Sacramento Fire Department crews were called Tuesday morning to put out a fire along the American River bike trail near Discovery Park.
The fire was reported about 6 a.m. burning in grass about a half-mile east of Discovery Park on the north side of the American River. The blaze spread into underbrush and trees, eventually consuming at least 1 acre.
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The ruins of a California town built during the California Gold Rush have re-emerged above the water at Folsom Lake.
The stone walls and foundations that made up part of the town of Mormon Island were visible on Monday.
Mark White, of Sacramento, hiked to the site near Brown’s Ravine and used his camera to capture some of the most striking images so far of the California drought.
“You don’t get to see this very often. Thank God!” White said.
Scattered among the ruins are rusty nails, pieces of pottery and other artifacts that belonged to the 2,500 people who lived in the Mormon Island in the mid-1850s.
“Some of the pottery we found you could tell was like a vase or like a clay pot, just be the shape of it,” said Janet Dyer, of Citrus Heights.
Signs warn visitors not to disturb the site and not to take anything.
However, Dyer said she noticed that a license plate she had seen at the site the last time the water was this low was missing.
“Hopefully, it’s in a history museum somewhere and not on somebody’s shelf,” she said.
The surface of the lake was at 364 feet above level on Monday.
That is 7 feet above last year’s low point of 357 feet and 17 feet higher than the all-time record low of 347 set in 1977.
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Saturday, September 19, is the date for the annual “Great American River Clean Up.” During the hours of 9 a.m. to noon, please consider donating some time to help clean the American River Parkway.
The American River Parkway Foundation sponsors the annual event as one way to maintain the natural habitat that comprises this 23 mile stretch along the American River.
Volunteers can register online and many students use the event as a way to earn community service credits for school. Staging sites where you can check-in include Alumni Grove at CSUS, Ancil Hoffman Park, and William Pond Park. More information can be obtained online at the American River Parkway Foundation website.
Federal officials plan to make a significant cut to flows from Folsom Lake, which is a primary water source for Sacramento suburbs, as water levels at the reservoir near historic lows.
The Sacramento Bee reports (http://bit.ly/1O4XUGy ) the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation will cut flows out of Folsom Lake in half by the end of the week.
As of Monday, the lake held about 20 percent of its capacity at 196,000 acre-feet of water. Reclamation officials have pledged not to let Folsom Lake drop below 120,000 acre-feet.
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A swimmer who drowned in the south fork of the American River last week has been identified as a Colorado man.
The body of Luke Matson, 33, of Vail, Colo., was recovered in the river on Tuesday, the day after he went missing.
The El Dorado County Sheriff’s Office said that Matson was swimming Aug. 24 in the area of the Marshall gold discovery site. His friends last saw him floating downstream from Sutter’s Mill.
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More people are drowning in two of Sacramento’s rivers, and the drought may be partially responsible.
The Sacramento Bee reports there have been six drownings on the Sacramento River in 2015 where typically there are between one and two annually. Data from the Sacramento County coroner shows drownings on the American River are two times higher than average years in the last decade.
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Sacramento and Metro fire crews responded to a fire that broke out about 9:30 a.m. near a homeless encampment along the American River at Discovery Park.
A Metro Fire helicopter was seen doing multiple water drops to put out flames and keep trees from toppling on firefighters.
Law enforcement officials told KCRA 3 that a 25-year-old man found floating in the American River has died following a rescue attempt Sunday.
At about 2 p.m. the Sacramento Metro Fire Department was called to Rossmore Bar after a helicopter and boating units discovered a body floating in the American River.
“At that point, they located him,” said Metro battalion chief Chris Quinn. “He was submerged and they were able to take him up to the medic units and transport him to Mercy San Juan Hospital. At this point his condition was still undetermined.”
But a well-placed law enforcement source with direct knowledge of the situation told KCRA 3 the young man did not survive.
Kyle Pierce, a rafting friend of the victim, said he knew his friend was in trouble.
“I was trying to yell with them to follow me to go to the shore, before they got lost in the rapids,” Pierce said.
The American River deserves more respect than often given, fire crews said.
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More than 10,000 acres of scenic meadows, forests and trout streams in the Sierra Nevada 10 miles west of Lake Tahoe have been preserved in a deal in which environmentalists hope to prove that thinning out overgrown forests can increase California’s water supply.
The Northern Sierra Partnership, an environmental group based in Palo Alto and founded by longtime Silicon Valley leaders Jim and Becky Morgan, joined with the Nature Conservancy and the American River Conservancy to buy the land for $10.1 million from Simorg West Forests, a timber company based in Atlanta.
The deal, which closed Aug. 5, preserves a landscape south of Interstate 80 in Placer County adjacent to Granite Chief Wilderness in the Tahoe National Forest. The land contains more than 20 miles of blue ribbon trout streams.
Home to black bears, mountain lions, deer, songbirds and other wildlife, the remote property also includes the headwaters of two of California’s popular whitewater rafting rivers, the North and Middle forks of the American River.
“There are forests and meadows, and granite outcroppings,” said David Edelson, Sierra Nevada director for the Nature Conservancy. “There are terrific views looking down the American River watershed and toward the Granite Chief Wilderness.”
For years, loggers turned the property’s evergreen forests into wooden crates for Central Valley fruits and vegetables. Now the environmental groups plan to remove old logging roads and restore the landscape.
But more significant, the purchase could change how California, now suffering through the fourth year of a historic drought, manages its Sierra Nevada forests in ways that might provide more water to cities, farms and the environment.
But starting roughly 100 years ago, the U.S. Forest Service and other agencies began putting out the fires, often to protect communities that had sprung up through the mountains. As a result, the forests grew thicker. Now, across millions of acres of the Sierra, around Lake Tahoe and in other parts of the West, some evergreen forests have five times or more trees per acre as they would naturally.
The trees are small, spindly and often prone to disease and beetles.
UC Merced and UC Berkeley scientists have done research indicating that if these forests are thinned it could increase the amount of water flowing from the Sierra Nevada into streams, rivers, the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta and San Francisco Bay.
“We’re trying to keep the trees in check so the forest is in a more sustainable condition,” said Roger Bales, a UC Merced engineering professor who directs the university’s Sierra Nevada Research Institute. “One of the benefits is that you get more water.”
The Sierra Nevada provides 40 percent or more of California’s water supply through snow and rain.
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A woman was caught in the American Rivercurrent and drowned Friday between the Highway 49 and Mountain Quarries Railroad bridges.
The woman was observed by a firefighter attempting to cross the American River at the confluence by foot shortly after 11 a.m. But the crossing went tragically wrong as he watched her slip and struggle in the fast-moving river.
A fire crew had been dispatched on a wildland fire reported in the confluence area and the firefighter could see from a vantage point above the river on Highway 49 as the woman and two other people made their way into the river upstream from the Highway 49 bridge, Auburn State Recreation Area Superintendent Mike Schneider said.
The stretch of river is just past where the middle and north forks of the river meet in the AmericanRiver canyon below Auburn, increasing the force of the current.
“They were in shallow water and trying to cross the river,” Schneider said.
While the woman’s death was still under investigation, indications were that she slipped on rocks and was carried downstream by the current, he said.
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