What it’s like to kayak from Tulare Lake to San Francisco Bay
Engulfing miles of prime farmland in California’s Central Valley is the growing mass of Tulare Lake, a rare phenomenon that remained dormant during California’s prolonged drought but recently reawakened as torrents of meltwater poured in from the state’s snow-loaded mountains. The lake’s captivating expansion gave Los Angeles journalist Brendan Borrell an idea: Would all that water make it possible to paddle a boat from the dusty agriculture capital of Bakersfield, up the fertile gut of farming country and through the delta to San Francisco Bay? It’d be a once-in-a-generation opportunity to glimpse how nature is overriding the nation’s most complex system for storing and moving water on its push to the ocean, hundreds of miles along an improbable path.