Data Center Watch: Stratos project edition: Massive complex on the banks of the #GreatSaltLake sparks intense opposition — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

May 8, 2026

📸 Opening Shot 🎞️

A train loads up at the West Elk coal mine near Somerset, Colorado. Like the rest of the coal industry, the West Elk’s days appeared to be numbered a decade ago. But growing power demand from data centers and the Trump administration’s fossil fuel-friendly policies are coming together to breathe new life into mines like this one. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

🤖 Data Center Watch 👾

Yet another scene in the ongoing saga of the Big Data Center Buildup is playing out in Box Elder County, Utah, where the board of commissioners this week approved the proposed Stratos Project data center and energy generation complex, despite widespread and intense local opposition.

Enigmatic entities have forwarded so many proposals for ginormous new data centers in the West that I not only find myself overwhelmed, but I also suspect that many of them are just speculative pipe dreams that will never be built. Similarly, when I read about the inevitable backlash, I tend to think of it as an almost reflexive reaction — something folks have simply been conditioned to do when they hear the terms “AI,” “hyper scale,” and “data center” — that is not based in the actual effects these things will have.

This project — led by investor Kevin O’Leary of the tv-show Shark Tank — appears to be serious, as it comes with the backing of Utah’s Military Installation Development Authority, or MIDA, a state entity created to “further economic development across multiple jurisdictions.” Gov. Spencer Cox has said the state has an “obligation … to allow for these types of data centers to be built,” so it should slide through state permitting without a hitch.

Its potential impacts are not only real, but also scary: The project would ultimately cover about 40,000 acres just north of the Great Salt Lake, its on-site 9-gigawatt power plant would guzzle enormous amounts of natural gas and emit greenhouse gases, and the facility could even create its own extreme heat island. No wonder the pushback is so impassioned.

The scale of this thing is utterly mind-blowing, from its 62-square-mile footprint — equivalent to about 1,000 Walmart super centers — to the size of its gas-fired power plant. Nine gigawatts (or 9,000 megawatts) is enough to power multiple cities and millions of households; all of Utah’s coal, natural gas, and wind and solar facilities combined have a nameplate capacity of just 10.2 GW. While natural gas burns more cleanly than coal, it still emits significant levels of carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxides, and Project Stratos could increase state’s greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 50%. Natural gas drilling, processing, and transportation bring their own environmental impacts and emit methane — a potent greenhouse gas — as well as other harmful pollutants. The facility would be served by the Ruby Pipeline, which carries gas extracted from Wyoming fields.

The natural gas component fits the pattern of the Big Data Center Buildup. Developers often say they are going to run their centers on solar, wind, geothermal, or even nuclear power. When it comes down to it, however, most of them end up relying on gas, at least initially. The developer of the proposed Prometheus Hyperscale data center along the Natrona-Converse county line in Wyoming initially touted all of the renewable energy opportunities in the area. Now they plan to run entirely on natural gas. Even the ones that do build or buy some solar or wind still tend to use gas-turbines or even diesel generators for backup.

Energy Transfer is looking to build a dedicated natural gas pipeline to serve the giant and controversial Project Jupiter complex in southern New Mexico, and the Bureau of Land Management just issued a right-of-way for the 400 million-cubic-feet-per-day project under its accelerated review process. The developers reacted to vigorous opposition by switching from the planned conventional gas turbines to solid oxide fuel cells. However, the cells are also fueled by natural gas — thus the pipeline —and do have emissions, albeit fewer than conventional turbines.

While many of the largest new data centers plan to build dedicated, on-site power generation, most of the planned facilities and those coming online now will get all or most of their electricity from the power grid. All of this new and projected new demand has utility executives salivating over the prospect of selling more product and raking in more profit. It has also spurred many utilities to cancel plans to shutter dirty coal plants or to make plans to build more natural gas facilities. So even if all of the proposed data centers aren’t realized, their mere possibility could lock in more fossil fuel burning and more pollution for years to come.

The Stratos Project’s potential water use is less clear, but certainly relevant given that it would draw from the same hydrologic system as the Great Salt Lake, which is shrinking. Data centers generate an enormous amount of heat, so they must be cooled, which can consume large quantities of water (and power). The developer says it plans to use a closed-loop cooling system, which must be filled once and so consumes relatively little water. These systems, however, remain relatively uncommon in these facilities. Natural gas turbines can also require large volumes of water for steam generation and cooling, though consumption levels depend on the type of turbine.

In March, the nearby Bar H Ranch proposed transferring its rights to 1,900 acre-feet annually of irrigation water diverted from the Salt Wells Springs Stream for industrial use at the Stratos Project, a.k.a. “Wonder Valley.” The application noted that the water “will be used primarily for power generation. A portion of the water will also be used in connection with a data center that will operate as a closed-loop system.” Thousands of people protested the application, based on its potential impacts on the lake and neighboring wells.

For context, 1,900 acre-feet (or 619 million gallons) would be enough to grow about 1,400 tons of alfalfa, or to irrigate some 500 acres of Utah alfalfa fields for a full growing season. That may not be enough water, however, to serve the natural gas power plant if it runs full-time. A combined cycle natural gas turbine uses about 200 gallons per MWhr of generation. If you assume a 60% capacity factor, then the 9 GW¹plant would produce about 130,000 MWhr per day, leading to an annual water use of about 9.5 billion gallons assuming it runs full-blast 24/7. This is in line with developers’ statements that they would eventually seek up to 13,000 acre-feet of water rights.

The firm withdrew the application this week, just two days after the protest period ended, saying it would submit a new application later (which would void all of the protests and force residents to re-submit their comments and pay the filing fee again).

“The people of Utah, especially those from Box Elder County, filed protests in record numbers because of their concerns about this project,” said Ben Abbott, BYU ecologist and executive director of Grow the Flow, a non-partisan organization dedicated to saving the Great Salt Lake. “For the developer to sidestep the public input process by withdrawing their application and resubmitting later is another breach of trust. I keep trying to give them the benefit of the doubt, but this has all the hallmarks of an out-of-state mega-project with little to no concern for the local community.”

Meanwhile, O’Leary, the project’s pusher, is responding to the opposition by dangling the dim possibility of incorporating other power generation technologies into the mix, and by accusing the ranchers, doctors, and Utah citizens protesting the proposal of being paid, out-of-state agitators. As tired, worn-out, and false the claim is, it does provide an indication that the developers behind this project really don’t care about its potential impacts — or the land, people, or waters it may affect.

Data Centers: The Big Buildup of the Digital Age — Jonathan P. Thompson

The Big Data Center Buildup is increasing demand for all sorts of energy, especially generation fueled by natural gas. This, along with increased liquefied natural gas exports, could drive up methane prices and finally pull the industry out of its 17-year-long slump — at least that’s what the industry is hoping for. And the Trump administration is doing its darndest to clear the way for more oil and gas drilling.

The BLM is currently seeking public input on its plan to sell a whopping 276 oil and gas leases on 357,337 acres in Wyoming. That’s a lot of land that could be targeted for drilling. The administration has leased public land, and issued drilling permits, at an almost unprecedented rate since taking office last January.

Data Dump: One year into the “energy emergency” — Jonathan P. Thompson

🌵 Public Lands 🌲 🏠 Random Real Estate Room 🤑

The effort to tackle the affordable housing crisis in Western amenities community has met up with the public lands, but not in the way you might think. Dozens of low-income housing advocacy groups have come together with environmental groups to form Shared Ground, a new coalition that aims not only to increase access to affordable housing, but also to protect public lands — while also opening the door to selling some of those lands if strict criteria are followed.

The mission of the coalition is summed up in a recent document, noting:

The document criticizes Sen. Mike Lee’s push to sell public land to real estate developers, noting:

Furthermore, the coalition acknowledges that the affordable housing crisis is “fundamentally a policy and investment challenge—not the result of a simple shortage of land.”

Nevertheless, Shared Ground does leave the door open to selling public land for housing, as long as it meets the following criteria (this is from the coalition’s statement):

Demonstrated Public Interest and Community Benefit: Any proposal for the use or disposal of public lands for housing must carry binding, legally enforceable requirements that the land primarily serves affordable housing rather than market-rate and never fuels speculative development. Benefits must flow primarily to local, existing communities—not private developers—and projects should be limited to parcels near existing infrastructure and services.

Careful Inventory and Prioritization: Any such proposal must also require carefulinventory of the public lands under consideration for use or disposal and prioritize already-developed sites over undeveloped land.

Conservation, Cultural, Recreational, and Tribal Safeguards: Public Lands withsignificant conservation, wildlife, cultural, historic, Tribal, or recreational value must be excluded from any conveyance or development proposal. All proposals must include early, meaningful consultation with Tribal Nations, and transparent engagement with local communities, with clear public accountability throughout the process.

On the housing supply-side theory — Jonathan P. Thompson

The Dolores River upstream of its confluence with the San Miguel River is heartbreakingly dry right now, as operators of McPhee Reservoir release 10 cubic feet per-second or less from the dam. After it joins the San Miguel, the river jumps to a meagre 84 cfs as it passes through Gateway. Forecasts are calling for warm temperatures in the coming week, which could raise the San Miguel’s level somewhat, but will also likely melt all the remaining snow in the mountains. Jonathan P. Thompson photo from May 3, 2026.

The Dolores River in Bedrock (in the Paradox Valley of western Colorado) is running at record low levels currently as dam operators hold back as much water as possible in McPhee Reservoir to ration out to irrigators this summer.

While I’m fairly certain the streams all hit peak runoff back in April, I’m not calling the contest yet. April and early May storms and more “normal” temperatures have kept a bit more of the snowpack around than expected, and forecasted heat in coming days will probably melt off what remains pretty quickly, possibly leading to a surge in streamflows. But by the end of next week, I’m predicting all but the highest monitoring stations will be snow-free, meaning spring runoff pretty much will be done and gone.

📸 Parting Shot 🎞️

A collared lizard basks in the early May sun between chasing butterflies and other insects near the Colorado-Utah state line. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

¹ The figures for the size of the power plant vary from place to place. The developer’s “fact sheet” lists 9 GW of Utah power generation, while the water right application said it was for 7.5 GW. Rob Davies’ analysis of the heat output of the facility assumes that the data center’s load will be 9 GW, which would require a 16 GW power facility operating at 55% efficiency.

Chaco protections in the crosshairs; Chaco comment period ends April 7; USFS Headquarters to Salt Lake City — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

Rubble and a cone-shaped butte at Pierre’s Site, a Chacoan great house about ten miles north of Chaco Culture National Historical Park. The area around the site would be re-opened to new oil and gas leases under the Trump administration’s proposal to revoke a Biden-era “buffer zone” around the park. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

April 3, 2026

The News: The Trump administration is formally proposing to revoke the Biden-era ban on new oil and gas leases within the 10-mile buffer zone around Chaco Culture National Historical Park in northwestern New Mexico. The Bureau of Land Management is accepting public comments for just seven days, with the input period ending April 7.

The Context: When President Theodore Roosevelt wielded the brand new Antiquities Act in 1907 to create Chaco Canyon National Monument, he drew the boundaries around what is now known as “downtown Chaco,” a handful of structures including the 800-room Pueblo Bonito, constructed between the 9th and 12th centuries by ancestors of today’s Pueblo people.

That was merely the center of the Chacoan world, however, which extended over 100 miles outward into the Four Corners region. No one knows if this was a political empire, a religious or cultural society, or a school of architecture, but it is clear that the dozens of Chacoan outliers or “great houses,” along with thousands of smaller sites, shrines, and architectural features with unknown function, did not exist in isolation. They were part of a cultural tapestry woven into the natural landscape. The national monument, in other words, was vastly incomplete, which is especially concerning given that it lies in would become one of the nation’s most heavily drilled oil and gas fields.

Wall at Twin Angels Great House, a Chacoan outlier along the Great North Road with an oil and gas well pad and tanks visible in the background. This site is well outside the 10-mile Chaco buffer zone. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

That’s not to say that Chacoan sites are devoid of protections. The park itself is off-limits to all oil and gas development. Pierre’s Site and several other outliers are part of the Chaco Culture Archaeological Protection Sites Program, and all sites on federal land are shielded by the Archaeological Resources Protection Act and Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act, which requires oil companies to conduct a cultural inventory of all land in the path of development. If the surveyors happen upon a “significant” site, the well pad or road or pipeline must be relocated, if possible, at least 50 to 100 feet away, a process known as “identify and avoid.” Tribes are supposed to be consulted in these cases, as well, though their concerns aren’t always considered.

But “identify and avoid” misses a great deal.

“Even though agencies try to mitigate the impact, it isn’t enough because you’ve literally destroyed the context in which those things exist,” Theresa Pasqual told me several years ago when I was writing about Indigenous resistance to drilling around Chaco. She is the former director of Acoma Pueblo’s Historic Preservation Office, and a descendant of the Pueblo people who occupied the Four Corners region for thousands of years. “Most of our pueblos are still transmitting their migration history through oral means. So when you have development that begins to impact many of these sites — that range in size from the grandeur of Chaco Canyon or Mesa Verde to very small unknown sites that still remain un-surveyed and unknown to the public — they are literally destroying the pages of the history book of the Pueblo people.”

Pierre’s Site, a Chacoan great house about nine miles north of the park’s boundary, illustrates this concept. The site is made up of a collection of thick-walled stone structures built among and in harmony with distinctive shale and sandstone buttes and bluffs. That “page,” or the structures and their immediate surroundings, has been kept intact by the aforementioned protections. But a cluster of well pads, along with pumpjacks, tanks, and associated infrastructure sit less than a half-mile away, and they are visible — and their whir-pop-whir sounds audible — from the site. They not only affect the way one experiences Pierre’s, but also have surely erased some of the important context.

Rubble at Pierre’s Site. Jonathan P. Thompson photo

Pierre’s lies along the Great North Road—the most prominent and visible of several such “roads” in the region—an architectural feature that stretches directly north of Chaco Canyon for 30 miles or more. It may have been a symbolic path through time, connecting old worlds with new, or a reminder of the power Chaco-central wielded over its outliers, or a giant arrow pointing people to a holy place. Chaco scholar Paul Reed calls it “a landscape monument on a large scale.” Yet little effort has been made to protect it. Oil field roads and pipelines cross it in dozens of places, and workers have bulldozed well pads right on top of it, erasing the subtle signs that it was ever there. If something so significant can get plowed under, how many more subtle features—shrines, corn fields, plant-gathering sites, ceremonial areas, flint-knapping spots—have been destroyed indelibly?

