Gold to Kilowatts: The Past and Future of Applegate Dam
By Daniel Newberry
Twenty-five years ago, water rose slowly behind the newly-completed Applegate Dam. Six ranches and the community known as Copper disappeared forever. After a quarter century of use for flood control, irrigation, and recreation, Applegate Dam may now get a face lift. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) recently began an Environmental Assessment to determine if it will allow a private company to construct hydropower facilities at the dam. A public comment period is expected this fall.
In the early 1970s, as many as two hundred people considered Copper their home. As in most remote rural locations of its era, this community was defined not by a place to shop, but by a location to pick up the mail. According to Ruch and the Upper Applegate Valley, by John and Marguerite Black, settlers first moved to the Upper Applegate River and Squaw Creek valleys in the Siskiyou Mountains on the Oregon-California border in the 1870s and made their living from mining.
The name “Copper” was apparently chosen for the rich deposits at the Blue Ledge Mine, a few miles up Eliot Creek from the Copper post office, according to Oregon Geographic Place Names, by MacArthur & MacAurthur. The post office first opened in 1914 across the state line in Siskiyou County, California, but ten years later moved north into Oregon, a half mile below Manzanita Creek, becoming perhaps the only post office to have been located in both states.
Mining was the heart of this community for most of its history, from the solitary miners living in the woods protecting their claims, to the everyday families in the Depression who panned for gold with pick, shovel, and sluice box to earn bread money.
“My father and uncle got a summer job on a Forest Service crew at a remote camp,” recalled Evelyn Byrne Williams, 79, “so my mother and aunt picked up their mining tools while they were gone. Everyone in the area needed the money in the Depression.” Williams grew up on Squaw Creek, located at the southern end of what is today Applegate Lake. Her family moved to the Applegate Valley in the 1850s.
Williams and her husband Clarence live just a stone’s throw from the Applegate River a few miles below the dam. She pulls out several scrapbooks filled with pictures and newspaper articles of local interest collected over a lifetime. With the story behind each picture on the tip of her tongue, Evelyn Williams is known to friends and neighbors as the definitive source of local history. She points to one of her favorites, a sepia-toned picture of a three-foot tall cedar shack in the woods, home for many years to Copper’s legendary miner, Knox McCloy. This reclusive miner who moved to the area in the 1890s was the subject of a 2002 U.S. Forest Service archaeological research project and report. Tall tales abound, like the time McCloy killed a bear in the autumn high in the mountains to provision for the winter. He skinned it and slept in the hide for warmth. Upon awakening, he found the tallow had frozen, trapping him inside. A passing mule packer heard his yelps and freed him.
Dow Lewis, 90, of Central Point, who as a youngster knew the enigmatic McCloy, also grew up on Squaw Creek, at the ranch of his grandfather John Harr. Lewis has several tall tales of his own, told with a deadpan face before breaking into hearty laughter just as he delivers the punch line. With a twinkle in his eye, Lewis began, “I visited the Blue Ledge Mine with my father during World War One when I was two. They had a pulley system that carried buckets full of ore down to the ground at the same time empty ones rose up to the ledge.” According to Lewis, his father placed his small son in an empty bucket, where he was lifted in to the mine, and so became its youngest visitor.
Although locals often gathered at the post office to meet the twice weekly mail deliveries, a sense of community “as Copper” began to form in the late 1930s, not long after the post office closed, with the construction of the Copper Store by the Crow family. Gladys Crow was a small, quiet woman with long dark hair who dressed in black and usually wore a shawl, recalled Paul Lewis, who today works in the engineering department for the City of Medford. Paul, the son of Dow Lewis, remembers Gladys Crow handing out licorice to him and the other local children.
A gas station was later added to the store to create an end-of-the-road provisioning center. This ARCO station had old-fashioned gravity pumps, much different from today’s electric units. On top of each pump—one for gasoline, one for kerosene—was a clear glass container into which the desired volume of fuel was first hand-pumped, then allowed to flow into the customer’s tank via gravity.
Though the post office closed years earlier, residents still gathered at the store for the twice weekly mail runs, and to exchange news and renew friendships. In the 1950s and 60s logging replaced mining as the profession of necessity for many local young men, explained Paul Lewis, and the Copper Store sold many a beer to thirsty loggers after a long day in the woods. Other than the store, according to Lewis, the social life for folks at Copper occurred at the Grange Hall, seven miles or so down river across from the historic McKee bridge.
The Copper store and gas station proved to be a lot of work for Gladys Crow, so she enlisted the help of Guy Watkins, whose grandfather was one of the first settlers to the upper Applegate area. Guy was also part Takelma Indian. Having no children, Crow left her estate to Watkins when she died in 1973.
“Guy was rather quiet,” said Clarence Williams. “He’d talk but wouldn’t start a conversation. When he wanted to tell you something he’d hedge, and come at it from the side. A real nice guy. Guy would shoot the bull and have a beer with you, but the law in those days was you couldn’t drink it in the store. You’d take your beer out of the ice bucket—no refrigerator in those days—and Guy would hand you the bottle opener. Then you go outside and sit on the bench and drink it and talk.”
