Catalina Island

This is beautiful Catalina Island just an hour’s trip outside of Los Angeles.  It’s about 22 miles long and 8 miles wide, and it’s full of very rocky uninhabitable canyons, caves, gold mines, and almost no fresh water.  It’s been like that since Cabrillo sailed into the bay in 1542.  The little towns of Avalon and Two Harbors had a salt-water toilet system even.  Despite having over a million tourists a year, the 5000 residents only use about 400 acre feet of water per year.  All of their drinking water comes from three shallow wells that feed off of a small, reservoir-driven aquifer.  I gather they also have a desalination plant that can handle 85 acre feet of water per year.  They’ve got an amazing system of water recycling going on, and are working on optimizing it further, but fresh water has always been a problem on this island…except…mysteriously…during Cabrillo’s visit.  When Cabrillo rolled in there were a lot of islanders, thousands, in fact, and judging from the rich archeological evidence they left behind on Catalina Island, they’d been there a long long time.  By the time of the gold rush, the island was uninhabited, everyone had moved to the mainland for jobs.  So they moved back and dug thousands of feet of tunnels under the island.  Then in 1864 a few years later, the USG, thinking they were all Confederates, forced everyone off the island again and set up a garrison.  It was a bit of a Pirates-of-the-Caribbean style easy harbor with a winding coastline easy to hide in.  The garrison is now the Isthmus Yacht Club.  Catalina was privately owned for a while, then corporately owned, and today two sister companies control the land and the tourist industry, which includes a casino, a golf course, a beach club and a country club.  How do they manage to do all this on 400 acre feet of water a year?   

Here’s a great article about the island’s first conspiracy theory- giant skeletons.  (with photos of the skeletons)  mysteriousuniverse.org/2017/07…

or the island’s secondary conspiracy theory - a portal to the hollow earth (Catalina has tons of caves and mines) - thecatalinaislander.com/articl…  thecatalinaislander.com/articl…   thecatalinaislander.com/articl… 

or the island’s third conspiracy theory - the mysterious death of Natalie Wood  www.cbsnews.com/news/natalie-w…

or the other island, you know the one, further north, where all mysterious occurrences have only one cause…