On the first of September, they will raise the gates on the Red Bluff diversion dam for good and Lake Red Bluff will also be gone. We had learned to like the dam because it seemed to fit in so harmoniously to the setting here. About the time we moved here the dam began operating for only four months out of the year. That covered the ag water delivery season and left the river open all during the salmon and steelhead migrations. When we first paddled down the river from Redding to Red Bluff in 1964 we were reflexively disappointed that it was being built and the next year we did experienced slack water at Ide Adobe about 2 1/2 miles above our takeout in downtown Red Bluff. The Lake was certainly popular. We were evicted from our motel room when we came up here in 1993 to buy our house because of the crowds attending the drag boat races on Lake Red Bluff had prior reservations. The canal won't go away and it will continue to carry water as far south as Dunnigan, just up I-5 from Sacramento but it will be pumped up to the canal instead of raising the river by 15 feet so that it would flow by gravity into the canal. Maybe because they think they will not have to worry anymore, the Bureau of Reclamation allowed the Photo Club to go out and crawl all over the dam and take photos.

This sequence depicts the dam in the morning, overhead at midday, and the upstream face at sunset on one of its last days as a functioning dam.