It was with the greater context in mind that in 2023, after years of consideration, public meetings, and analysis, President Joe Biden signed Public Lands Order 7923, which withdrew about 336,000 acres of public land from oil and gas leasing for 20 years. Tribal nations with ties to the cultural landscape, environmental advocates, and archaeologists had sought the withdrawal to provide a buffer zone around the national historical park and to add a layer of protection to the associated sites within 10 miles of the park’s boundaries.

Map of the 10-mile buffer zone. Source: All Pueblo Council of Governors.

The withdrawal was incomplete, in that it still covered only a tiny slice of the greater Chaco landscape. Several significant outliers, along with about 20 miles of the Great North Road, remained unprotected. Chaco is also in the middle of what’s known as the Checkerboard, a hodgepodge of land ownership and jurisdictions, which complicates the withdrawal, since it only applies to BLM land. The Checkerboard lies within the Navajo Nation’s borders, but it is not reservation land, and it includes Bureau of Land Management land, state lands, private lands, and Indian allotments, which exist in a sort of limbo between private, tribal, and federal land.

The Navajo Nation initially supported the withdrawal, but when tribal leadership changed, so did its stance. In response to pressure from allotment owners within the buffer zone, who worried that their royalties from drilling would be threatened, the Buu Nygren administration turned against the buffer. While leasing is still allowed on those allotments within the withdrawal area, an oil and gas company is less likely to drill there because they can’t “pool” the allotment resources with those of neighboring federal parcels.

Pumpjack and Haystack Mountain as seen from the “Acropolis” at Pierre’s Site, with “Downtown Chaco” in between (but out of view since it’s in a canyon). This view looks directly south down the Great North Road, which is aligned with the meridian stretching from Haystack Mountain to Mount Wilson in the San Juan Mountains in Colorado. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Project 2025, the right wing’s playbook for the Trump administration, directly called for the Chaco buffer zone’s elimination, and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has been toying with the idea for the last year. Finally, on the last day of March, the administration opened a one-week public comment period, on the proposal to either revoke the buffer zone altogether, or to reduce it to a five-mile radius around the park, which would leave out Pierre’s and other significant sites.

The All Pueblo Council of Governors, Indigenous and environmental advocates, archaeology groups, and New Mexico’s congressional delegation all pushed back on the Trump administration’s move and called for the current buffer zone to be retained.

To give your two cents on the proposal, go to the BLM’s project page. [ed. emphasis mine]

***

The Trump administration announced it will move the U.S. Forest Service headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Salt Lake City as part of a “sweeping restructuring of the agency to move leadership closer to the forests and communities it serves.” The shake-up includes:

Moving about 260 employees from Washington HQ to Salt Lake City, and shuffling around another 2,600 staffers;

Eliminating its region-based organizing structure and shifting it to one centered around 15 state-level offices. This will include shuttering regional offices, some of which will be retained for other purposes;

Closing 57 research and development stations, while retaining 20, eight of which are in Western states;

As for firefighting, a Forest Service press release noted:

Administration officials say the overhaul is aimed at making the agency, which is a branch of the U.S. Agriculture Department, more nimble and efficient. Yet it has not provided an analysis of how such a vast restructuring would accomplish those goals, or how much money it would save. It comes about a year after the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE, fired about 3,400 Forest Service employees, or more than 10% of the agency’s total workforce.

It’s all part of a larger departmental overhaul designed to “bring the USDA closer to its customers,” according to a USDA memorandum from last year. Customers? Do they mean the extractive industries? The American people? Or what? Either way, it seems like strange terminology for a government agency to be using.

In reality, as Christine Peterson reports in High Country News, the overhaul is doing little except sowing confusion and concern among agency staffers and observers.

These maps show where the new state offices will be after the reorganization is complete. Source: USDA.

Which research facilities will survive the overhaul (below). Source: USDA.

As I’ve written here before, I don’t see moving public land agencies out of Washington to be an unmitigated disaster in and of itself. And contrary to some takes, it won’t automatically lead to wholesale clearcutting of the West’s forests. Forest Service and BLM higher-ups don’t need to be close to Capitol Hill or the White House to do their jobs, especially in the Zoom age. And it wouldn’t hurt to get the Forest Service Chief or the BLM Director out on the landscapes they oversee a bit more often, where perhaps they can see the consequences of projects or policies they may sign off on. Utah may be a questionable location, given the state’s leaders hostility toward public land management, but Salt Lake City is a fairly progressive place, and the likes of Sen. Mike Lee will have just as much access to agency leaders in D.C. as they would in SLC.

That said, if such a move is not done correctly, it can be disastrous. Take Trump’s first-term relocation of the Bureau of Land Management’s headquarters to Grand Junction, Colorado, in 2019. That led to a de facto agency housecleaning; many senior staffers chose to resign or move to other agencies rather than uproot their lives and families and move across the country, and only a handful of workers ended up in the Colorado office, which shared a building with oil and gas companies. A vast storehouse of institutional knowledge and expertise was lost, and virtually nothing was accomplished.

We’re likely to see the same sort of dynamic playing out with this move, even though SLC is larger, more cosmopolitan, and has a bigger airport than GJC. Plus, the USFS overhaul is far more than a mere HQ move. Shuttering nearly 60 research and development facilities, many of which are tied to universities or colleges, will have a major impact, even if their functions and staff are moved elsewhere. Ditto with the regional-to-state office shuffle (the point of which is what, exactly?).

And, this is all happening as the administration makes a push to return the Forest Service to its timber plantation era, which ran from the 1950s through the ’80s. During that time, logging companies harvested 10 billion to 12 billion board-feet per year from federal forests, while for the last 25 years, the annual number has hovered below 3 billion board-feet. Now, Trump, via his Immediate Expansion of American Timber Production order, plans to crank up the annual cut to 4 billion board-feet by 2028. How? By declaring an “emergency” that allows the agency and logging companies to bypass environmental laws. Never mind that the infrastructure and demand don’t necessarily exist to carry out this plan.

Rollins issued a memo last year declaring that the threat of wildfires, insects and disease, invasive species, overgrown forests, the growing number of homes in the wildland-urban interface, and more than a century of rigorous fire suppression have contributed to what is now “a full-blown wildfire and forest health crisis.” And she expanded the “emergency situation” acreage from 67 million acres under Biden, to almost 113 million acres, or 59% of all Forest Service lands, opening it up to streamlined forest “management,” aka timber operations.

🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫

I’m calling it: The Dolores River in Dolores reached peak spring runoff of 1,090 cubic feet per second on March 26. If this holds (and, yes, there is a chance that April showers will bring big May flows), then it will be the earliest peak on record by far. This is more an indication of how intense and unusual the end-of-March heat wave was than of how scant the snowpack was. It was the fourth lowest peak flow on record, behind 2002, 1977, and 2018.

The good news: The April 1 storm gave the snowpack a big boost. The bad news: In most places the snow water equivalent remains below that of the same date in 2002, which had been the worst snow year on record. The same pattern is evident in other San Juan Mountain river basins, but the picture looks a little better at higher elevation SNOTEL stations. Source: USDA NRCS.

Silverton, Colorado’s weather watcher Fred Canfield reports on a welcome burst of moisture at the high country burg in early April, writing:

Parting Cheeseburger Query

Four years ago, I asked you kind readers (or at least the ones that were around back then), for your recommendations on the best independent bookstores and green chile cheeseburgers in the West so I could add them to the Land Desk Green Chile Atlas. I know, it’s kind of weird to combine the two, and I apologize to all vegan booksellers that this pairing may offend (but I will add that vegan burgers are included, too).

Now I figured I’d come back and not only remind you that the Atlas exists, but also ask for updates, new book or green chile-related finds. So fire away!

Warm weather boosts fishing, hurts skiing and water reserves in Southwest #Colorado — The #Durango Herald #snowpack #drought

Westwide SNOTEL basin-filled map January 3, 2025.

Click the link to read the article on The Durango Herald website (Jessica Bowman). Here’s an excerpt:

December 30, 2025

All it takes is a quick step outside to confirm that, so far, winter in La Plata County – and across much of Southwest Colorado – is unseasonably warm. Durango set record-breaking highs on Dec. 24 and Dec. 25, when the temperature climbed to 60 degrees, 5 degrees warmer than previous records for those dates, according to in-town data from the National Weather Service. The warm temperatures have been accompanied by a drier-than-normal December and scarce early season snowfall. While it has impacted and raised concerns across sectors like cattle ranchers, water management and tourism – sectors largely dependent on winter weather – no one is throwing out hope for a good winter. [ed. emphasis mine]

Local businesses have been impacted by the weather differently – good or bad, dependent on the seasonal recreation it sells. Scant snowfall is bad news for powder hounds, and bad business for ski shops that depend on winter recreation business…And while ski-related businesses wait for snow, Durango’s fishing industry has seen increased activity, as warmer temperatures keep rivers accessible later into the season…If warm, dry conditions persist long-term, Glenn said, the outlook could shift. Low river levels and heightened wildfire risk would pose serious challenges for the fishing industry in future seasons…

For the region’s ranching community, winter precipitation is closely tied to long-term water security. Low snowpack can mean less water available once irrigation ditches reopen in the spring. Although the warm weather has limited snowfall so far, heavy rains in the fall helped replenish local reservoirs, providing some reassurance heading into summer, said Wayne Jefferies, president of the Archuleta Cattlemen’s Society…Lemon and Vallecito reservoirs are now nearly three-quarters full – a significant improvement from projections at the end of last summer…

Colorado Drought Monitor map December 30, 2025.

Still, Jefferies said a lack of snowfall remains concerning. If dry conditions persist into early 2026, reservoir levels alone may not be enough to offset reduced snowmelt. Ranchers – who often joke that they are “grass farmers” – rely heavily on snowmelt to recharge underground moisture that supports healthy forage growth. Beneath the surface, soil and gravel layers act like a sponge, [Wayne] Jefferies said. Snowmelt is needed to saturate that sponge before irrigation water and rain can effectively reach grasses. Without sufficient snow and spring runoff, those underground layers remain dry, he said. When irrigation begins, much of the water is absorbed below ground, leaving less available for grasses to grow. The result can be weaker forage, reduced grazing capacity and added strain on ranching operations. Jefferies added this isn’t new. Southwest Colorado has experienced persistent drought conditions for much of the past two decades, punctuated by only brief periods of relief…

Water managers, meanwhile, are entering winter in a stronger position than usual thanks to the fall floods. The October flooding caused reservoirs to rise rapidly. Vallecito Reservoir, which stores water for the Pine River Irrigation District, rose 25 feet in just a few days, said Ken Beck, PRID superintendent. The surplus of water reserves after a dry summer is a good buffer for next year, and has eased the stress of relying solely on winter precipitation, Beck said, although water supply is always subject to some degree of uncertainty.

The Weminuche Wilderness at 50 — and a way forward for public lands: The creation of Colorado’s wilderness area was remarkably nonpartisan — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

A photo illustration of the Grenadier Range in the Weminuche Wilderness. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

October 28, 2025

Editor’s note: Last week I had the pleasure of speaking at the San Juan Citizens’ Alliance celebration of 50 years of the Weminuche Wilderness, Colorado’s largest wilderness area at nearly 500,000 acres. Congress passed the legislation establishing the Weminuche in 1975, and it now covers some of the most spectacular landscape in the nation. This is an adapted version of the talk I gave (with a lot fewer umms and uhhs in it).

As I’m sure you all are aware, our public lands have been under attack for a while now, but especially in the last nine months, from both the Trump administration and from the Republican-dominated Congress.

This all out assault has given me many reasons to worry about the fate of some of my favorite places. I have worried about Sen. Mike Lee, the MAGA adherent from Utah, selling off Animas Mountain or Jumbo Mountain to the housing developers; I have fretted about Trump shrinking or eliminating Bears Ears, Grand Staircase-Escalante, or Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon national monuments and opening them to the latest uranium mining rush; and I worry that regulatory rollbacks and the administration’s “energy dominance” agenda will make the San Juan Basin and the Greater Chaco Region more vulnerable to a potential new natural gas boom driven by data center demand for more and more power.

But one place I haven’t worried (as much) about being attacked by the GOP and Trump is the Weminuche Wilderness. That’s not because I think Trump or Lee are above messing with wilderness areas. They aren’t. In fact, just this week they opened the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge up to oil and gas leasing. Still, the Wilderness Act is one of the few major environmental laws these guys haven’t gone after directly — at least so far.

But more than that, the reason I feel the Weminuche is less vulnerable to MAGA attacks is because I am confident that even the most die-hard anti-environmentalist sorts understand that an attack on the Weminuche would be an attack on this region and its identity. The Weminuche has simply become ingrained in the collective psyche of southwest Colorado and beyond. If the feds were to try to open it to logging or drilling or mining or any other sort of development, there would be a widespread, deep revolt from this entire region, even from many a Trump voter.

In part, that’s because of how special the place is, with or without a wilderness designation. But it also has to do with the way the wilderness was established, and the widespread local support it ultimately garnered.

Not long after the Wilderness Act of 1964 was signed into law, federal and state agencies and residents of southwestern Colorado began talking about establishing a wilderness area in the remote San Juan Mountains. Areas such as the Silverton Caldera had been heavily mined, and no longer qualified for wilderness designation (even if the mining industry and local communities would have allowed it).

But the heart of the San Juans in and around the Needle and Grenadier ranges certainly fit the bill. In 1859, Macomb expedition geologist J.S. Newberry described the San Juans as a “thousand interlocking spurs and narrow valleys, [which] form a labyrinth whose extent and intricacy will at present defy all attempts at detailed topographical analysis. Among these are precipices, ornamented with imitations of columns, arches, and pilasters, which form some of the grandest specimens of nature’s Gothic architecture I have ever beheld. When viewed from some nearer point they must be even awful in their sublimity.”

“Awful” might be a bit harsh, but sublime? Indeed. That this should become a wilderness must have seemed like a no-brainer.

Nevertheless, the process to designate the Weminuche was no slam dunk. It took a half decade of wrangling and debate and boundary adjustments and congressional committee sausage-making. What to me is most remarkable, however, looking back on the process from our current, politically polarized era, is that the debates were not partisan. And even though there were differing opinions on where the boundaries should be drawn or even whether there should be any wilderness at all, the conversation was just that: a conversation, and a civil one at that.

Proposals were forwarded by the Forest Service and the Colorado Game & Fish Department. Meanwhile, the Citizens for the Weminuche Wilderness — made up of local advocates, ranchers, scientists, business people, and academics — came up with its own proposed boundaries.

My father chronicled some of the back and forth in an insert he put together and edited for the Durango Herald in 1969 called “The Wilderness Question.” It includes his editorials and news stories, but also opinion pieces from a variety of residents.