Like most Copper residents, Guy relied on more than one source of income to make ends meet. In the summers he ran cattle in the high country at Cameron Meadows, which didn’t leave him with enough time to manage the store. So when a young woman in her early twenties, new to the area, approached Guy one day in 1971 and asked if he’d like help running the store, he hired her on the spot.
“I was living at the hippie commune a half mile from the store,” recalled Pat Acklin, “and was happy to have the money.” Her waist-length hair and large hoop earrings swayed as she shared these memories, and it’s not hard to imagine her in that setting. Acklin now lives in Ashland where she is a professor of Geography at Southern Oregon University. She takes her students to the upper Applegate Valley each year on a field trip and makes sure to point to the middle of the lake to indicate where her house once stood.
“I met him in Copper,” Acklin said, tilting her head toward the dark haired man next to her who has been smiling at her reminisces.
“I didn’t know as many people as she did,” says Ken Kigel, Acklin’s husband. “I played bass guitar in a rock band and was gone for weeks at a time on tour.” Kigel, who today is an assistant principal at Ashland High School, still keeps up with his music. He now plays violin in the Rogue Valley Symphony.
Not long after Gladys Crow died, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began appraising property in preparation for purchase, under eminent domain, of land to be affected by the future reservoir.
“The idea for the dam began right after the 1955 Rogue Valley flood,” explained Jim Buck, operations manager of the Rogue Basin Project for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. “There must have been one hundred public meetings in the region to sense interest in water resources development by the Corps.” In 1962, Congress passed the Flood Control Act that authorized the development of three local dams: Lost Creek, Applegate, and Elk Creek. The Lost Creek Dam was completed in 1977, Applegate in 1980. The Elk Creek Dam has yet to be built.
Congress authorized three uses for Applegate Dam: flood control, irrigation, and fish enhancement. Annually, 26,000 acre-feet was set aside for irrigation and 40,000 acre-feet for fisheries, in the form of increased releases to provide cooler water through increased summer flow over what would occur naturally. An acre-foot is the amount of water that will fill an acre—roughly the size of a football field—to the depth of one foot. “This was a radical idea at the time,” said Buck, “traditionally fisheries were not taken into account. But because of the Rogue’s nationally and internationally-known fishery, it was different in this case.”
Construction of the Applegate Dam was opposed not only by environmental groups but by many local residents. “I was against it back then,” admitted Evelyn Williams, “because it did away with all our memories. I grew up there. Now I see it’s beneficial.” According to Williams, a dam site on the lower Applegate River was considered that had two to three times the storage capacity of the current reservoir. It was rejected because far more farms would have been flooded and people displaced than were with the dam as eventually constructed.
In early 2001, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission received a request from a newly-formed company in Rigby, Idaho, to begin a process that could culminate in a license to construct and operate hydropower facilities at the Applegate Dam. According to its web site, this company, Symbiotics, LLC, “…was founded under the principle that there are existing hydroelectric facilities and sites that can be retrofitted to produce a significant amount of electrical energy at prices competitive with alternate sources.” Since 2001, Symbiotics has flooded FERC with more than 250 license applications for new hydropower facilities at existing dams throughout the Western United States. With the jump in energy prices in the past six years, the economic appeal of such an approach is natural: no new expensive dams need be constructed. Environmentally, the idea of using existing dams, rather than damming additional rivers—or building new fossil fuel-burning plants—also has appeal.
Symbiotics was founded as a joint venture between Northwest Power Associates and Ecosystems Research and a group of investors, according to Erik Steimle, a biologist for the latter company. Steimle explained that before filing the applications, his team analyzed 75,000 dams nationwide to find a subset that would meet the company’s criteria for economic and environmental feasibility.
For a variety of reasons—economic, environmental, scenic—most of the Symbiotics hydropower applications have been withdrawn or were rejected by FERC. Of the twenty-two remaining active projects, four license applications have been accepted by FERC. Three of these are in Oregon (Applegate, Bowman Dam on the Crooked River near Prineville, Dorena Dam on the Coast Fork of the Willamette River near Cottage Grove) and one is in Idaho (Chester Dam on the Henry’s Fork of the Snake River near St. Anthony).
Symbiotics has held several public meetings in the Ruch area since 2002 to inform local residents of their plans and hear concerns. Ruch-area residents have voiced three primary concerns: impacts of new high voltage power lines to health, safety, aesthetics, and property values; impacts of operations on fish; and construction impacts on fish, wildlife, and water quality.
According to Symbiotics’ planning documents, power poles on the entire dam-to-Ruch corridor, more than fifteen miles, would need to be replaced with poles that are fifteen feet taller than existing poles to accommodate the new 69,000 volt lines. The new poles would be noticeably larger than existing poles, yet significantly smaller than the large metal towers carrying power from Columbia River dams.
