The Tallest Wall in the World

That old stone dam holding back Lake Hemet — I told you it was once the tallest of its kind in the whole world, and now let me tell you how in the world they did it, because it's a tale of pure mule-headed mountain grit.

Set the scene: it's the early eighteen-nineties. There's no such thing as a bulldozer, no dump truck, no ready-mix concrete rolling up in a spinning drum. Down in the valley, the farmers are desperate for water to make their crops in that dry country, and the water they need is up here in these mountains, running off in the winter and spring and then gone. So a company sets out to do something that sounds half-mad: dam this mountain canyon, way up here at forty-three hundred feet, and catch that runoff in a lake.

Now how do you build a dam a hundred and twenty feet tall, up a mountain, in the eighteen-nineties? You do it out of stone — solid granite — because that's what the mountain gives you. And so the crews quarried enormous blocks of granite right out of the bluffs around here, and I mean enormous: blocks weighing five tons, ten tons, some of them fifteen tons apiece — a single stone as heavy as a loaded truck. And they moved those monsters, and lifted them, and fitted them together into a wall across the canyon, with mule teams and hoists and derricks and the sweat of a lot of strong backs, block by block by block, up here where the roads were barely more than trails.

And when they finally topped it out, in 1895, they had built — right here on this back-country mountain — the tallest solid masonry dam on the face of the Earth. The tallest anywhere. Not in New York, not in Europe, not on some great famous river — up here, in the San Jacinto Mountains, above the desert. And it held that world record for sixteen years, until a bigger one went up in Arizona. Then, in the nineteen-twenties, they came back and raised this one even higher.

It's still standing. Still holding back that lake you're looking at, well over a century later — those same hand-cut granite blocks, still doing their job. So give it a nod as you pass. It's a plain gray wall of rock on a quiet mountain lake, and for a while there, it was the champion of the whole world. Drive on.