Looking back, it is a truly striking document. First off, there’s the fact that the Forest Service’s original proposal would have excluded Chicago Basin — now considered the heart of the wilderness area and a Mecca for backpackers and peak-baggers (and their attendant impacts) — and the City Reservoir trail and surrounding areas. They were left out, in part, because there were hundreds of mining claims in those areas, and the mining industry remained interested in them, despite their remoteness and difficult access.

The citizens group, however, was having none of that, and demanded that both areas be included in the wilderness area. Carving these areas out would be like cutting the soul from the place. Ranchers weighed in, as well. James Cole, who was described as a “prominent Basin rancher,” wrote this for the Herald supplement: “The La Plata County Cattlemen are in favor of the proposed Weminuche Wilderness Area … We would like to see Weminuche Creek and Chicago Basin, which the forest service would like to exclude, included in the Wilderness Area.”

It may seem odd, today, to see a livestock operators’ group advocating for morewilderness than even the feds wanted, but it makes a lot of sense. Not only are many ranchers conservation-minded, but their operations were unlikely to be affected by wilderness designation, since grazing is allowed in wilderness areas. It’s actually far stranger to see southeastern Utah ranchers become some of the most zealous opponents of Bears Ears National Monument, since its establishment didn’t ban or restrict current grazing allotments.

Fred Kroeger, a lifelong Republican1 and local water buffalo, who for years pushed for the construction of the Animas-La Plata water project, supported wilderness designation because it would protect the region’s water. (My grandparents, who were Animas Valley farmers and Republicans also supported the designation).

John Zink was a rancher, businessman, fisherman, and hunter and member of the citizens’ committee. In the Herald supplement he wrote that the proposed Weminuche Wilderness, “offers outdoor lovers an opportunity to support another sound conservation practice.”

He continued:

“For me it won’t be many years until slowed feet and dimmed eyes make the south 40 the logical place to hunt, and when the time comes, I expect to enjoy it. But a new and younger generation of outdoor lovers will then be climbing the peaks and wading the icy streams. I ask all outdoor enthusiasts to support the proposed Weminuche Wilderness Area, so each new generation may enjoy it much as it was when Chief Weminuche led his braves across this fabled land.”

That’s not to say everyone was in favor of the citizens’ proposal, but opposition was almost always on pragmatic, not political or ideological grounds. Probably the most strident opposing opinion piece in the Herald supplement came from an engineer at the Dixilyn Mine outside of Silverton, who didn’t want his industry shut out of any potentially mineralized areas, including Chicago Basin. Less than two decades later, the mining industry would be all but gone from the San Juans — and it had nothing to do with wilderness areas or other environmental protections.

John Zink’s son, Ed, who would go on to become a prominent businessman, pillar of the community, and the driving force establishing Durango as a cycling hub, asked that some areas, including the trail to City Reservoir, be excluded from the wilderness to accommodate the rights of “riders of machines.” He was talking about motorbikes back then, but would later focus more on mountain bikes. Zink, a staunch Republican, was undoubtedly bummed when the City Reservoir trail was included in the wilderness area, per the citizens’ proposal.

Nevertheless, a few years later, when I was about eight years old, I went on one of my earliest backpacking trips up the trail with Zink (who was my dad’s cousin), along with his sons Tim and Brian, nephew Johnny, and my dad and my brother. We hiked for hours without seeing anyone else — and without hearing the buzz of any motorized vehicles. Ed didn’t seem to miss his motorcycle one bit, nor did he or other motorized groups file lawsuits to try to block or shrink the wilderness, as is common practice today.

Ed would later be instrumental in establishing the Hermosa Creek wilderness area north of Durango, a compromise bill that left Hermosa Creek trail open to mountain bikes and motorbikes. Again, he worked from a pragmatic mindset: He wanted to protect the watershed from which his irrigation and drinking water came, and the forests that sustained game and wildlife, while also retaining recreational access.

When Congress finally passed the bill establishing the Weminuche, it went with the citizens’ group proposal and then some, designating 405,000 acres of federal land as a wilderness area and including Chicago Basin and City Reservoir. The Weminuche Wilderness was expanded in 1980 and again in 1993.

In the years since, public lands protection and conservation have become more and more politicized, along with just about everything else. The pragmatism of the 1970s has been abandoned in favor of ideology; public lands, somehow, have become a pawn in the culture wars. I’m sure both parties share some of the blame, but judging from their actions of late, the MAGA Republicans have become the staunchly anti-public lands conservation party — and bear absolutely no resemblance to the old school Republicans who fought for wilderness designation 50 years ago. Hell, for that matter, some Republican politicians don’t even resemble their selves from just a couple of decades ago.

The death of the pragmatic Western Republican: Extremism is killing the old-school GOP — Jonathan P. Thompson

Trump’s going to go away some day, and the attacks on public lands will probably ease off. But they won’t stop altogether. Humans’ hunger for more stuff and minerals and energy will undoubtedly put pressure on the places we hold dear, maybe even on the Weminuche. But polarization and political partisanship will only hamper our ability to save these places. Our only hope is to, somehow, recover some of the civility, the non-partisanship, and the pragmatism that fueled the designation of the Weminuche in 1975.

I have no idea how we’ll get there, but I do hold out hope. I really have no choice. I’ll leave you with some words written by my father, Ian Thompson, in the “Wilderness Question” insert in 1969:

“The Wilderness effort we are engaged in at the time is, in one respect, a pitifully futile struggle. Earth’s total atmosphere is human-changed beyond redemption, Earth’s waters would not be recognizable to the Pilgrims. Earth’s creatures will never again know what it is to be truly “wild.” The sonic thunder of man’s aircraft will increasingly descend in destructive shock waves upon any “wilderness area” no matter how remote or how large. No, there is no wilderness, and throughout the future of humanity, there will be no wilderness. We are attempting to save the battered remnants of the original work of a Creator. To engage in this effort is the last hope of religious people.

“The child seen here and there in “The Wilderness Question” would have loved Wilderness. There is tragedy in that knowledge. Hopefully we will leave him a reasonable facsimile of Wilderness. In the last, tattered works of Creation this child might find the source of strength necessary to love America and the works of man. If we care enough to act.”

*Nowhere in the several-page insert are political parties mentioned, most likely because people were less inclined to identify themselves according to political party, but also because environmental preservation was not at all partisan at the time. I mention their affiliations here to further demonstrate the way the discussion transcended party politics.

Speaking of the Weminuche: It looks like wolves may have made their way into the wilderness area. Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s most recent Collared Gray Wolf Activity map shows that the wolves have been detected in the San Juan, Rio Grande, Uncompahgre, and Gunnison River watersheds in the southwestern part of the state. Since the minimum mapping unit is the watershed, it’s not clear that the wolves have for sure ventured into the Weminuche. But it is certain that they have been recorded in the San Juan Mountains. It seems only a matter of time before they cross into New Mexico and maybe even Utah.

When Trump was elected for the second time, I figured there was no way he could make public lands grazing any less restrictive. After all, presidential administrations of all political persuasions have famously — or infamously — done very little to restrict grazing or to get it to pay for itself (the BLM’s grazing fee has remained at $1.35 per AUM, the mandated minimum) for decades. But, alas, the U.S. Agriculture Department recently announced its plan to “Fortify the American Beef Industry: Strengthening Ranches, Rebuilding Capacity, and Lowering Costs for Consumers.”

The plan, as you may imagine, looks to expand public lands grazing, among other things. And it was released at about the same time as Trump encouraged folks to eat Argentinian beef, since he seems to have developed a sort of crush on Argentina President Javier Milei.

I’ll get into the details of the USDA plan and offer some thoughts on it in the next dispatch. In the meantime, you can dive into my deep dive on public lands grazing here, though you have to be a paid subscriber (or sign up for a free trial) to get past the paywall.

The West’s Sacred Cow Public land grazing makes it through another administration unreformed — Jonathan P. Thompson

West’s Sacred Cow part II: Indian Creek case study Plus: Monarchs in trouble, Wacky weather, Living in f#$%ed up times — Jonathan P. Thompson

Windom, Eolus, and Sunlight — Weminuche Wilderness via 14ers.org

Coyote Gulch enjoying a lunch break at the top of Windom Peak or Sunlight Peak in the Weminuche Wilderness with a hiking buddy, 1986ish.

Town of #Telluride implements outdoor watering restrictions: As #drought conditions strain Telluride’s water supply, irrigation regulations will help conserve water — The Telluride Daily Planet #SanMiguelRiver #DoloresRiver #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification

Current drought conditions across the state of Colorado, with San Miguel County outlined in black, as of Aug. 26. The Town of Telluride implemented outdoor water restrictions on Monday, Aug. 25, due to ongoing drought conditions and limited water availability locally. (Map courtesy of the U.S. Drought Monitor)

Click the link to read the article on The Telluride Daily Planet website (Sophie Stuber). Here’s an excerpt:

August 30, 2025

The Town of Telluride implemented outdoor water restrictions beginning Monday, Aug. 25, due to ongoing drought conditions and limited water availability locally. All water utility customers for the Town of Telluride, including Lawson Hill, Hillside and Sunnyside, are required to follow an irrigation schedule, with outdoor watering only permitted on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Watering must take place between 7 p.m. and 8 a.m. Irrigation systems should be set to 70-75% of normal water use, and all exterior water features must be turned off. No users are permitted to truck in additional water…Additionally, restaurants and businesses should serve water only upon request, and people are requested to fix any leaks immediately. Water audits and monitoring of water bills for excessive use can also help people regulate their use. Property owners who have landscaping that has been installed since spring 2024 can apply for additional permission to water. The public works department will review variances for new or modified landscaping on a case-by-case basis…

Although monsoonal rains have recently brought some moisture to the local area, it is still very dry. On the Western Slope, drought conditions remain dire, with several zones in northwestern Colorado in the category of ‘exceptional’ drought. Exceptional is the most severe category of drought and is often linked to hydrologic and agricultural issues.

“The ongoing lack of precipitation has been to blame for that, and it was very hot last week,” Allie Mazurek, engagement climatologist at the Colorado Climate Center, told the Daily Planet. “We have an elevated wildfire risk.”

[…]

Over 7% of Colorado remains under exceptional drought, and 1.86 million people are experiencing some type of drought, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Drought Monitor, published on Aug. 28. Exceptional drought typically happens about once every 50 years, although parts of Colorado also experienced exceptional drought in 2023. San Miguel County is faring slightly better than much of the Western Slope, although all of the county is under at least severe drought, and the eastern edge is under extreme drought…

Locally, the San Miguel River, measured at the Placerville gauge, ended up at 62% of normal total streamflow volume for the April through July period, and the Uncompahgre River at Ridgway Reservoir was at 66%. The Animas at Durango was also at 62% of median, and the Dolores was at 52%. Some of these streamflows are historical lows…This year’s observed streamflow for the Dolores and Animas is only in the ninth percentile out of more than 100 years of observation…For the most current information on Telluride’s Water Conservation Program, visit bit.ly/totwater or follow @townoftelluride on social media.

The #ColoradoRiver is salty. But where does salinity come from, and what’s being done about it?: Among river disputes, salinity is an issue that all seven basin states agree is worth solving together — The Summit Daily #COriver #aridification

Colorado River. For over 50 years, stakeholders throughout the Colorado River basin have worked to address challenges caused by salinity. Photo credit: Abby Burk via Audubon Rockies

Click the link to read the article on the Summit Daily website (Ali Longwell). Here’s an excerpt:

February 6, 2024

Since 1974, the seven Colorado River basin states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — have coordinated efforts to implement salinity control in the waterway as part of the Colorado River Basin Salinity Control Forum. The forum was created by the U.S. Congress, flowing funding through the Bureau of Reclamation to reduce the salt load in the river and research the issue…While salinity is naturally occurring, there are a few reasons that states and river stakeholders have long kept an eye on it.A baseline amount of salinity is OK. Too much salinity can have adverse effects on drinking water, water infrastructure and treatment, appliance wear, aquatic life, the productivity of certain agricultural crops (including wine grapes, peaches and other salt-sensitive products) and more. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation estimates that salinity causes between $500 and $750 million annually in damages and could exceed $1.5 billion per year if future increases are not controlled…

Much of the Upper Basin geology — specifically Mancus and Mesa Verde shale formations — was created when it was covered by an inland sea, [David] Robbins added. Therefore, they contain salt deposits that through natural erosion and runoff, make their way to the rivers and downstream. In Colorado, natural salinity sources include the geothermal hot springs in Glenwood Springs; shale cliffs and evaporating salt deposits in the Eagle and Roaring Fork valleys; and the salt domes in Paradox Valley in Montrose County along the Dolores River. Human activity can also exacerbate challenges by accelerating the release of compounds from these natural geologic materials and increasing the salt load in the river and tributaries, according to the 2009 U.S. Geological Survey report. This includes activities like mining, farming, petroleum exploration and urban development. For example, with some agricultural irrigation practices, by adding more water to the soil that naturally contains salts, “increases the rate of dissolution above the natural signal,” [Dave] Kanzer said. The use of road salts — solid and liquid — to clear snow and ice can also lead to increased salt loads as the salt dissolves and makes its way into snowmelt and streams.

Bone-dry winter in the San Juans — Allen Best (BigPivots.com) #SanJuanRiver #DoloresRiver #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification

**Lee Ferry, the dividing line between the upper and lower basin states of the Colorado River Basin**. **Photo credit: Allen Best**

Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):

January 28, 2025

It’s part of a theme. Does Colorado need to start planning for potential Colorado River curtailments?

Snow in southwestern Colorado has been scarce this winter. Archuleta County recently had a grass fire. A store manager at Terry’s Ace Hardware in Pagosa Springs tells me half as many snowblowers have been sold this winter despite new state rebates knocking 30% off the price of electric models.

Near Durango, snowplows normally used at a subdivision located at 8,000 feet remain unused. At Chapman Hill, the in-town ski area, all snow remains artificial, and it’s not enough to cover all the slopes. A little natural snow would help, but none is in the forecast.

Snow may yet arrive. Examining data collected on Wolf Creek Pass since 1936, the Pagosa Sun’s Josh Kurz found several winters that procrastinated until February. Even when snow arrived, though, the winter-end totals were far below average.

All this suggests another subpar runoff in the San Juan and Animas rivers. They contribute to Lake Powell, one of two big water bank accounts on the Colorado River. When I visited the reservoir in May 2022, water levels were dropping rapidly. The manager of Glen Canyon Dam pointed to a ledge below us that had been underwater since the mid-1960s. It had emerged only a few weeks before my visit.

