[81alum]

Trinity is going to take a long while to get to average.  I'm hoping it gets a lot of its water from snow melt.

It does.  I backpack in the Trinity Alps.  Because they are further north and closer to the Pacific than the Sierra, they get a much larger amount of precipitation even though they are much lower in elevation.   It is a lot more like Oregon than it is like central California.  There are some permanent snow fields as low as 7000 feet on some northern slopes.  At least, they used to be permanent.

This is a major reason why the bulk of the state's water storage is in our most northerly reservoirs.  That is the part of the state that gets the most moisture.  I've hiked across snow in the Trinity Alps well into July, depending on the year, even though comparable alpine/subalpine territory in the Sierra is 3000-4000 feet higher.

Trinity Dam is an interesting and controversial dam--the Trinity River drains to the Pacific and does not naturally flow to the central valley.  Just a few miles away Shasta Dam is on the Sacramento River that of course does flow to the central valley.  It is a marvel of engineering (and an ecological catastrophe) that Trinity Dam feeds a diversion complex that sent most of the Trinity River through tunnels to the central valley.  This was devastating to the Trinity fisheries and the Yurok people, and many mitigations have since been tried, including building a fish hatchery, requiring minimum stream flows during certain seasons, etc.  As a result, not all the water captured behind Trinity is now usable for drought-relief--some of it is required to keep the Trinity River looking something like a river.

[81alum]

Trinity is going to take a long while to get to average.  I'm hoping it gets a lot of its water from snow melt.

It does.  I backpack in the Trinity Alps.  Because they are further north and closer to the Pacific than the Sierra, they get a much larger amount of precipitation even though they are much lower in elevation.   It is a lot more like Oregon than it is like central California.  There are some permanent snow fields as low as 7000 feet on some northern slopes.  At least, they used to be permanent.

This is a major reason why the bulk of the state's water storage is in our most northerly reservoirs.  That is the part of the state that gets the most moisture.  I've hiked across snow in the Trinity Alps well into July, depending on the year, even though comparable alpine/subalpine territory in the Sierra is 3000-4000 feet higher.

Trinity Dam is an interesting and controversial dam--the Trinity River drains to the Pacific and does not naturally flow to the central valley.  Just a few miles away Shasta Dam is on the Sacramento River that of course does flow to the central valley.  It is a marvel of engineering (and an ecological catastrophe) that Trinity Dam feeds a diversion complex that sent most of the Trinity River through tunnels to the central valley.  This was devastating to the Trinity fisheries and the Yurok people, and many mitigations have since been tried, including building a fish hatchery, requiring minimum stream flows during certain seasons, etc.  As a result, not all the water captured behind Trinity is now usable for drought-relief--some of it is required to keep the Trinity River looking something like a river.