January 2026. Atmospheric Rivers. Sierra Nevada Foothills. Winter in our Yard. Tulare Lake, 2023.

    In early January, finding ourselves in a bit of a cabin fever mode, we took advantage of a sunny day to drive up to the nearby Sierra Nevada foothills. Who knew when the sun would disappear again.
    With 275 days of sun a year, why were we worried about losing the sun? Well, because when the unusual warmth ended in mid-November, California was promptly drenched by an atmospheric river. 

A sunny day at Lake Kaweah. When the reservoir fills, the boat launch will be under water.

    For those of us who live in the Central Valley, essentially the entire center of the state, rain was followed by a cold, damp blanket of tule fog that lasted 3 weeks. So, yes, when the sun returned we headed out to enjoy it. 

  

Thanks to the rain, we found Lake Kaweah to be fuller than when we went by it on our way to Sequoia National Park in December. 

A lot of California depends on the water content of the Sierra snowpack for water. Currently the water content is about 69% of average.

    Lake Kaweah was created with the construction of Terminus Dam on the Kaweah River. The dam was named for Terminus Station, the end of one route on the Visalia Electric Railroad.

Green hills surround the lake, beautiful but fuel for wildfires.

Kaweah Range is in the background.

        We stopped at the Slick Rock boat launch and walked upstream along the river. In a few months hopefully this area will be under water and we will be enjoying it in our kayaks.

The Sierra Nevada Foothills & Mountains are very rocky, from pebbles to huge boulders, monoliths, & megaliths. 

Being very rocky means plenty of convenient spots for Doug to stop & take in our surroundings while Marilyn takes pictures of wildflowers. 

Grass & wildflowers in hills along Kaweah River.

Chorispora tenella—Blue Mustard—I think.

  Diplotaxis muralis—Annual Wall Rocket, related to arugula—I think.

 

I could not ID this plant, though there are fields of it. If you know the correct ID of any of the wildflowers, please let me know.

Dried thistle?

From Lake Kaweah, we continued into the foothills to the town of Three Rivers. We lunched at Sierra Subs & Salad on a patio above the river.

Passing Horse Creek Campground on Lake Kaweah as we head back to the Valley floor. If the lake fills, the campground will be under water.

A patchwork of green driving down from Terminus Dam. The brown in the middle left marks the Kaweah River flowing from the lake.

    Tulare County, where we live, and Fresno County to the north are the most productive agricultural regions in the country. Our area is especially known for citrus, stone fruit, olives, almonds, walnuts, and pistachios.

New citrus grove below rocky hills. 

    Why are the Sierras so rocky? Eons ago, granite cooled deep in the earth. Later, earth's shifting plates forced the granite to the surface, creating a rocky surface. 

Glaciers also played a large role in carving and smoothing out the Sierra Nevada's peaks & valleys.

Oranges.

Packing crates ready for lemons to be picked & hauled to packing houses.

Mandarins.

Olives.

Windmills in citrus groves to move the air when temperatures fall below freezing.

Cherries.

Snow-topped Sierra Nevadas from freeway overpass near our home.

Mountains from our street.

It'd be nice to live in a part of town like this where you can walk out the door & see the mountains, but so much agricultural land is succumbing to development.

* * * 

    The flora in our own yard are a bit confused by the weather this year, also.

Our drought tolerant front yard. Desert Dianthus at bottom left in bloom. There will be more color in spring.

 

Desert Dianthus blooms much of the year. It spreads, can be separated, & is wonderfully hardy.

Paper-whites bloomed as they typically do around Christmas.

Bearded iris.

    Our bearded iris are from Sutton's Iris Gardens. Many are rebloomers, and we never know when they are going to bloom. But some that are currently blooming seem early. We're still sad that Sutton's moved from nearby Porterville, where they held an annual Iris Festival, to Idaho, but thankful for their mail order catalogue.

