[kevinskii]

Fascinating! Also worth a look is Lake Lahontan, which covered much of northern CA and southern OR about 12,000 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Lahontan

[mkl]

Looks like you misremembered or misread the map? "Lake Lahontan was a large endorheic Pleistocene lake of modern northwestern Nevada that extended into northeastern California and southern Oregon." It was mostly in what's now Nevada, and there's a clearer map here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Bonneville#/media/File:La...

[blendo]

Perhaps there are American Indian oral histories of this lake? It would have covered the Black Rock desert to a depth of 500 feet.

“Archaeological evidence along the shore indicates the existence of the lake coincided roughly with the first appearance of humans in the region. ”

[gricardo99]

you don't have to go that far back. A little more than a century ago the California central valley looked very different. Tulare Lake was the largest fresh water lake west of the great lakes, bigger than Tahoe[1]. Of course there's also Hetch Hetchy, which supplies San Francisco's water[2]. Countless other engineering projects have vastly changed the flow of water in the state.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulare_Lake 2 -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hetch_Hetchy

[onychomys]

It's always seemed so bonkers to me that Yosemite National Park was made in 1890 and yet Hetch Hetchy, which was part of the park, was dammed in the early 1920s. I get that it was a different time and all, but come on, you can't go around destroying part of a NP like that.

[jefftk]

Consistent sources of water for cities are really important, and people were historically more willing to make pragmatic tradeoffs.