That ledge at Powell was covered again after an above-average runoff in 2023. The reservoir has recovered to 35% of capacity.

A ledge that had been used in the construction of Glen Canyon Dam emerged in spring 2022 after about 50 years of being underwater. *Photo May 2022/Allen Best*

Will reservoir levels stay that high? Probably not, and that is a significant problem. Delegates who wrangled the Colorado River Compact in a lodge near Santa Fe in 1922 understood drought, at least somewhat. They did not contemplate the global warming now underway.

In apportioning the river flows, they also assumed an average 17.5 million acre-feet at Lee Ferry, the dividing line between the upper and lower basins. It’s a few miles downstream from Glen Canyon Dam and upstream from the Grand Canyon. Even during the 20^th century the river was rarely that generous. This century it has become stingy, with average annual flows of 12.5 million acre-feet. Some worry that continued warming during coming decades may further cause declines to 9.5 million acre-feet.

Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall

Colorado State University’s Brad Udall and other scientists contend half of declining flows should be understood as resulting from warming temperatures. A 2024 study predicts droughts with the severity that formerly occurred once in 1,000 years will by mid-century become 1-in-60 year events.

How will the seven basin states share this diminished river? Viewpoints differ so dramatically that delegates from the upper- and lower-basin states loathed sharing space during an annual meeting in Las Vegas as had been their custom. Legal saber-rattling abounds. A critical issue is an ambiguous clause in the compact about releases of water downstream to Arizona and hence Nevada and California.

Colorado transmountain diversions via the State Engineer’s office

Might Colorado need to curtail its diversions from the Colorado River? That would be painful. Roughly half the water for cities along the Front Range, where 88% of Coloradans live, comes from the Colorado River and its tributaries. Transmountain diversions augment agriculture water in the South Platte and Arkansas River valleys. The vast majority of those water rights were adjudicated after the compact of 1922 and hence would be vulnerable to curtailment. Many water districts on the Western Slope also have water rights junior to the compact.

In Grand Junction last September, Andy Mueller, the general manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District, the primary water policy agency for 15 of Western Slope counties, made the case that Colorado should plan for compact curtailments — just in case. The district had earlier sent a letter to Jason Ullmann, the state water engineer, asking him to please get moving with compact curtailment rules.

Eric Kuhn, Mueller’s predecessor at the district, who is now semi-retired, made the case for compact curtailment planning in the Spring 2024 issue of Colorado Environmental Law Review. Kuhn’s piece runs 15,000 words, all of them necessary to sort through the tangled complexities. Central is the compact clause that specifies the upper basin states must not cause the flow at Lee Ferry, just below today’s Glen Canyon Dam, to be depleted below an aggregate of 75 million acre-feet on a rolling 10-years basis.

That threshold has not yet been met — yet. Kuhn describes a “recipe for disaster” if it is. He foresees those with agriculture rights on the Western Slope being called upon to surrender rights. He and Mueller argue for precautionary planning. That planning “could be contentious,” Kuhn concedes, but the “advantages of being prepared for the consequences of a compact curtailment outweigh the concern.”

Last October, after Mueller’s remarks in Grand Junction, I solicited statements from Colorado state government. The Polis administration said it would be premature to plan compact curtailment. The two largest single transmountain diverters of Colorado River Water, Denver Water and Northern Water, concurred.

Front Range cities, including Berthoud, above, are highly reliant upon water imported from the Colorado River and its tributaries. December 2023 photo/Allen Best

Recently, I talked with Jim Lochhead. For 25 years he represented Colorado and its water users in interstate Colorado River matters. He ran the state’s Department of Natural Resources for four years in the 1990s and, ending in 2023, wrapped up 13 years as chief executive of Denver Water. Lochhead, who stressed that he spoke only for himself, similarly sees compact curtailment planning as premature.

“It just doesn’t make sense to go through that political brain damage until we really have to,” he said. “Hopefully we won’t have to, because (the upper and lower basins) will come up with a solution.”

Lochhead does believe that a negotiated solution remains possible, despite the surly words of recent years…

“We need to figure out ways to negotiate an essentially shared sacrifice for how we’re going to manage the system, so it can be sustainable into the future,” he said. This, he says, will take cooperation that so far has been absent, at least in public, and it will also take money.

Instead, we’ll have to slog along. The runoff in the Colorado River currently is predicted to be 81% of average. It fits with a theme. Unlike the children of Lake Wobegone, most runoffs in the 21^st century have been below average.

Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0

Local drought could impact the West’s water supply: Western Slope has a vital role in water supply for #ColoradoRiver Basin — The #Telluride Daily Planet #COriver #aridification

West Drought Monitor map January 7, 2025.

Click the link to read the article on the Telluride Daily Planet website (Sophie Stuber). Here’s an excerpt:

January 7, 2025

Although Telluride is in the depths of winter, states are still negotiating a new agreement for the Colorado River basin. About 85% of the Colorado River begins as snow in Colorado and Wyoming’s mountains. The 1,450-mile river provides water to about 40 million people in the U.S. and Mexico and is key to the $5 billion annual agriculture economy. Across the state, snowpack is at 97% of the median. Locally, in the San Miguel-Dolores-Animas-San Juan River Basin, snow water equivalent is at 75% of median.

Colorado’s Western Slope river basins are essential to the health of the whole basin as well the economy and natural environment. Regional water managers often compete for water demands for agriculture, environmental flows and downstream deliveries to Lake Powell and Lake Mead, which store much of the region’s water. The current operational guidelines for the Colorado River will expire at the end of 2026. Drought in the Western Slope can significantly impact both local water use and deliveries to Lake Powell, and drought is likely to become more prevalent with climate change…A recent study, published in Nov. 2024, analyzed local drought vulnerability in Western Slope and the consequences for the region, going into the Colorado River basin. “Streamflow declines driven by an optimistic climate change scenario can transition the system to a drier regime and increase drought impacts,” the study’s authors write. The study developed a model to create streamflow scenarios and the potential impacts of drought in the region. The model showed elevated drought risks to downstream water users, agriculture and the environment…

The San Miguel Watershed Coalition recently released a new planning document for the whole watershed, including floodplain reconnection and beaver-based restoration projects. Much of this work involves federal land managers because more than 50% of the watershed is federally owned…Other important research includes how to better predict how snowpack is transformed into snowmelt and runoff into watersheds, collaborating with Airborne Snow Observatories (ASO), which provides basin-wide measurements of snow water equivalent and forecasts of snowmelt runoff.

The view from an Airborne Snow Observatory plane as it flies over a mountainous region to capture data on the snowpack. Photo credit: Airborne Snow Observatories Inc.

Restoration project on West Fork of #DoloresRiver benefits trout habitat, ecosystem as a whole — The #Durango Herald

Cutthroat trout historic range via Western Trout

Click the link to read the article on The Durango Herald website (Cameryn Cass). Here’s an excerpt:

December 28, 2024

An area chapter of Trout Unlimited recently partnered with a landowner to restore a portion of the West Fork of the Dolores River their property borders…Besides the West Fork’s beauty, it’s the largest tributary of the Lower Dolores. It’s also home to all four kinds of trout, including the only one native to Colorado, the cutthroat…

Over time, modern practices and a change of land use along the riverbanks – such as ranching, grazing, or simply cutting out big fields – has resulted in less and less “large woody debris” falling into the river, Rose said. That debris is not only a source of food, it also can be something of an anchor to slow down the water flow, and to offer fish and other critters a refuge.

In effect, the restoration project was in the name of something Rose called “structural complexity.”

“That’s the most important term you’ll pick up in this whole project,” Rose said. “If you don’t have complexity and have homogeneity, you don’t have the richness you need to accommodate all of the aquatic co-evolutions.”

To create this structural complexity – and put simply – the project involved strategically arranging big boulders in different ways and places along the stretch of river.

New Year #snowpack update: Bold beginning tapers off: But there’s still a lot of snow season left — Jonathan P. Thompson

October snows above Ouray, Colorado. The Red Mountain Pass SNOTEL showed the snowpack to be 103% of normal as of Jan. 2, 2025. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Click the link to read the article on the Land Desk website (Jonatan P. Thompson):

January 3, 2025

🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫

Happy New Year! The Land Desk had a very mellow and relaxing couple of weeks off, and I must admit that I’m struggling to get back into the old routine. And I sure as heck haven’t gotten used to writing “2025” yet. Oy.

But no matter what the calendar may say, we’re one-fourth of the way through the 2025 water year, and one-third of the way through meteorological winter. That means it’s time for a little snowpack update.

Snowpack levels in the watersheds that feed Lake Powell are just about normal for this time of year, thanks to some late-December storms across the region. But as you can see from 2023 (the purple line), there’s plenty of time left for it to be a huge snow year — or a downright crappy one if the precipitation suddenly stops. Source: NRCS.

This snow season got off to a rip-roaring start in much of the West, with some substantial high-country snowfall back in October and November. Then, as is often the case, someone turned off the big sky spigot, the clouds cleared, temperatures warmed, and the early season bounty became mid-winter middling to meager. Meanwhile, the high-mountain snow, while not necessarily melting, began “rotting.” That is, it embarked on the metamorphosis from strong, well-bonded snow, to weak, faceted, depth hoar1.

That’s a problem, because when another layer of snow falls on top of it, the weak layer is prone to failure, resulting in an avalanche. Sadly, avalanches have taken the lives of four people so far this season, all during the last couple of weeks in December. Two of the fatalities occurred in Utah and one in Nevada, all following a late December storm atop a deep, weak layer. The other one was in Idaho on Dec. 15. Two of the victims were on motorized snowbikes, one was a solo split-boarder, and another was on foot or snowshoes. Last season there were 16 avalanche-related fatalities across the West, all occurring after the first of the year.

Southwestern Colorado got some good dumps in October and November, pushing the snowpack far above average and into the 90th percentile. But a dry December brought snowpack levels down below “normal” for the 1991-2020 period. Still, this year’s levels almost mirror 2023’s, when snow season didn’t get going until January. Source: NRCS.

Meanwhile, further south, the Sonoran Avalanche Center hasn’t had much action this season, at least not of the snowy kind. Most of the Southwest has been plagued by a dearth of snowfall — and precipitation in general — following a couple good storms in October and November. Temperatures have also been well above average in the southern lowlands. Phoenix set four daily high-temperature records in December, and the average for the month was a whopping seven degrees above normal; Flagstaff was also far warmer than normal and received nary a drop of rain or snow during all of December. And Las Vegas hasn’t received measurable rainfall since it got a bit damp (.08 inches) in mid-July.

The Salt River watershed in central Arizona has received hardly any snow so far this year and continues to lag far behind the 2023 and 2024 water years. The lack of moisture and unusually high temperatures in December don’t bode well for the region’s runoff. Source: NRCS.

The Rio Grande’s headwaters also started out strong, but have dropped below normal.

Things were looking pretty grim in western Wyoming’s Upper Green River watershed until December snows pushed the snowpack almost up to normal for this time of year. The entire state was quite dry last year and it’s looking like the drought will persist there.

This does not bode well for spring streamflows, particularly in the Salt and Gila Rivers. The mountains feeding the Rio Grande also are in need of some good storms to keep that river from going dry this summer.

We can take comfort in the fact that in many places in the West, snow-season doesn’t really arrive until February or March. So this could turn out to be a whopper of a winter yet.

The drought situation a year ago (left) and now (right). While drought has subsided in New Mexico and the Four Corners area, it has intensified dramatically in Wyoming, Montana, parts of Idaho and a swath that follows the lower Colorado River and includes Las Vegas, which has only received .08” of precipitation since April of last year. Source: U.S. Drought Monitor.

For now it looks like there’s no relief in sight for the Southwest or the Northern Rockies.

🌵 Public Lands 🌲

Biden’s getting busy as he prepares to vacate the White House. The Los Angeles Times reports that he plans to designate the Chuckwalla National Monument on 644,000 acres of federal land in southern California, and the Sáttítla National Monument on 200,000 acres in the northern part of the state near the Oregon border. That’s what I’m talkin’ about, Joe! Now do the lower Dolores!

🦫 Wildlife Watch 🦅

The soon-to-be Chuckwalla National Monument lies south of and adjacent to Joshua Tree National Park, an area often targeted by utility-scale solar developers. That’s the sort of development that will now be banned there. Not only will cultural sites be protected, but also wildlife. A new study found that some of the Southwest’s best sites for solar overlap critical habitat for vulnerable species, including in most of southern California.

***

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is seeking any information on the killing of a gray wolf in Grand County, Colorado, in summer of 2024. The wolf, 2309-OR, was part of the Copper Creek pack that was captured by wildlife officials in August, after members of the pack had made a meal out of local ranchers’ livestock. 2309-OR was in bad condition and perished in captivity; a subsequent investigation found that he died of a gunshot wound. It’s illegal to kill wolves in Colorado, not to mention immoral and just a horrible thing to do. The Center for Biological Diversity and other conservation organizations are offering a $65,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the shooter.

📸 Parting Shot 🎞️

San Francisco Peaks near Flagstaff, Arizona, in mid-November. They had a bit of snow from earlier storms, but haven’t received much since. The Snowslide Canyon SNOTEL site at 9,744 feet in elevation is recording 65% of normal snow water equivalent. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

1 Andy Gleason, snow nerd extraordinaire, explained it like this after record-high avalanche fatalities during the relatively scant 2021 snow year :

#Colorado’s environmental efforts could be in grave peril: 2024 is likely to be hottest year on record. It’s no time for science deniers to be in charge of country’s future — Pete Kolbenschlag (Colorado Newsline) #ActOnClimate

An aerial view of Assignation Ridge in the Thompson Divide area of Colorado. (Courtesy of EcoFlight)

Click the link to read the commentary on the Colorado Newsline website (Pete Kolbenschlag):

December 31, 2024

Some people say that the movement toward renewable energy cannot be stopped by a single regressive administration. But Colorado could be badly harmed if its efforts to transition to clean energy are put on hold. Millions of dollars in investments for rural co-ops, community-based solar, and grid hardening could be in jeopardy, striking a heavy blow to our more resilient future. Worse still, that’s only one piece of what could be coming under a new federal regime.

Colorado’s public lands and water supplies are also in grave peril under the incoming Congress and president. This is despite decades of hard, locally-driven work to secure protections for vital headwaters, hunting lands, forests and habitat, many from a century-long history of extraction. And it’s regardless of rapid warming, persistent drought and an imperiled Colorado River system with no good solutions in sight.

