Shasta Lake

Shasta Lake is California's biggest reservoir and the keystone of the Central Valley Project, the federal plumbing that moves northern water to the farms of the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys. Shasta Dam, a curved concrete gravity dam 602 feet (183 m) high, blocks the Sacramento River just north of Redding. Built by the Bureau of Reclamation as a New Deal project, it was finished in 1945, months ahead of schedule despite wartime shortages that cut its planned height. When full the lake holds about 4.55 million acre-feet (5.6 km³) and spreads its arms up the Sacramento, McCloud and Pit rivers.

The lake's 365 miles (587 km) of shoreline make it a houseboat capital, with Mount Shasta rising to the north. Beneath its surface lie the copper-mining town of Kennett and much of the ancestral homeland of the Winnemem Wintu, whose villages and burial grounds were flooded. The dam also cut off salmon from about half of their best spawning habitat in the basin, and its cold-water releases are now managed to keep endangered winter-run Chinook alive downstream. A long-debated proposal to raise the dam faces opposition from the Winnemem Wintu, fishing groups and California officials.

• California
  The most populous U.S. state, admitted 1850 located in
• Burney Falls
  Spring-fed falls in California’s volcanic northeast, flowing even in drought near
• Lassen Volcanic National Park
  The southernmost active Cascade volcano and its boiling hydrothermal basins near
• The Cascade Range
  A chain of volcanoes in the Pacific Northwest near
• Sacramento River
  California’s largest river, the backbone of its Central Valley water system part of
• Sacramento
  Capital of California, in the Central Valley related