Lake Don Pedro

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Panoramic view of Don Pedro Lake, California

Lake Don Pedro or Don Pedro Lake or Don Pedro Reservoir have all been used as names for the water retained by the Don Pedro Dams. If the names are qualified, the first projects in 1923 are generally referred to as the Old dam and reservoir, and the 1971 upgrades are the New dam and reservoir.

The project is located in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountain range at 37.7156° N 120.3940° W. The reservoir has about 160 miles (260 km) of shoreline, has submerged some 26 miles (42 km) of Tuolumne River bed, and has a surface area of about 13,000 acres (53 km²). The 2.03 million acre feet (2.50 km³) of water stored here comes from a watershed of over 1,500 square miles (3900 km²), and is used by the Modesto Irrigation District (MID) and the Turlock Irrigation District (TID) for agricultural irrigation of several hundred square miles of productive Central Valley farm land. Some of the water is treated by the MID and used as drinking water in Modesto. The two irrigation districts and the BLM control the land 15 feet above the high lake level, so there are no private boat docks on lakefront parcels. There are three public boat ramps.

The 5 largest artificial lakes in California are:

4.55 million acre feet (5.61 km³) Lake Shasta
3.54 million acre feet (4.37 km³) Lake Oroville
2.45 million acre feet (3.02 km³) Trinity Lake
2.42 million acre feet (2.99 km³) New Melones Lake
2.03 million acre feet (2.50 km³) New Don Pedro

While Lake Don Pedro is not part of the Hetch Hetchy Water and Power system, water in that system flows in tunnels under the upper end of the reservoir. Lake Don Pedro could easily be tied into that system in the future, and the efforts of the Restore Hetch Hetchy group to drain the reservoir in the Hetch Hetchy Valley depend largely on that possibility. The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC), of which Hetch Hetchy Water and Power is a division, provided about 45% of the funds for construction of the 1971 Don Pedro Dam and so has the right to store 570,000 acre feet (0.70 km³) of water in the reservoir. The rights of the MID and the TID are senior to those of SFPUC, however, so in dry years MID and TID can draw down the reservoir to meet their own needs.

Towns near the lake include Moccasin, California.