Healthy natural systems guard against ecological collapse. But now various environmental tipping points, that moment in a system where it moves into a new norm and change becomes irreversible, appear at their most precarious moments. During 2024 humans pumped out more climate-choking pollution than ever before. That’s almost 10 years after the acclaimed Paris Agreement, which our president-elect and his cabinet have vowed to abandon.

Global warming presents a clear and present danger to all our livelihoods and well-being. And the United States is already the No. 1 oil and gas producer in the world and a top polluter behind only China. 2024 is likely to be the hottest year ever recorded. Without the sufficient response we careen toward calamity. To meet this moment, the incoming administration and Congress have pledged to pollute more and care less.

That is bad news not only for our lands and water supplies, but for the economic future, too. Our ledgers will already never be free of climate risk. Which is why the debate at the global climate summits is now about who ends up with the bill for loss and damages done and coming. That matters here, too: A recent study correlates rising insurance costs with climate vulnerability and puts much of Colorado in the dark red hazard zone.

In a state where housing is increasingly unaffordable, putting science deniers in charge of our future is just a bad idea. Moving federal agency offices or installing Colorado-based cabinet-members won’t matter if the new administration is just rearranging deck chairs to ensure its patrons have the best seats to watch this escalating disaster.

In fact, fossil fuel “dominance” could make a mess of Colorado, as it does most places it asserts itself. This puts at risk our lands and communities with oil trains, backdoor schemes to subsidize legacy polluters, policies that favor extraction over conservation, and more pipelines for more fracked gas exports. The alternative to slamming head on into a worst future is to stop the harm now and to make systems more resilient to coming disruptions. That means less fossil energy and more conservation of natural places. [ed. emphasis mine]

Milkweed, sweet peas, and a plethora of other flora billow from Farmer’s Ditch in the North Fork Valley of western Colorado. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Standing up for Colorado’s liveable future means fighting the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure and defending places Coloradans have fought for decades to protect – such as Thompson Divide, the Dolores River canyons, or the forests and public lands surrounding critical watersheds and farmlands in places like the North Fork Valley.

That will best limit the extent of further harm and will better secure our natural capital as a hedge against future disruption. By investing in ecological systems through resilient watersheds and healthy lands we guard against uncertainty. By defending these cherished places, we will keep intact critical sources of sustenance and enjoyment for the future and return dividends to those who live, work, and visit here today.

The Dolores River, below Slickrock, and above Bedrock. The Dolores River Canyon is included in a proposed National Conservation Area. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism.

Opinion: Hunters and anglers call for Biden to designate #DoloresRiver Canyons National Monument — The #Montrose Press

A view of the Dolores River in Colorado. (Bob Wick/BLM/Public domain 1.0)

Click the link to read the guest column on The Montrose Press website (David Lien). Here’s an excerpt:

August 24, 2024

Currently, Colorado’s hunters and anglers have perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to protect a wide swath of public lands habitat in southwest Colorado’s Dolores River Canyons region. In April, we joined hunters, anglers, rafters, business owners, and many others from across the state and region in supporting a proposed Dolores River Canyons National Monument…The Dolores River faces threats from industrial scale mining, habitat fragmentation, and unmanaged recreation. Protecting intact habitat for mule deer, elk, and desert bighorn sheep, particularly winter range and movement corridors, is essential for retaining quality sporting opportunities. Now is the time for action. A national monument designation will help everyone better manage the change that is already occurring while also protecting public lands habitat and ensuring future generations of hunters, anglers, and many others experience the area as we have. For additional information see Sportsmen for the Dolores.

Opinion: ‘#DoloresRiver Canyons very foundation of Ute Mountain Ute identity’ — The #Durango Herald

Dolores River near the confluence with the San Miguel River. Photo credit: Jonathan P. Thompson

Click the link to read the guest column on The Durango Herald website (Regina Lopez-Whiteskunk). Here’s an excerpt:

The Dolores River Canyons represent a significant portion of the cultural heritage for the Ute People that serve as a place of spiritual connection, a place to connect with our ancestors’ stories and traditional practices. These lands are not merely scenery; they are the very foundation of the Ute Mountain Ute identity. Increased mining would not just disrupt the delicate balance of the ecosystem, it would sever the cultural ties that bind my people to part of our ancestral home.

The future of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, and Indigenous communities across the country, lies in the enduring strength of our cultural heritage. Protecting the Dolores River Canyons is not just about safeguarding the environment; it’s about ensuring that future generations of Indigenous youth can grow up connected to their land, steeped in the traditions of their ancestors. Imagine the richness of a future where Ute children learn about their history by exploring the canyons, not by reading about the environmental devastation wrought by a bygone mining industry.

Let us choose the path that honors the past, protects the present and secures a brighter future for generations to come. Let us choose to leave a legacy of respect and cultural preservation, not one of environmental destruction and broken promises.

Some thoughts on the bid to protect the Lower #DoloresRiver — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

Boulders in the Dolores River downstream from Bedrock. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

July 30, 2024

The News: Western Colorado’s Mesa and Montrose counties propose a 30,000-acre national conservation area for the Lower Dolores River corridor as an alternative to the proposed 400,000-acre national monument. While this may look like a peace offering or compromise of sorts from counties that have opposed protections of any kind, it is just as likely an attempt to block any sort of designation and will probably only further fan the flames of controversy. It’s the latest volley in a half-century-long battle over the fate of the beleaguered river.

The Context: The current controversy over the Dolores River takes me back to when I was a youngster in the early ‘80s. McPhee Dam was under construction on the Dolores River, its proponents having vanquished a movement that sought to block the dam and keep the river free. My parents had been on the losing side of the fight, and I can distinctly remember my father blaming the defeat, at least in part, on outsider environmentalists — including Ed Abbey — deriding the pro-dam contingent as a bunch of “local yokels.

I’m sure my dad took it personally. He was a fourth-generation rural Coloradan, had graduated from Dolores High School, and his mom and sisters still lived in Dolores — apparently making him a “yokel,” even though he opposed the dam. But also he saw it as a major strategic misstep. Not only were these people insulting locals, but they were falling into the pro-dam contingent’s trap, bolstering the dam-building effort in the process.

More often than not, these land protection fights are framed as well-heeled elitist outsiders and Washington D.C. bureaucrats imposing their values on and wrecking the livelihoods of rural, salt-of-the-earth local ranchers and miners. And in almost every case it is a gross oversimplification, at best, and at worst is an inaccurate portrayal and a cynical attempt to disempower locals — and anyone else — who favor land protection. So when those anti-dam folks caricatured the pro-dam contingent as local yokels, they were not only alienating locals who may have been on their side, but also validating the false depiction of the situation.

Fresh snow on Bears Ears. Photo credit: Jonathan P. Thompson/The Land Desk

We saw this play out in the battle over the Bears Ears National Monument designation and Trump’s shrinkage of it in a gross way. The anti-monument contingent insisted that all “locals” were opposed to the monument — and the media largely bought into it — never mind the fact that effort to establish a monument in the first place was driven by local Navajo Nation and Ute Mountain Ute citizens, and was taken up by tribal nations who have inhabited the landscape in question since time immemorial. Never mind that the anti-monument “locals” were backed by mining corporations, right-wing think tanks, and conservative politicians from all over (including a Manhattan real estate magnate and reality TV personality who became President). Utah’s congressional delegation even had the gaul to attempt to disenfranchise and silence the voices of tribal leaders because they happened to be based on the other side of a state or county line that was arbitrarily drawn based on arbitrary grids by dudes in Washington D.C.

The movement to protect the Dolores River has been portrayed in much the same way over the last several decades. It has its roots in 1968, when U.S. Rep. Wayne Aspinall, a Democrat from Colorado’s Western Slope, pushed through the Colorado River Basin Project Act, authorizing the construction of five Western water projects. One of them was the Animas-La Plata Project, a byzantine tangle of dams — including one on the Animas River above Silverton — along with canals, tunnels, and even power plants. Another was the Dolores Project, which included building McPhee Dam several miles downstream of the town of Dolores, which would impound water to lengthen the irrigation season for the Montezuma Valley and allow water to be sent, via canal, to the dryland bean farmers around Dove Creek.

The prospect of another river being stilled by another giant monolith sparked a movement to block the dam and to designate the Lower Dolores River corridor as a Wild and Scenic River, which would have prohibited mining and oil and gas leasing, while also ensuring enough water would be left in the stream to keep the river “wild and scenic,” which is to say a lot more water than zero, which was the lower river’s flow from mid-summer into fall due to irrigation diversions.

Local farmers were generally in favor of the dam — and against Wild & Scenic designation, since it would likely deprive them of some irrigation water during dry times. But their cause was also backed by powerful agricultural interests on the state level, the pugnacious Durango attorney Sam Maynes, Sen. Gary Hart, the Colorado Democrat, and, probably most importantly, the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, which would receive a portion of the vast amounts of water to which they were entitled from the Dolores Project. The project was ultimately authorized (though I doubt the local yokel comment had all that much to do with it, really). Construction of McPhee Dam began in 1979 and the reservoir began filling in 1983.

La Plata Mountains from the Great Sage Plain with historical Montezuma County apple orchard in the foreground.

No matter how one feels about dams, you have to admit it had some benefits. In 1978 the federally funded Dolores Archaeological Program was launched to survey, excavate, and study the rich cultural sites that were spread out across the area to be inundated by the reservoir. It was a huge project that brought a slew of researchers to the area, significantly advanced scientific knowledge of the Ancestral Puebloan people who inhabited the region for centuries, and provided the seeds for future archaeological work and organizations, including the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center.

And, contrary to opponents’ fears, the dam didn’t kill the river. Rather it was like putting the river’s manic-depressive flows on lithium. The massive spring runoffs were tempered, but water managers released enough water in most years to scour beaches and preserve Snaggletooth’s whitewater snarl. And for the first time in a century the lower Dolores didn’t run dry in July. In fact, the year-round flows were enough to build and sustain a cold-water fishery for trout in the first dozen or so miles below the dam and a habitat for native fish below that. The Ute Mountain Ute Tribe got both drinking water from the project as well as enough to irrigate a major agricultural enterprise near the toe of Ute Mountain, providing much needed economic development. The Town of Dove Creek receives water from the project as do the formerly dryland farmers, allowing them to diversify their crops. The dam’s completion happened to coincide with the demise of the domestic uranium mining industry, meaning that threat mostly went away as well, along with the need for added protections.

The Dolores River at its confluence with the San Miguel River. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Unfortunately, drier times set in and the current megadrought, now going on a quarter century, has depleted the river’s flows and reservoir levels. In order to keep the irrigation ditches flowing as deep into the summer as possible, dam managers have released almost no water during 14 of the last 24 years, essentially desiccating the stream bed below the dam and throwing the riparian ecology out of whack. In the midst of it all the uranium industry made a short-lived comeback between 2006 and 2012. Now it seems to be emerging from its zombified state once again and is targeting numerous sites along the Dolores River. The river runs through the Paradox Formation, as well, meaning it could be targeted by lithium and potash miners. Meanwhile, visitation to the Lower Dolores River has ramped up — along with the impacts — as social media posts reveal the canyons to more people and as the Moab crowd seeks new places to play.

All of that spawned new Wild & Scenic campaigns for the Lower Dolores, but after it became clear they couldn’t get past political hurdles, stakeholders came together to work on a compromise, resulting in a proposal to create a national conservation area on 60 miles of river corridor below the dam, which would withdraw the land from new mining claims and oil and gas leases, bring more attention to the plight of this sorrowful and spectacular river, and possibly more funding to river restoration efforts. But it would leave another 100 miles of the Lower Dolores unprotected, in part because Mesa and Montrose Counties withdrew their support for the plan. Thus the proposal for President Biden to designate 400,000 acres as a national monument.

That proposal, perhaps predictably, has sparked a backlash and an anti-national monument campaign partly fueled by disinformation. And, just as predictably, it’s being falsely framed as a fight pitting locals vs. outsiders. It’s true that a survey commissioned by Mesa County of about 1,200 registered voters in Mesa, Montrose, and San Miguel Counties found that 57% of respondents oppose the national monument proposal. That shows that more locals oppose it, but that quite a few support the initiative, as well. And Center for Western Priorities director Aaron Weiss found that the survey may be biased since its creators consulted with national monument opponents, but not proponents, about which questions to ask and how to word them. And it shows.

For example, the survey precedes one set of questions with: “Currently, uranium mining in the Dolores River Canyon area in the west end of Montrose County impacts the local economy by providing tax dollars and jobs. The current national monument proposal would allow some but not all existing permit holders to continue to operate, but it has not been decided if the proposal would allow new permits or permit renewals in the future.” But this is misleading, because the uranium mining industry remains virtually dead, so the economic impact is zero to negligible. Furthermore, a national monument grandfathers in all existing valid mining claims and has no effect on patented (private) claims. So even if there were operating mines, a monument wouldn’t hamper operations. [ed. emphasis mine] Other questions were similarly misleading by implying that a national monument designation would remove management from the BLM or Forest Service.

Tellingly, the survey also found that 72% of respondents support existing national monument designations “such as Browns Canyon, Chimney Rock, and Colorado National Monument.” Why? Because they value conservation and they’ve seen that national monuments don’t hurt the economy or agriculture or significantly restrict access. That they are less sure about a new national monument might have something to do with the opponents’ simplistic and unfounded argument against it, which is that it could “impose severe economic hardships,” without explaining how.

Nevertheless, Mesa County used the survey to justify a resolution opposing the national monument and supporting its proposal for a vastly scaled down national conservation area. Again, this tactic is an echo of ones used by Bears Ears National Monument opponents. National Conservation Areas don’t inherently offer more or less protections or restrictions than national monuments, but they do need to be passed by Congress. Given how dysfunctional our Congress is, that could take years or even decades.

Yet the Lower Dolores River needs help now. No, a national monument won’t solve all its problems; it may not help the river, itself, at all. Already the fight over the proposal has shone a spotlight on a remote, largely unknown area, which will surely draw more visitors and more damage. A national monument designation at least would provide the possibility of protection against future development and burgeoning crowds.

Our River of Sorrow Jonathan P. Thompson October 27, 2021

Dolores River near Lizard Head Pass. Photo credit: Jonathan P. Thompson

Read full story

The Dolores River between Rico and Dolores in southwestern Colorado on Memorial Day 2009. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots

#ColoradoRiver officials vote to explore water conservation “credits” to protect against worst #drought years — Fresh Water News #COriver #aridification

Colorado River headwaters tributary in Rocky Mountain National Park photo via Greg Hobbs.

Click the link to read the article on the Water Education Colorado website (Shannon Mullane):

July 17, 2024

Four states in the drought-stricken Colorado River Basin, including Colorado, want credit for conserving water, but water users and officials have big questions about how to make it happen.