Calendula & bearded iris. Calendula have such a variety of colors & pedal shapes & configurations.

The calendula came up en masse, last year's few plants having reseeded prodigiously.

Ahem...sunflowers not only growing but blooming in December? They began coming up in November, reseeded by last year's plants.

We planted tens of daffodil bulbs. 

The name "Hop Lips Autumn Sage" might imply it should not be blooming in January. It was pruned a few weeks ago & regrew as if it were spring.

Violets look delicate, yet sturdy.

* * * 

Speaking of Agriculture and Water...
    Since we never got around to doing a post on Tulare Lake, we thought we'd tie it in here.
    It's still difficult to conceive the amount of moisture the atmospheric rivers of winter 2022-2023 brought to the San Joaquin Valley: 221% of average snowpack in the Sierras and 300% of normal average runoff from snowmelt in the Tulare Basin. This led to the reappearance of Tulare Lake for the first time since 1998. Doug well remembers Tulare Lake in 1969 and 1998.

Tulare Lake, 2023. Utility poles mark the submerged road that continues past a flooded farm & into the distance.

    Tulare Lake was historically fed by the Kings, Kaweah, Kern, and Tule Rivers. It was shallow and its surface area varied with the inflows, growing to 800 square miles some years. In 2023, the lake grew to 156 square miles. 

Doug & some friends went out to see the lake. They're standing on a road that was nearly comletely submerged in the lake.

    It was remarkable to see the lake bottom with water in it, not crops. Roads, farms, homes, and crops were flooded. During 2024 the water mostly receded. Rains in 2025 led to the lake filling slightly again.

The following day, we both went to see Tulare Lake.

    Doug became famous on our May 1, 2023, visit to Tulare Lake when he was interviewed by Wilson Walker of CBS affiliate KPIX. Doug commented, "It was maybe an inch lower [yesterday]. Doesn't sound like much, but that's a lot of surface area. A lot of water."

"[Tulare] Lake shows its wet and dry side in late March 2023. (Photo: Ken James, Department of Water Resources. KneeDeepTimes.org)

    In the above photo farmland is seen stretching to the horizon. Agriculture and population growth in the area of Tulare Lake began in the late 19th century. Eventually the Tachi Yokut Tribe were forced off their ancestral lands around the lakes. The rivers that fed into the lake were dammed and the water diverted to agriculture and Los Angeles. 

In 2023, PG&E used fan boats to take divers out into the lake to retrieve its equipment.

    Local utility PG&E used fan boats such as are used in the swamps of the Florida Everglades to transport divers to pull its equipment out of the lake. Imagine diving into the mirky water where thousands of chickens had drowned and oils and chemicals seeped in from flooded farms. 

The dike that protects the City of Corcoran & 2 nearby state prisons was raised in the event the lake should rise even higher.

Concluding the interview, Doug said, "...we've always come out every time it gets high. But I've never seen it...this high. It's foreboding." 

    The rapid reemergence of species of flora and fauna around Tulare Lake in 2023 encouraged renewed efforts by the Tachi Tribe, environmentalists, and activists to bring back a portion of the lake permanently. They must convince farmers, in particular JG Boswell and John Vidovich, to sell some of their land.
    "The farmlands that would be set aside for the project include 11,640 acres owned by Sandridge Partners, a company controlled by the family of Silicon Valley businessman John Vidovich, and 1,100 acres owned by farming giant J.G. Boswell Co., the area’s largest landowner. A third piece of land, totaling 11,240 acres, is owned by the Los Angeles County Sanitation District, which uses the fields to spread compost and grow crops." (LA Times. Ian James, "‘Water brings life’: Plans to revive Tulare Lake take shape in the San Joaquin Valley." July 3, 2025).

* * *

    We leave you with Doug's buddha and the cyclamen that has bloomed constantly since we placed the statue next to it. 

A reminder of the  Walk for Peace Buddhist Monks are taking from Texas to Washington, DC.