From my own investigations, which have now been in progress, off and on, for more than two years, I am convinced that the Hetch Hetchy is much the best mountain source for the San Francisco District, and I am also convinced that the city in course of its development of works for water supply will make the Hetch Hetchy valley more beautiful, and a far more useful instrument of pleasure than it is today...

What one finds there today is beautiful, but it is relatively tame in comparison with the far more grand and varied Yosemite.

The flooding of the valley floor, giving in its place a deeply sheltered lake with an outlet so planned that the bottom could never again become uncovered, would present features different from anything found in the Yosemite or elsewhere in California. The flooding of the margins and the stocking of the lake with trout would cure the mosquito pest and would thus double and perhaps treble the length of the season in which one can visit the valley in pleasure.

...it can be proved that by taking any source for its future water supply other than those found above the Hetch Hetchy, Eleanor, Cherry and Poopenaut reservoir sites, the San Francisco District would waste certainly more than ten million dollars; ultimately perhaps more than thirty million dollars,....and it is a matter of plain common sense that an extra burden of ten or twenty or thirty million dollars should not be placed on the tax payers and other citizens of the cities around San Francisco Bay merely to satisfy the peculiar views of a few solitude lovers or in order to meet the unreasonable demands of some sentimentalists who have been led astray by misstatements of the case and who have had no direct knowledge of the facts.