Last year, taxpayers paid farmers and ranchers $16 million to cut their water use in the Colorado River Basin, but the water saved on one farm simply reentered streams, where it could be used by anyone downstream. For years, officials in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming have been considering ways to get credit for that conserved water — to track it, store it in a reservoir, and save it to help the states in the future. Representatives from the four states voted in June to develop a proposal exploring the idea by mid-August.

But building a long-term program to track and store conserved water raises questions about equity, funding, economic impacts and whether the idea is feasible at all.

People are concerned about the bigger picture, said Andy Mueller, general manager of the Colorado River District in Colorado.

“If we’re going to conserve water up here, and if the federal government is going to pay for that conservation with taxpayer dollars, it seems to us that storing it and using it for important public purposes makes sense, rather than sending it downstream to just encourage continued consumption of water [by downstream states],” Mueller said.

Cutting back on water use is a big topic of conversation in the Colorado River Basin, which supplies water to 40 million people and is enduring warmer temperatures and a two-decade megadrought.

Officials from each of the seven states in the basin are weighing who might have to cut their use and how to manage the basin’s reservoirs in high-stakes negotiations over the river’s future after the current rules expire in 2026.

The Upper Basin’s alternative, summed up. Source: Upper Colorado River Commission.

The Upper Basin released a proposal in March that outlined its plan to manage the river after 2026 as part of these negotiations. That proposal includes a commitment to pursue voluntary, temporary and compensated conservation programs.

The June vote of the Upper Colorado River Commission aimed to take that commitment one step forward. The state and federal representatives on the commission want to design a conservation-for-credit program in advance so it’s set up and ready to go if needed.

The commission’s plan could help inform the states’ negotiations, said Amy Ostdiek, who is part of Colorado’s negotiating team and works on interstate water issues for the state’s top water policy agency, the Colorado Water Conservation Board.

“We’ve heard this from water users a lot. … If we’re going to continue doing conservation-type activities, can we explore ways to quote-unquote get credit for it?” Ostdiek said. “It’s worth exploring. … There’s a lot we’d need to work out before we get there.”

Grays and Torreys, Dillon Reservoir May 2017. Photo credit Greg Hobbs.

Big questions from water users

Officials and water users have been kicking around the idea of tracking and storing conserved water for credit for years, and the commission’s August proposal will be the latest iteration of those discussions.

One heavily debated program, called demand management, offered a path toward storing conserved water in a reservoir to help Upper Basin states. But Colorado hit pause on analyzing the idea in 2022 as other Upper Basin states slogged through intense feasibility studies.

Taxpayers paid $16 million in 2023 to conserve water through another program, the System Conservation Pilot Program. Because the program does not track conserved water, there is no certainty where it ends up.

“It inherently just flows downstream and continues to be used by the Lower Basin,” Mueller said. “It really doesn’t do anything other than feed the continued use of the water, rather than encourage conservation of the water.”

The commission’s proposal will try to answer key questions for a program that tracks and stores conserved water, said Chuck Cullom, executive director of the Upper Colorado River Commission. But how will water managers track the actual water down streams, through reservoirs and across state lines? What is a “conservation credit” and how can it be earned? What role would location play?

Mueller of the Colorado River District said the location of the projects ties into big potential equity issues.

Most of Colorado’s participants in the system conservation pilot program so far have been farmers and ranchers on the Western Slope, he said. They helped conserve water by fallowing fields and switching to crops that used less water. But if a farmer stops production, or fallows acres of land to conserve water, it can cut jobs on the farm and spending in the community.

A paid conservation program has to be designed to incentivize participation from all regions of Colorado where Colorado River is used, which includes Front Range cities from Fort Collins down to Colorado Springs and beyond, Mueller said.

Joe Bernal, a rancher in Loma who is participating in the System Conservation Pilot Program, said his concern was how a conservation-for-credit program would be administered.

“Would they work with ditch companies, or would they go with individuals? How much would they offer?” he said. “Would they … help ditch companies and communities protect the viability of agriculture?”

Other water users want to know which reservoirs would store conserved water for credit.

Storing conserved water closer to a river’s source — in high-elevation Upper Basin reservoirs rather than farther downstream — would give the four states more say in when, how much and from where water is released.

Plus, local water users want to conserve water in good years and save it in a nearby reservoir to provide a cushion during the next dry year, said Ken Curtis, general manager of the Dolores Water Conservancy District.

Farmers and ranchers in his district are already doing just that: This year, they volunteered to be paid to save water through the system conservation program, and they’re storing it in the nearby McPhee Reservoir to boost carryover water supplies for next year, Curtis said.

The commission’s proposal also aims to define the requirements conservation projects would have to meet to qualify and how years of past water use would come into play.

How to factor in past water use is important to two tribes in Colorado, the Ute Mountain Ute and Southern Ute Indian tribes, said Peter Ortego, general counsel for the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe.

Both tribes have water in a southwestern reservoir that they plan to put to use in the future, but haven’t used yet. Their water does not qualify for use in current paid conservation programs, which raises the question of whether it could qualify for a newer, reimagined conservation-for-credit program, Ortego said.

A program to help the Upper Basin

As officials try to tackle big questions, one thing is clear: Upper Basin water watchers do not want to conserve water if it will just flow downstream to support current use in the Lower Basin.

Congress is currently considering a bill to extend the system conservation pilot program, which does not track where conserved water goes. Meanwhile, officials are dusting off years of analyses about the demand management program, which expires in 2026.

The demand management program created an “account” for up to 500,000 acre-feet of conserved water in Lake Powell. One acre-foot roughly equals the annual use of two to three households.

It’s been frustrating to know the demand management account exists in Lake Powell and to see water being conserved through the system conservation pilot program, or SCPP, that just flows through the reservoir, said James Eklund, a former Colorado water official who helped forge the program and owns a ranch in the pilot program.

“All it needed was to be tagged as DM (demand management) water instead of SCPP water — and it would be water we’d have in our account as Upper Basin states. And we’d be able to point to that water in negotiations,” Eklund said.

But that program is very prescriptive, Ostdiek said.

The account could be used for one purpose: fulfilling the Upper Basin’s interstate water sharing obligations outlined in the 1922 Colorado River Compact, even if river conditions worsen drastically and trigger mandatory cuts in the Upper Basin. The shorthand for this worst-case scenario is a “compact call” or “compact compliance.”

The commission’s upcoming proposal could explore more general uses for credits, including or beyond compact compliance, Ostdiek said.

“I think we need to do some more exploring on what the concept of credit actually means to individual states,” she said, “and think about what the goals would be of that type of approach.”

More by Shannon Mullane

Winter #snowpack recedes earlier than usual in southern #Colorado after rare, sudden and large melt — Fresh Water News

Sneffels Range Ridgeway in foreground. Photo credit: SkiVillage – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15028209 via Wikiemedia

Click the link to read the article on the Water Education Colorado website (Shannon Mullane):

May 30, 2024

Southwestern Colorado is left with 6% of its peak snowpack earlier than usual this season in part because of a rare, sudden and large melt in late April.

Snow that gathers in Colorado’s mountains is a key water source for the state, and a fast, early spring runoff can mean less water for farmers, ranchers, ecosystems and others in late summer. While the snow in northern Colorado is just starting to melt, southern river basins saw their largest, early snowpack drop-off this season, compared to historical data.

For Ken Curtis, the only reason irrigators in Dolores and Montezuma counties haven’t been short on water for their farms and ranches is because the area’s reservoir, McPhee Reservoir, had water supplies left over from the above-average year in 2023.

“Because of the carryover, the impacts aren’t quite that crazy bad,” said Curtis, general manager of the Dolores Water Conservancy District. “If we hadn’t had that carryover, it would have been a terrible year.”

A terrible year like 2021, he added, when many irrigators who depend on water from McPhee only received 10% of their normal water supply.

The snowpack in the southwestern San Miguel-Dolores-Animas-San Juan combined basin peaked at about 18 inches April 2, then plummeted by 8 inches during the last half of April. It was the largest 14-day loss of snowpack before the end of April in this basin since the start of data collection in the 1980s, according to the Colorado Climate Center at Colorado State University.

The basin still held onto 1.1 inches of snow-water equivalent, the amount of liquid water in snow, as of Wednesday. Typically, the snowpack is about twice as high in late May, according to the Natural Resources Conservation Service.

“The Rio Grande and the southwest basins, the snow is pretty much gone, and it’s going to be gone within days to a week at this point,” said Russ Schumacher, the state climatologist and CSU professor.

The Upper Rio Grande Basin, which spans the central-southern part of the state including the San Luis Valley, had 0.1 inch of snow-water equivalent as of Wednesday, much less than its norm for late May, which is about 1.5 inches.

Eastern and northern basins, like the South Platte Basin which includes parts of Denver, have held onto their snowpack for slightly longer than usual. These basins have above-average snowpack for late May, ranging from 119% to 162% of the historic norm, as of Wednesday [May 29, 2024].

The April decline in the southwest was caused by warm and dry conditions and sublimation, when snow and ice change into water vapor in the atmosphere without first melting into liquid water. Dust that darkens snow and speeds snowmelt also played a role, Schumacher said.

The spring runoff is a little faster than usual in the southern basins, but it’s within the realm of normal, said Brian Domonkos, snow survey supervisor for the Natural Resources Conservation Service, which manages snow-measurement stations around the state.

“What we’re seeing right now is not something that I would be alarmed about,” Domonkos said.

Spring snowfall, storms and cooler temperatures have slowed the speed of snowmelt in some areas as well, he said.

In Durango, the Animas River’s flows were around 2,000 cubic feet per second Wednesday, lower than the late-May norm of 2,990 cfs.

When it comes to recreation, the lower flows might actually be a boon, said Ashleigh Tucker, who is planning a river sports event, Animas River Days, scheduled for June 1 and 2. Some races require participants to pass through hanging gates, moving both upstream and downstream through a whitewater park, she said.

“If the water’s super high, it makes it a lot harder to do. So as far as our events go, it’s a good level,” she said. “But there’s not much snow left, so that means we won’t really have much left for the rest of the year, which is kind of a bummer.”

She doesn’t expect the river’s slightly lower flows to impact attendance either: Only years with really low flows, about 1,000 cfs, have discouraged people from floating the Animas, she said.

Warm and dry conditions are likely to continue through June, then weather watchers will turn their gaze to the sky in July to watch for the monsoon season.

In the meantime, Curtis is watching inflow forecasts for McPhee Reservoir. The runoff has been lower than average so far, even after an average snowpack season, he said.

That means there might not be as much water left to carry over into 2025.

“The monsoons will have the next impact,” he said. “If you see everyone going on fire restrictions, you know the monsoons haven’t shown up.”

More by Shannon Mullane

Huge telecom tower on its way to Bears Ears? Plus: A cool old video of the lower #DoloresRiver; #Snowpack watch — Jonathan P. Thompson (@Land_Desk)

The plan for the tower. Credit: The Land Desk

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

March 1, 2024

🐐 Things that get my Goat 🐐

Exhibit One of the consequences of Utah lawmakers nixing the Bears Ears National Monument land exchange: A company is proposing to build a 460-foot telecommunications tower, complete with two sets of blinking red lights, on state trust land just outside Natural Bridges National Monument in the heart of Bears Ears.

Last month, the San Juan County Planning Commission voted 3-2 to approve a conditional use permit for the tower. The county commission is expected to consider whether to grant the developer a variance, since the maximum structure height for the parcel is 35 feet. The Utah Trust Land Administration and Federal Communications Commission would also need to grant permission prior to construction.

Neither the Bureau of Land Management (which manages Bears Ears NM) nor the National Park Service (which manages Natural Bridges NM) have much say in the matter, because the tower is on state land that would have been included in the swap — if it had occurred. And yet, the ginormous tower (460 feet is really big) would be visible throughout much of both national monuments.

Presumably the tower will extend telecommunication signal to the vast cell phone dead zone that, in my experience, begins around Salvation Knoll and stretches westward to the Henry Mountains. It would have obvious public safety implications by allowing folks to call for help if they happen to venture out on an “Impassible When Wet” road just as an April slush storm is rolling in and end up in a ditch — or worse.

I must admit, there have been times when I’ve been out there that I would have liked to have cell signal so I could let my family know I was alive. Or when access to a current weather forecast may have led me to make better decisions (yeah, right!). Or when being able to work online would have allowed me to stay out in the canyons for a few more precious days. This tower would make all of that possible, I guess.

But is it really worth it? The site of the proposed tower and its red lights is one of the nation’s few remaining dark sky regions, where light pollution has yet to dim out the stars and the night. Similarly it’s one of the only refuges from the otherwise omnipresent social media, text messages, emails, and ringing phones — a digitally dark area, if you will. The tower will disrupt both.

(Thanks to the folks at SUWA for alerting me to this issue).

Reminder

I should have put this link in Tuesday’s dispatch, but spaced it. Anyway, it’s just a reminder that mineral withdrawals for national monuments or other purposes don’t affect existing valid mining claims. Valid ≠ Active. In order for a claim to be valid, the claimant must demonstrate the presence of a valuable mineral deposit there. It’s a small distinction, but an important one. In the end, however, the point remains: a national monument designation would not block existing mining operations or potential operations on valid claims.

🎥 What We’re Watching 🎞️

You gotta check out this video that reader Robert Dundas alerted us to (and that was posted to Vimeo by Rig to Flip). It’s footage from southwest river-running pioneer Otis “Doc” Marston’s May 1948 run down the lower Dolores River with his wife Margaret, friends Becky and Preston Walker, and Ditty the dog. It’s fascinating, even though it lacks audio or narration (it helps to put on your own background music).

Ottis Marston – Dolores Footage. No Audio. Huntington Library, Marston Collection.
Filmed in 1948.

It’s a bit long, too, but do watch it all the way through, because a lot of the best stuff is near the end, when they deal with some very big water — i.e. about 11,000 cubic feet per second. If the footage is too slow moving, just put the video on double-speed, which puts it almost on pace with our frenetic modern society. The scenery is, of course, fantastic. And the river-running gear and attire is really something to behold, as is Preston Walker’s method of guiding “Doc” through the rapids by standing on the bow, shirtless and life-preserver-less, pointing the way with a lit cigarette as if it were a conductor’s baton.

Most of the places in the video haven’t changed that much, aside from Marston’s launch point, which is now under McPhee Reservoir. Oh, and the Dewey Bridge, near where they take out, hadn’t burned (it looks shiny and new). There’s some cool shots of the hanging flume, in a more-intact-than-now state.

