As the water wars arrive in Wisconsin, it’s useful to take a look at what has happened in other parts of the United States. Juliana Barbassa does just that in California’s Ansel Adams Wilderness Area:

It begins as fresh snowmelt, streaming from Mount Ritter’s gray granite faces into Thousand Island Lake, a bouldered mirror. The clear blue water spills out through a narrow canyon, and the San Joaquin River is born.

When conservationist and mountaineer John Muir first explored these upper reaches, the narrow gorge barely contained the power of the living river, which carried the continent’s southernmost salmon run, sustained Indian tribes and set the rhythm of life in the valley below with floods and droughts.

“Certainly this Joaquin Canyon is the most remarkable in many ways of all I have entered,” Muir wrote in 1873.