Tulare Lake

Tulare Lake was a large shallow lake in the southern portion of the California Central Valley, about forty miles south of Fresno, that existed over one hundred years ago and presumably thousands of years before that. It is now a shallow basin and indistiguishable from the rest of the agricultural valley. Native Americans built reed boats and fished in this lake before the arrival of the white man. The lake dried up over the course of a few decades as rivers were dammed upstream and canals were built to drain the lake. In fact, aggressive groundwater pumping since the draining of the lake has resulted in a significant lowering of the water table and subsidence of the land. In 1849, the lake measured 570 square miles. Its size fluctuated from year to year due to varying levels of rainfall and snowfall, but by the end of the nineteenth century the lake had almost completely disappeared. Because the lake's basin remains, the lake occasionally reappears during floods following unusually high levels of precipitation, as it did in 1997.

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History of Tulare Lake

Tulare Lake Reborn in 1997