Twin Drainage Play
Made February 15, 2009
Northern Central Valley in California
Hot, dry summers. Cool wet winters.
This play promises to be such a perfect play that as I contemplated it, it suggested certain principles that led me to find a similar play for the "twin" drainage in this basin. This link will take you to that play when the next rain allows me to make it.
1st View - This shows the heart of the play. We are standing on a broad gentle ridge that rises about forty feet above the local drainage which cuts down into this gentle plateau. Runoff flowing from the slopes behind us out towards the view ahead of us. However, the slope ahead bends the runoff into a head of the drainage that lies in the green shade of the manzanitas toward the top left.
In the foreground is the heart of the play - two parallel diversion channels that lead the runoff towards the right, away from that head of the drainage.
February 21, 2009
2nd View - This view looks out over the end of the main diversion channel towards the gentle ridgetop where the diverted runoff will flow towards.
February 21, 2009 March 2, 2009
3rd View - This view looks up across the gentle ridgetop that the runoff is diverted onto. What will happen because of the increase in groundwater that will accumulate here?
February 21, 2009
4th View - This view looks down onto two channels that converge in the lower left. My play diverts most of the runoff away from the upper channel in the picture. What will happen because of the reduction in runoff within this drainage?
February 21, 2009
The twin drainages converge
5th View - This view looks upstream at the channel that runoff has been led away from. In the foreground is the head of the gully that has formed downstream of the convergence of the two channels in the 4th View.
March 1, 2009
6th View - This view looks up the erosive heart of Rimrock Canyon - about 50 feet downstream of the convergence.
March 7, 2009
7th View - Lower end of Rimrock Canyon just above where Twin Drainage Basin converges with its higher order drainage.
March 7, 2009
8th View - Looking downstream at the higher drainage just below Twin Drainage's convergence.
March 7, 2009