I was a bit baffled when, about four minutes into the video, I spied a Spanish colonial style church in or near what appears to be the Castle Valley east of Moab. I mean, it ain’t no LDS stake house, that’s for sure. But a closer examination revealed it was part of a movie set. It took a bit of searching and old-Western trailer viewing, but I’m pretty sure that the church was from John Ford’s Rio Grande, starring a youthful John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara. The church shows up at about 1:15 in this trailer:

Rio Grande (B&W). In this John Ford classic, John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara are embroiled in an epic battle with the Apaches and each other. Lt. Col. Yorke (John Wayne) leads his cavalry troops to the Rio Grande to fight a warring tribe. Yorke’s toughest battle lies ahead when his unorthodox plan to outwit the elusive Apaches leads to possible court-martial. Locked in a bloody war, he must fight not only to save his family, but also to redeem his honor.

🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫

I was looking forward to today, the first day of meteorological spring, because I could finally deliver the good news about the big improvements to the snowpack during February. And things are looking up! Albeit maybe not as much as we’d expect, given the huge dumps some places have received in the last month.

To sum things up, the snowpack across much of the West is right around average. Not great, not anything like 2023, but also far better in most places than this time of year in 2021. Let’s just jump into the graphs:

The snowpack for the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado is at about 91% of the median. Winter started slow, there were some huge dumps in early February, and then things slowed down a bit. Big San Juaners are possible and even likely in March and April, so there’s still plenty of time for snow levels to jump above normal. Source: National Water and Climate Center.

Zooming out to the Upper Colorado Basin as a whole and you get a slightly brighter picture — and a better outlook for Lake Powell’s levels this summer. The early February storms brought levels up to normal and they’ve continued to come.

This one’s a bit bizarre to me, because California (this is in the Sierra Nevada near Lake Tahoe) has had a few pretty good storms this year. But they haven’t delivered the goods to the mountains. At least not yet. As I write this an atmospheric river is bearing down on California and is expected to bring up to 12 feet of snow to the mountains.

This is more like it! This station is up near Mt. Charleston west of Las Vegas. It appears to be a bit of a sweet spot as far as this year’s snowfall goes.

Cheatgrass and other stuff that gets my goat — Jonathan P. Thompson

Cattle grazing in southeastern Utah in early spring. I think I see some cheatgrass in there, but maybe not. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

🐮 Cheatgrass Chronicles

“Today the honey-colored hills that flank the northwestern mountains derive their hue not from the rich and useful bunchgrass and wheatgrass which once covered them, but from the inferior cheat which has replaced these native grasses. … The cause of the substitution is overgrazing. When the too-great herds and flocks chewed and trampled the hide off the foothills, something had to cover the raw eroding earth. Cheat did.”—Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac

For a couple years when I was a teenager, my dad lived in a house near Lebanon, a tiny settlement about ten miles north of Cortez, Colorado. The front porch afforded an expansive view of much of the Montezuma Valley, a quilt of pastures and hayfields and residential development amid patches of sagebrush and piñon-juniper set against the backdrop of Ute Mountain and Mesa Verde.

On hot, dry summer afternoons I liked to sit on the porch and gaze upon the valley, waiting for the inevitable plume of smoke. It always started as a white-gray wisp wafting into the cloudless blue sky, and sometimes would quickly die down. More often than not, however, the wisp grew into a thick, billowing, dark cloud with glowing orange flames at its base. And then, maybe ten minutes later, the faint sound of sirens would ring out as the volunteer fire fighters raced to the scene hoping to save houses and barns from the expanding inferno.

Almost every one of these fires was sparked intentionally — a landowner burning their fields against better judgment. And the target of the blaze was almost always the same, an innocent-looking species that is so nasty and pernicious that it can drive folks to risk burning down their own property to get rid of it: cheatgrass, aka Bromus tectorum, a Eurasian annual that invaded North America in the 1800s and has since become one of the continent’s most detested, ubiquitous, and stubborn invasive species.

The news hook, unfortunately, is not the discovery of a foolproof method to eradicate cheatgrass (burning it doesn’t work, by the way). Rather it’s a new paper on cheatgrass that compiles a collection of scientific studies into a comprehensive, extensive yet digestible, volume: “Cheatgrass invasions: History, causes, consequences, and solutions,” by Erik M. Molvar et al. and put out by the Western Watersheds Project.

Cheatgrass’s invasion of North America echoed Euro-American settler-colonization. The first continent’s earliest record of the grass was made in Pennsylvania in 1790. It popped up in Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming in the 1800s, in the wake of mining rushes and subsequent influxes of cattle and sheep to feed the burgeoning settler population. Cheatgrass was carried westward by wagons and railroads where it quickly took over land disturbed by farming and, especially, livestock grazing. Sometimes livestock operators would burn sagebrush and then encourage cheatgrass to replace it since in early spring the green grass makes for nutritious forage. By early summer, though, it’s unpalatable, and the dry seeds drive folks to arson.

By the 1930s cheatgrass, aided by a massive ground invasion of livestock grazing, had invaded much of the West. And further land disturbance in later decades facilitated the spread of the invasive species, which competes with and often displaces native bunch-grasses. In what’s known as the livestock-cheatgrass-fire cycle, grazing facilitates an initial cheatgrass invasion. The flammable grass then burns, taking out native shrubs such as sagebrush, leaving a cheatgrass mono-crop in their place. This destroys the sagebrush ecosystem and harms all the species that depend upon it, making cheatgrass “one of the most significant ecological crises facing land managers in the arid West,” according to the paper. Climate change is expected to make it worse.

It’s all rather depressing, to be honest. And even worse is that there’s no easy way to rid the West of this malignant grass. Various methods have been tried, from burning the stuff to chemical herbicides to amending the soil to even hand-pulling it. None have been successful in the long-term. Some researchers have suggested inoculating cheatgrass with fungi and bacterium, such as black-fingers-of-death. But they could have dire unintended effects.

Yet it’s not all hopeless. Reducing livestock grazing in areas that have yet to be overrun by cheatgrass has kept a full-invasion at bay, and ceasing grazing altogether in cheatgrass-dominant places has allowed native grasses to recover. Avoiding soil disturbance of any form and preserving the cryptobiotic crusts can help fend off new cheatgrass invasions. The authors of the paper sum it up nicely:

“The key to combating weed invasions is to prevent the types of conditions and land uses that confer advantages to weed species over native plants, and to restore native plant associations that are resilient and resistant to future weed invasion.”

Dust, snow, and diminishing albedo, JONATHAN P. THOMPSON MAY 7, 2021

“Most of us are poor now, like I am. Many of them blame John Collier, who made us reduce our flocks and herds because there was not enough grass for all. But I think the true reason is a change in the climate. When I was a young man this whole country was covered with tall grass. We had rains enough in summer to keep it alive and growing. Now the rains d…“
Read full story

🏠 Random Real Estate Room 🤑

Year-end real estate market reports are rolling in and, generally, it looks like more of the same: Homes are getting more expensive and further out of reach of the average income earner. And relatively high interest rates don’t seem to be dimming the trend, at least in most places.

Take La Plata County in southwestern Colorado, home of Durango and of an alarming increase in home prices across the entirety of its 1,700 square miles over the last several years. In 2023, median sales prices shot up once again — by as much as 26.7% in one area — relative to 2022. The typical in-town Durango home will now cost you about $780,000, with the median priced condo/townhome selling for $529,000. The high high-end is even scarier: Homes in Purgatory resort area were selling for about $1.1 million in 2021; now they’re fetching $2.1 million.

Perhaps most alarming is the way once-affordable areas have also become overpriced. As recently as 2018 the lowest priced house in the county sold for $48,000; last year it was three times that much. While the $150k or so sale would be within the price range of, say, a Durango school teacher, it is an outlier: I look at the listings constantly and rarely see anything under $200,000. The exception might be a trailer in a park, which is great, except that you need to add a $600-$1,200/month lot fee to the mortgage payment, which can easily push affordable housing into the unaffordable zone.

Sigh… More stats here.

🐐 Things that get my Goat 🐐

The once lofty institution known as National Geographic recently weighed in on the growing visitation to national parks issue by dispensing some advice to its 9.5 million readers: “National parks overcrowded?” asks the headline. “Visit a national forest.”

Ugh.

Some national parks clearly are overflowing with visitors. And these crowds may diminish the experience for some of these visitors (others may be just fine with it). And the more people you have, presumably the more impacts they will bring.

But shuffling them onto nearby public lands isn’t the answer. All that’s doing is moving the people from places that have infrastructure, roads, and rangers designed to handle the crowds and limit their impacts, to places that lack this sort of infrastructure. Instead of being confined to paved roads, paths, viewpoints, visitors centers, and bathrooms, the masses will scatter themselves across fragile terrain with no rangers to guide them back to the trails.

I’m not saying folks shouldn’t go to the national forests or that they should be kept secret — as if that were even possible. It’s just that National Geographic should think about the potential impacts of these sorts of articles and who is benefiting from them. The parks won’t be better off, nor will the crowds be noticeably smaller. The forests won’t be better off. And probably the would-be national park visitor that headed to the forest to escape the crowds won’t benefit either. There is, after all, a reason so many people go to national parks (they have iconic landforms and infrastructure and interpretive signs and clean toilets and gift shops). They’d only be disappointed by the forests. So let them go to the parks — crowded or not — and leave the forests alone.

📖 Reading Room … 🧐

… or Listening Room in this case. If you liked Tuesday’s Messing with Maps dispatch, you’ll probably also like The Magic City’s podcast delving into the mysteries of Durango’s founding. Even those most versed in Colorado history will learn something and it’s a captivating listen, besides. Check it out on Spotify or at The Magic City.

Parting Shot

Henry Mountains. Photo credit: Jonathan P. Thompson

Atmospheric rivers boosting #snowpack (February 7, 2024) — The #GrandJunction Daily Sentinel

Click the link to read the article on The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel website (Dennis Webb). Here’s an excerpt:

February 7, 2024

A second atmospheric river of moisture in a matter of days is further bolstering Colorado snowpack levels that have continued to lag a bit behind normal…An initial atmospheric river storm system that wound down over the weekend dumped as much as three feet of snow in parts of the mountains, with the Colorado Avalanche Information Center saying the Ruby and Ragged ranges west of Crested Butte and south of Marble were particularly hard-hit. The Mesa Lakes area on Grand Mesa got about 15 inches of snow in that storm and Park Reservoir saw about a foot of snow fall, while another measuring site on Grand Mesa got only about 4 inches, said Dennis Phillips, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Grand Junction. The second atmospheric river that arrived this week is expected to be a stronger system, he said…

The federal Natural Resources Conservation Service on Tuesday said that statewide snowpack in Colorado stood at 93% of normal for Feb. 6. It has seen little growth since the middle of last month or so, after increasingly sharply from below 70% of normal at the start of January.

Snowpack in the Colorado headwaters basin on Tuesday stood at 96% of normal for Feb. 6. The Yampa-White-Little Snake basins were at 95% of normal, as was the Gunnison River Basin, and the Arkansas River Basin was at 91%.

Southwest Colorado is drier, with the combined San Miguel-Dolores-Animas-San Juan basins at 84% of normal and Upper Rio Grande River Basin at 80%. On Grand Mesa, snowpack levels at NRCS sites Tuesday ranged from 93% at Mesa Lakes to 74% at Overland Reservoir. Mountain snowpack is relied upon to bolster streamflows, reservoirs and agricultural and municipal supplies when that snow melts and runs off.

Colorado Drought Monitor map February 6, 2024.

Most of Southwest Colorado is in varying levels of drought, with moderate drought stretching into western and southern Mesa County, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.

What and where is the #DoloresRiver and why is it important?: #Colorado’s Dolores river is critically important for both wildlife and people — Environment America

Dolores River Canyon. David Joswick | Used by permission

Click the link to read the article on the Environment America website (Karli Eheart and Ellen Montgomery):

December 22, 2023

Where is the Dolores River?

The Dolores River flows more than 241 miles from south to north through Colorado and then into Utah where it joins the Colorado River, carving one of the country’s most stunning canyons.

In 1765, a Spanish explorer came across what he named “El Río De Nuestra Señora de Dolores,” or “The River of Our Lady of Sorrows.” Today, the Dolores River brings pleasure rather than sorrow, as a vibrant habitat for wildlife and a popular recreation destination.

Why is the Dolores River important?

The water in the Colorado River is used for multiple purposes across many western states; including agriculture and drinking water. The river provides water to the cities of Cortez and Dove Creek as well as the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe and the Montezuma Valley through large, man-made canals. Importantly, the Dolores River flows into the Colorado River, which provides critical downstream benefits to some 40 million Americans.

The Dolores River was dammed just southwest of the city of Dolores, Colorado, creating the McPhee Reservoir, which allocates all of its stored water for agriculture. Even though it is the second largest reservoir in Colorado, the McPhee does not have the capacity to support agriculture and to release enough water into the river to help recreation and wildlife thrive.

This watershed is an ideal habitat for large mammals, such as desert bighorn sheep, mule deer, and beavers as well as many migratory birds. The river is also home to three native fish; flannelmouth sucker, bluehead sucker, and roundtail chub.

The jaw-dropping scenic views make it a popular tourist destination year after year. Rafting, camping, hiking, fishing, hunting, bird watching and other activities are abundant. Visitors also come for the rich cultural history. The Dolores Canyon was home to ancient Ute peoples, Ancestral Puebloans, and Fremont peoples for thousands of years.

Threats to the Dolores River

The Dolores river is dependent on water released by snowpack, the snow that builds up in the colder months. Due to climate change, snowpack has been decreasing since the 1950’s as snow melts earlier and there is less precipitation.

Because of the more intense drought conditions caused by climate change, there is often not enough water in the McPhee Dam left to release into the river after water has been allocated to agriculture. The river’s flow has decreased by 50% over the last 10 years. Not having enough water flowing can lead to dramatic increases in both water temperature and sediment and silt, leading to reduced water quality.

Nathan Fey, seen here paddling the Lower Dolores River. The lower Dolores River depends on a deep snowpack for boating releases from McPhee Reservoir. (Photo courtesy Nathan Fey)

The importance of snowpack to the river was demonstrated in 2016. Thanks to a healthy snowpack which released more water than past years, the river flowed at a “floatable” level for the first time in half a decade. The fully flowing river led to increased water recreation, such as rafting the technical rapids, exploring back hidden canyons, fly fishing for rainbow trout and spotting wildlife such as beavers. Camping even resumed, despite many campsites being overgrown and untended for years.