Several concerns about the impact of hydropower operations on fisheries have been detailed in comment letters to FERC by state and federal fisheries agencies, most notably the likelihood of significant mortality for juvenile fish that pass through the turbines. As water flows toward the turbines, velocity increases, drawing fish toward this simulated river flow. Fisheries biologists refer to this as “false attraction” and small fish sucked through the power turbines have a high likelihood of injury and death.
Federal and state regulations thus require new and renewing hydropower facilities to install screens in front of the turbines. The screen requested by fisheries agencies for the Applegate project is the “Eicher screen.” This technology was recently installed at PGE’s Sullivan power plant on the Willamette River and has reduced juvenile fish mortality to 1-2%. The Eicher is a fine mesh screen that is inclined upward at the downstream end as fish approach the turbine. Instead of passing through the turbine, the fish are pushed to the surface and toward a bypass that allows them to pass over or through the dam, avoiding the turbines. “Fish can be impinged on screens at high velocity flow into the turbines,” explained David Harris, Southwest Hydropower Coordinator for the Oregon Department of Fish & Wildlife (ODFW).
The Applegate Dam has a unique configuration that requires such a high-performance screen. According to Rob Burns, biologist for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, water is currently released from the dam at multiple depths to meet varying temperature requirements: cool water from deep in the reservoir is released in the summer to provide a more temperature-friendly environment for salmon and steelhead. This translates not only into a need for a screen for each outlet, but deeper outlets are under higher pressure and new screens must be able to withstand those harsh conditions.
Both fisheries agencies and the public have voiced concern that flows might be raised and lowered significantly on a daily basis to match peak power demand. Tailoring the flow regime to such a “peaking operation” was enacted at the J. C. Boyle powerplant on the Klamath River several years ago, causing a disruption to aquatic life and the rafting industry. Symbiotics’ License Application to FERC called for a “run-of-the-river” flow regime, meaning that Symbiotics will not be able to alter the river flow: they may only use the flow released by the Army Corps. “It would take an act of Congress to make a peaking facility at Applegate,” said the Army Corps’ Jim Buck.
Power at the 242 foot-tall Applegate Dam would be run through two turbines, supplying a maximum of 10 Megawatts (MW) of electricity. One MW can power approximately 1,000 homes or small businesses. The proposed facility is relatively small in the hydropower world: the Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River has a peak output of more than 100 times this capacity. Symbiotics has proposed an average annual power generation of 5 MW at Applegate Dam, with peak power during snowmelt in May when the reservoir is full and excess flow must be released, and a low in the fall when the Army Corps is filling the reservoir.
To avoid damage to turbines during high flood flows, excess water would not be routed through the hydropower plant. “We asked for a Howell-Bunger valve,” said ODFW’s Harris. “This is a pressure release valve that kicks on and sprays water that normally goes through turbines at high pressure to safely release water so the outflow can be controlled in an emergency. It’s pretty spendy.” Agencies can require these protective devices as mitigation for potential harm caused by construction and ongoing operation and maintenance. “Sometimes mitigation required may cost them out of the game,” said Harris. “It might cost $13-14 million [at Applegate].” Not only is initial construction of these devices costly, so is the operational cost. In a letter to FERC dated April 26, 2006, Symbiotics estimated an annual loss in power revenue of $100,000 were the Eicher screen used throughout the year.
What type of construction will be necessary to add hydropower capacity to the dam? According to Symbiotics’ License Application, the main construction will be the penstock, outlet gates, powerhouse, and draft tubes. A steel tube, known as a “penstock,” 105 foot long and 12 feet in diameter, would be installed into the concrete dam and held in place with a steel liner. Water would flow, under pressure, from the penstock to a new 50-by-60-foot powerhouse where the electricity would be generated. In between the two structures would be the outlet gates, capable of shutting off flow from the penstock during emergencies or maintenance. Draft tubes would carry water from the powerhouse to the river in a manner that would minimize disruption to fish. The ODFW currently collects spawning fish at the base of the dam and trucks them to the Cole River hatchery at the Lost Creek Dam where eggs are hatched and the juveniles raised, before their subsequent release into the Applegate River.
FERC is expected to complete the Environmental Assessment for the proposed hydropower facility and operations in January 2007, following a period of public comment, and make its decision by April 2007. The initial “scoping” period, in which the public may comment on the scope of the proposed analysis, ends September 7, 2006. That agency has been busy, as more than 240 hydropower licenses are up for renewal between 1998 and 2010. Licenses are usually granted for 30 or 50 years.
If old-time miner Knox McCloy was still alive, he might be of two minds about the dam. He might see that gold is no longer measured only in ounces but also in kilowatts. But he might also miss his old stomping grounds. Who knows, his fortune could still be out there, waiting to be discovered. Some of the old timers believe that McCloy died before cashing in his fortune, and his hiding place may now be under water.
Daniel Newberry is a hydrologist and environmental consultant who lives in the Applegate Valley.
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