Tucked into the foothills of Mount Shasta, the Northern California town of McCloud has no stoplights and one grocery store. A former logger's El Dorado, McCloud fell on hard times in the 1980s when it started running out of trees to cut down. But with its drop-dead panoramas and crisp, clean air, the burg started to limp back in the 1990s. Today it is a world-renowned paradise for trout anglers, a respite for burned-out boomers looking to escape the status race, and a hotbed of New Age seekers, some of whom jet in from Japan to meditate and chant in what they regard as a spiritual vortex.
It is here that Nestlé Waters North America (NWNA), a subsidiary of the Swiss food and beverage giant, plans to operate one of the largest spring-water bottling plants in the U.S. The 1 million-square-foot facility—picture five Wal-Mart (WMT) supercenters strung together—is to rise on the site of McCloud's defunct lumber mill, a 250-acre swath of land that bends around the base of the mountain. Nestlé aims to draw 1,250 gallons a minute of water from McCloud's glacier-fed springs. The company would then pack 300 semi-trailers a day full of Arrowhead brand water, truck it as far away as Los Angeles and Reno, and sell it at prices that are as much as 1,000 times more than the cost of tap water. In exchange, Nestlé has agreed to pay McCloud roughly $350,000 a year for the water and create up to 240 jobs in and around the town.
