Qualla: Camanche Reservoir

Camanche Reservoir: Introduction

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit TheAustinMan, CC BY 3.0. Three towns lie beneath this lake. Camanche, Lancha Plana, and Poverty Bar -- settlements that sprang up during the Gold Rush, shrank as the easy gold vanished, and finally drowned when the East Bay Municipal Utility District dammed the Mokelumne River in the early 1960s. What replaced them is a 7,700-acre reservoir that holds 417,120 acre-feet of water at capacity, serves as a critical piece of the East Bay's water infrastructure, and has quietly become one of the Sierra Nevada foothills' most popular recreation areas. More than 50,000 pounds of trout are stocked here each year, and the Mokelumne River Hatchery downstream works to keep Chinook salmon and steelhead trout from disappearing entirely from a river system that dams have fundamentally altered.

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Image: TheAustinMan | CC BY 3.0

Camanche Reservoir: The Drowned Towns

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit TheAustinMan, CC BY 3.0. The communities that vanished beneath Camanche Reservoir had their roots in the Gold Rush. Prospectors settled along the Mokelumne River in the 1850s, establishing camps at Poverty Bar, Lancha Plana, and a cluster of other settlements in what is now western Calaveras County. As t...

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Image: TheAustinMan | CC BY 3.0

Camanche Reservoir: A Lake That Nearly Emptied

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nzeemin, CC BY-SA 3.0. California's multi-year drought from 2011 to 2015 tested Camanche Reservoir as severely as anything since its creation. By August 2015, the reservoir had dropped to its lowest level ever -- just 81,940 acre-feet, roughly 19.6 percent of maximum capacity. The shoreline retreated d...

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Image: Nzeemin | CC BY-SA 3.0

Camanche Reservoir: Saving the Salmon

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit TheAustinMan, CC BY 3.0. When dams blocked the Mokelumne River, the Chinook salmon and steelhead trout that had spawned in the Sierra foothills for millennia lost access to their ancestral grounds. The Mokelumne River Hatchery, built in 1963 just downstream of the dam, was California's attempt to compens...

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Image: TheAustinMan | CC BY 3.0

Camanche Reservoir: Oak Woodland and Hidden Predators

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit TheAustinMan, CC BY 3.0. The landscape surrounding Camanche Reservoir is California oak woodland, a community dominated by valley oak and blue oak that grow in a characteristically spread-out pattern rather than dense forest. The understory is a mix of native grasses, herbs, and shrubs, along with introd...

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Image: TheAustinMan | CC BY 3.0

Camanche Reservoir: Fifty-Six Miles of Shoreline

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit TheAustinMan, CC BY 3.0. At full pool, Camanche Reservoir stretches across 56 miles of shoreline, and the recreation infrastructure built around it is substantial. Five campground areas -- North Shore, South Shore, Boat-in, Group, and Equestrian -- offer more than 500 campsites and 200 RV locations, avai...

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Image: TheAustinMan | CC BY 3.0