Diamond Valley Lake

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I have a long sad story to tell~~We had tour day, and I took beautiful (although mostly brown!) pictures. BUT, I got a new photo program. Everything was going well with it, but then I opened the program. Things went downhill from there. It ate my photos, and won't spit them back up. You'll not be seeing any tour day photos! But be sure to read my extremely interesting description!!! (and don't pretend like I'm the only one this has happened to!)

Tour Day! We toured the Diamond Valley water project, outside of Hemet. By going through the visitor’s center I got a grasp of the water situation in southern California. The majority of the people live in this part of the state, and yet 99% of the rain falls in the northern part. There’s just no way to feasibly get water here. Hemet is particularly hard hit, as the mountains all around us divert the rain clouds. I’ve also heard of the heavy rains in southern California, followed by flooding, and it wasn’t until I looked at a map of natural vegetation that I could plainly see that there’s nothing to prevent the water from running along the top of the ground~~there’s no vegetation to slow it, and the ground is as hard as concrete. The majority of the water here is coming through aqueducts from the Colorado River. We spent quite a bit of time in the visitor’s center, and then went up to the dam, which covers 4500 acres.

It was surprising to see so much water. (OH...you would have seen a lovely blue water picture!) Hey, it’s surprising to see any water here, and then to see such a huge, beautiful lake, with birds flying and people fishing and swimming was like an mirage! And then when you drive back to the other side of the damn, you’re back to the brown. This water provides a backup source of water, but statistics show that they will have used that water by 2010, unless people start conserving water. It sure made me think about my water usage.

When we were in Washington I kept saying how green it was, and how I’d never seen so many shades of green. Here it’s the browns…there’s light brown, deep brown, gray brown. Even some of the plants have a brownish blossom. Needless to say, the majority of the houses are some shade of brown.

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