An Open Letter on the Next Fifty Years at Camanche and Pardee
The federal license that governs Camanche and Pardee reservoirs is being renewed for the first time since 1981. What gets written into the next license will shape public access to these lands until the 2080s.
The comment window on the study plan closes August 18, and I have filed comments in the federal proceeding asking that the region's trail potential be studied honestly.
The letter below is the companion to that filing. It is addressed to the District's board and leadership, and it asks for three things: a trails advisory committee, a trails implementation plan, and a clear pathway for events and partnerships. Organizations across the region are adding their names. If yours would like to join them, the form at the bottom of this page takes two minutes.
An Open Letter on the Next Fifty Years at Camanche and Pardee
To the Board of Directors and General Manager of the East Bay Municipal Utility District:
My name is Matt Teresi. I live in Lodi, and I write through Trailshed, an initiative that keeps a standing watch to improve trails at the rare windows when their future is decided. I see an opportunity to realize potential energy that can improve this region's trails, recreation, and tourism. I write with appreciation, and with an invitation.
The District's federal license for the Mokelumne River Project is being renewed for the first time since 1981. A license like this comes around once in a working lifetime. The people signing this letter will spend the rest of their lives beside these lakes under the terms now being written, and we want to help write a good recreation story into them.
We start by acknowledging what the District has already built. Camanche and Pardee are working water infrastructure, yet they host campgrounds with hundreds of sites, day use areas that serve thousands of families, a trail permit program, guided hikes led with District support, and a bicycle access pilot the District chose to undertake. The Mokelumne Coast to Crest Trail's Camanche-Pardee segment exists because District staff helped build it. This is not the record of an agency indifferent to recreation. It is a foundation, and foundations are for building on.
Here is what we see standing on that foundation. Trail running is in the middle of a remarkable rise. Applications for the Western States lottery, the sport's oldest hundred-mile race two counties north of us, have grown from about 2,300 in 2013 to more than 11,000 for 2026. The Canyons races in Auburn now draw over 2,500 runners from seventy countries. Major brands and international series are investing in venues: an independent 2024 study measured Ultra-Trail Australia's value to its host region at over 25 million Australian dollars in a single year, and Spain's Transgrancanaria documented 22.6 million euros, with visiting runners spending 27 percent more per day than the average tourist. No California region has yet commissioned such an assessment. The first one to deserve it may be ours.
And this region has already stood in that current once. From 2011 to 2022, the Mokelumne River Trail Running Festival ran on the Camanche-Pardee trail, and its 50-mile course carried UTMB qualifying points, the international standard, as recently as 2018. The race ended quietly, as volunteer efforts do. The trail did not go anywhere. With the right regulatory environment and cooperation with the District, what existed here can be reignited, and built to last this time.
The terrain itself is the quiet headline. More than twenty miles of continuous, runnable shoreline trail today. A potential loop of more than one hundred kilometers around both reservoirs, entirely under one landowner, something almost nowhere else in California can offer. A mild season that welcomes runners and hikers all winter, when the Sierra is closed. Three million people within ninety minutes. For Amador, Calaveras, and San Joaquin counties, a positioned trail network is jobs, visitors, and health: lodging and restaurant weekends, year-round training visitors, school teams with somewhere close to run, and families thirty minutes from a trailhead instead of ninety.
We do not ask the District to become something it is not. We ask to explore, together and deliberately, what these lands could become over the coming decades. Three steps would begin that exploration.
- Convene a Camanche-Pardee trails advisory committee, a standing body of regional stakeholders, including equestrian and conservation voices, to guide trail planning through the relicensing period and beyond.
- Commit to a trails implementation plan, with milestones, as a component of the Recreation Plan.
- Establish a published special-event and partnership pathway, so that qualified organizers and stewardship groups have a clear, fair process for proposing activity on project lands.
Fifty years is a long time. It is long enough to build something no single budget year could justify and no single administration could finish. The last license quietly carried a campground, a trail, and a generation of family weekends. We would like to help the next one carry more, and we would be glad to start whenever you are.
With respect and appreciation,
Matt Teresi
Trailshed, Lodi, California