476 km² (570 sq mi), and in 1879, 1,780 km² (690 sq mi), as its size fluctuated due to varying levels of rainfall and snowfall. Following the floods of 1861-62 and 1867-68, the highest water on record reached between 216 and 220 ft above sea level. At that elevation, the lake overtopped the natural "spillway" (located five miles west of the current community of Halls Corner on state route 41) and flowed northward into the sea via the Boggs and Fresno sloughs and the San Joaquin River. But, as the state and farmers diverted much water from its tributaries for agricultural irrigation and municipal water uses, by the early 20th century the lake went nearly dry.

Enough water remained so that Alameda Naval Air Station used Tulare Lake as an outlying seaplane base during World War II and the early years of the Cold War. Flying boats could land on Tulare Lake when landing conditions were unsafe on San Francisco Bay.

The expression "out in the tules," referring to the sedge growing 3–10 ft tall that lined the lakeshore, is still common in the dialect of old Californian families and means "beyond far away."^{[citation needed]}

Decline of lake

In the wake of the United States Civil War, late nineteenth-century settlers drained the surrounding marshes for early agriculture. The government dammed the Kaweah, Kern, Kings and Tule rivers upstream in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, which turned their headwaters into a system of reservoirs. In the San Joaquin Valley, the state and counties built canals to deliver that water and divert the remaining flows for agricultural irrigation and municipal water uses. Tulare Lake was nearly dry by the early 20th century.

The lake bed is now a shallow basin of fertile soil, within the Central Valley of California, the most productive agricultural region of the United States. Farmers have irrigated the area for a century and soil salination is becoming a concern.

Environmental impacts

The destruction of the terrestrial wetlands and the lake ecosystem habitats resulted in substantial losses of terrestrial animals; plants; aquatic animals; water plants; and resident and migrating birds. Although now dry, the lake occasionally reappears during floods following unusually high levels of snow melt, as it did in 1997.

See also

• Rancho Laguna de Tache (Limantour)
• Tularemia
• Aquatic ecosystems
  • Ramsar Convention
  • San Luis National Wildlife Refuge
  • Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge
  • Great Valley Grasslands State Park
• Turlock Basin - a sub-basin of the San Joaquin Valley groundwater basin
  • San Joaquin (soil)
• Category: Native American history of California
  • Yokut people
• Mussel Slough Tragedy
• Aral Sea

External links

• Wildlife of Tulare Lake
• Google: Tulare Lake History timeline
• Tulare Lake restoration proposal
• San Joaquin Valley Groundwater Basin: Tulare Lake Subbasin
• Kings County History website