In addition to low water levels, the river is exposed to pollution from uranium tailings and runoff from historic mines at its headwaters. With the possibility of mining resuming, the Dolores could be exposed to even more pollution, threatening native fish species, potentially leading to population declines. Additionally, it decreases the quality and the safetyof drinking water across the country, potentially leading to public health risks.

Prickly Pear Dolores River Canyon. David Joswick | Used by permission

We must protect the Dolores River

We must ensure the water in the Dolores River is safe for drinking, wildlife, recreation, and agriculture. Designating the land surrounding the Dolores River in Mesa and Montrose counties as a national monument would help to protect endangered species, encourage sustainable and responsible recreation and protect the water that does flow in the river from future toxic pollution. A national monument will not address all of the challenges with water shortages in this area but it will give wildlife a better chance. This will allow people to continue to enjoy the unique beauty of this area without running the risk of overuse, and preserve it for future generations.

Dolores River skeleton plant (Lygodesmia doloresensis). Photo by Peggy Lyon via Colorado Natural Heritage Program

Conservation of the North Rim area — Pete Kolbenschlag (Colorado Farm and Food Alliance) #GunnisonRiver #DoloresRiver #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification

Stateline run of Dolores River around the turn of the last century. Photo credit: Pete Kolbenschlag

From email from Pete Kolbenschlag (Colorado Farm & Food Alliance):

The North Rim of the Black Canyon, in the National Park, which is accessed from Fruitland Mesa near Crawford – a remote region of ranches at the base of the West Elk Mountains – showcases an especially dramatic feature. Even among many spectacular places in western Colorado it impresses, marking where the Southern Rockies transition into the mesas, deserts and canyons of the Colorado Plateau. This cherished national treasure is also a local North Fork favorite, found on the way to Blue Mesa and the city of Gunnison.

The Colorado Farm & Food Alliance is supportive of public lands conservation, for protecting the stunning landscapes near our home-base. Set into this amazing landscape are small towns like Crawford, Paonia and Hotchkiss, and scattered between and on the mesas all around are the farms, ranches, wineries and businesses that work hard to make it here.

As we consider how we can adapt rural communities to be resilient and prosperous in a changing climate and dynamic future, we think that land conservation and watershed health are two of the most important, and effective, strategies we can pursue. That is one reason, as we look even further west, across the Uncompahgre Plateau, into the heart of Colorado’s red rock canyon country along the Dolores River, we see opportunity.

Far less visited than Moab and Monticello, Utah which lie just on the other side of the La Sal Mountains and Paradox Basin, the looming Wingate cliffs along this tributary to the Colorado River, which it joins at Dewey Bridge just over the stateline, contain an unique, fascinating, often hardscrabble history.

Back in the North Fork Valley, the Black Canyon National Park is not the only nearby designated national park service or conservation area. Just downstream is the Gunnison Gorge National Conservation Area. And above it is the Curecanti National Recreation Area which includes not only Blue Mesa reservoir, Colorado’s largest water body, but seldom visited upper reaches of the Black Canyon itself, with sweeping vistas of the San Juan Mountains and the Uncompahgre Plateau. Protected public lands are critical components of the economy in this region.

So lately as talk has percolated up from people who love the red rock Dolores River country, about securing protections to conserve what is unique and important about it, we pay attention. Sen. Bennet has long championed a bill to establish a national conservation area for part of the Dolores Canyon region. And more recently, a growing coalition of businesses, conservation groups and local elected officials are calling on President Biden to designate a national monument for a part of the region as well.

We think this could be a great opportunity to ensure what is unique there remains intact and that local businesses benefit from growing visitation to the region. Given the rich history in the West End of Montrose County, like the Hanging Flume and the town of Uravan – a critical player in the Atomic Age – it’s no wonder community leaders are wanting to protect the area.

Towns like Naturita and Nucla, with their markets and cafes, can serve as hubs that support local farms and residents, as they always have, and play host to visitors and activities, provide guides and services, and be the jumping off and provisioning point for the more adventuresome.

For places as rooted in tradition as are the rural communities of western Colorado, public land conservation and protecting the health of our lands and watersheds is a solid strategy to preserve what we care about most. And to welcome new opportunities. This is the strongest connection we see with our friends on the West End: protected public lands protect a rural way of life – and can help us better prepare for and better prosper in the future.

As 2024 opens to new possibilities, we cannot think of a better conversation than how to secure a locally-rooted, sustainable, and prosperous future for the Dolores Canyon Country and the rural, western communities of our local and nearby watersheds. As President Biden looks for legacy projects to leave with future generations, now is the time for Colorado’s leaders like Senators Hickenlooper and Bennet, and Governor Polis to speak up and urge the president to act.

Map of the Gunnison River drainage basin in Colorado, USA. Made using public domain USGS data. By Shannon1 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=69257550

McPhee Reservoir breakwater replaced after 10 years — The #Durango Herald

The San Juan National Forest installed a new breakwater near the boat ramp at McPhee Reservoir to protect those using the ramp from dangerous waves. (Courtesy of the San Juan National Forest)

Click the link to read the article on The Durango Herald website (Reuben M. Schafir). Here’s an excerpt:

The structure installed to prevent waves from interfering with operations at the boat ramp consisted of roughly 200 oversize tires strung together with cables. The remnants of a previous breakwater – also a pile of car tires – lay stuck in the lake bed, exposed by dropping water levels. But after years of waiting, the trash was removed and an 800-foot shiny new wave attenuator was installed in 2023, thanks to a federal grant and the work of the San Juan National Forest, which manages recreation at the site.

The new breakwater near the boat ramp at McPhee Reservoir cost nearly $600,000 by the time the work and removal of the previous system was completed. (Courtesy of the San Juan National Forest)

The new breakwater, like the one at Lake Nighthorse, is a Wave Eater system composed of floating cylindrical drums that cause surface waves to break and dissipate. The total cost of the installation and removal of trash exceeded $600,000. In 2015, Montezuma County spent over $150,000 of a Colorado Parks and Wildlife grant to build a new breakwater. But the design was lacking, said Tom Rice, recreation staff officer of the Dolores Ranger District…The new breakwater is made of durable yellow and orange polypropylene drums, which, when combined with new, lighted no wake buoys, greatly improve visibility in all weather conditions, day or night, a SJNF spokeswoman said in an email.

#AnimasRiver: The 1911 Flood: Could it happen again? — @Land_Desk (Jonathan P. Thompson) #SanJuanRiver #RioGrande #DoloresRiver #GreenRiver #ColoradoRiver

Flood damage wrought by Junction Creek in October 1911. This is looking south down Main Avenue from around the current location of Durango High School.

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

At around four a.m. on October 6, 1911, Navajo Methodist Mission Superintendent J.N. Simmons woke up to find himself and the mission near Farmington, New Mexico, surrounded by water. It wasn’t a total surprise. He and two other staffers—Frank B. Tice and Walter Weston—had received the flood alarm the previous day, but had chosen to stay, certain that the San Juan River’s waters would never reach them, and if they did, the brand new, three-story cement-block mission building, watched over by God, would provide an unsinkable refuge. They were wrong.1.

The rain began in the San Juan Mountains late on the morning of October 4, 1911. It came down gently at first, slowly gaining intensity over the course of the day. By evening the tropical storm was a torrent, dropping two inches of precipitation on Durango in just 12 hours, nearly twice what the town normally gets during all of October. Weather watchers in Gladstone, above Silverton, recorded eight inches of rain on October 5—a virtual high country hurricane.

Design for the whitewater park at Smelter Rapids via the City of Durango

Once-gurgling streams jumped from their banks and twisted steel railroad tracks into contorted sculpture, decimated roads and bridges, and demolished barns. Junction Creek tore out the Main Avenue and railroad bridges before adding its load to the Animas, which carried an estimated 25,000 cubic feet per second of water as it ran through town. It’s an almost incomprehensible volume. A good spring runoff these days might lift the waters to 6,000 cfs, high enough for the river to leave its banks and spread across the floor of the Animas Valley, and to turn Smelter Rapid into a churning hellhole for rafters.

The water unmoored the railroad bridge near Durango’s fish hatchery and carried it downstream, despite the fact that two full coal cars had been parked on the bridge to provide ballast. The river jumped its channel and headed onto 15th street, creating a five-foot-deep river that today would go right through a Burger King. further downriver the waters washed away 100 tons of toxic slag from the Durango smelter, and carried away several homes from Santa Rita, on the opposite shore.

The Animas River rushing beneath the Main Avenue bridge in Durango, Oct. 1911. Note the partially submerged house located about where the VFW is now and the water crossing Main near where Burger King is currently located. Photo credit Center of Southwest Studies, Fort Lewis College.

Sixty miles east of Durango, in Pagosa Springs, the upper San Juan River swept away more than 20 structures and destroyed the town water plant, hospital, and jail. Its power plant “was wiped out of existence, nothing left but the water wheel.” The Bayfield Blade called Arboles, a village near the junction of the San Juan and Piedra Rivers, “a thing of the past.” That was a bit of hyperbole, but maybe also prophetic: the community survived that flood, but was later buried under the waters of Navajo Reservoir. Further east the Rio Grande grew even grander and threatened to carry parts of Española, Bernalillo, and Albuquerque down to the Gulf of Mexico.

Over in Dolores, Colorado, the river peaked out at 10,000 cfs, more than 20% greater than the second highest peak hit in 1949. The raging river of sorrow ripped out railroad tracks, washed out roads, and inundated the town under four feet of water and four inches of mud, carrying away houses and the boardwalk. My great grandfather, John Malcolm Nelson, had come down from Ouray in early October to look at buying land in the Ute Strip — and he did, down at Sunnyside Mesa. But his trip back north was delayed by the fact that every bridge and road in the region was washed out.

In Farmington the seething monsters of the upper San Juan and the Animas joined forces, spilling over the banks and onto the flats on either side of the river, where the Navajo mission sat. Simmons and his fellow staffers sent the children to higher ground at about midnight as a precaution, equipping each with a blanket and loaf of bread. Then they went to bed, not realizing their own mistake until they awoke four hours later.

Somehow, Weston was able to quickly escape on horseback (he may have snuck out earlier). Tice chose to stick around, heading for the top floor of the structure. Simmons ran out and climbed atop an outhouse, apparently in order to launch himself onto a horse. Simmons missed the horse and ended up in the water, instead, carried rapidly downstream alongside dead animals, haystacks, and pieces of people’s homes.

Tice, it seemed, was the only survivor, and as the sun came up, onlookers gathered on the opposite shore. They watched Tice climb from the second story to the third, finally climbing onto the roof with his dog. It seemed safe enough; the water stopped rising after it inundated the third story. Little did he know, the waters were slowly dissolving the building underneath him, and it, the roof, the dog, and finally Tice were all swallowed up by the current.

The Shiprock Indian School campus was covered with water five feet deep, washing away several adobe buildings, and the fairgrounds, prettied up for the annual fair, were covered with a torrent of muddy water. Every bridge in San Juan County, Utah, where a miniature oil boom was on, was torn loose and carried away by the angry torrent; 150,000 cubic feet of water shot past the little town of Mexican Hat every second, according to a 2001 USGS paleo-flood hydrology investigation. That’s about 100 times the volume of water in the river during a typical March or April, a popular time to raft that section. It took out the then-new Goodridge bridge — some 39 feet above the river’s normal surface — tore through the Goosenecks, backed up in Grand Gulch, deposited trees on sandstone benches high above where the river normally flows, and finally combined with the raging Colorado River to create a liquid leviathan of unknown volume that wreaked more havoc through the Grand Canyon and beyond.

***

The 1911 event is typically considered to be the Four Corners Country’s biggest flood, based on streamflow estimates, anecdotal accounts, and the damage wrought. Since then it has been rivaled only by the June 1927 flood, when the Animas River in Durango reached 20,000 cubic feet per second; and in 1949 and 1970 when the high-water mark was about 12,000 cfs and 11,600 cfs, respectively. That might make 1911 seem like a freak event — a once-in-a-millennium confluence of factors. Combine that with the fact that the river’s annual peak streamflows have trended downward over the last century or so, and a 1911 repeat seems less and less likely.

But these waters are muddied, so to speak, by the relatively short timeline and limited geographical scope we’re working with. Many streams didn’t have gages on them at the time, and even those that were present weren’t always accurate (most of the 1911 figures are estimates, not actual measurements). Even though most of the “old-timers” said it was the biggest flood they’d ever seen or heard of in these parts, we have to remember that they tended to be white guys, and white settler-colonists had only been in the area for four decades or so. Not that memories of weather events are ever all that reliable.

A swollen San Juan River nearly wiped Montezuma Creek and Bluff City, Utah, off the map back in 1884 (the 1911 flood wreaked less destruction). Yet there were virtually no stream gages, so the magnitude of that earlier event is hard to quantify and, besides, maybe the later flood was less destructive because there were fewer homes and infrastructure in the flood’s path by then.

Also, when one looks beyond the San Juan Basin watershed, one finds streamflows that far exceed those of October 1911. On the USGS stream gage on the Green River in Green River, Utah, the 1911 flood (which was at the beginning of the 1912 water year, by the way) ranks as just the 5th largest flow since 1895. And 1911 places fourth overall on the Rio Grande at Otowi Bridge, outdone by 1920, 1941, and 1904.

We can extend the timeline dramatically by turning to paleoflood hydrology, which is sort of like dendrochronology, except instead of looking at tree rings to understand past climate, it uses geological evidence — slackwater lines, debris — to reconstruct the magnitude and frequency of past floods. I skimmed the available literature, including this Bureau of Reclamation survey of studies, and here’s what stood out:

The 1911 flood was likely the largest on the Animas River over the last several hundred years or more. On the San Juan River near Bluff, researchers found no evidence of floods higher than the 1911 debris, indicating it “may represent the largest flood on the San Juan River for a much longer time period than 1880-2001.” In any event, 1911 was larger than the 1884 flood, even in Bluff.

On the Colorado River at Lees Ferry the 1884 flood was most likely the largest during white settler-colonial times, with an estimated flow of about 300,000 cubic feet per second (there were no gages there, yet), which would have provided quite the ride through the Grand Canyon. Some researchers believe an 1862 flood had a flow of about 400,000 cfs. Holy big water, Batman!

Extend the timeline further and the ride gets even wilder: A 1994 USGS paleoflood study found evidence of a 500,000 cfs flood at Lees Ferry between 350 and 750 A.D.; and a 2018 reconnaissance found slackwater deposits indicating a flow of 700,000 cfs. I’m sure it provided quite the scene for Puebloan observers looking down from the canyon rim. If you happened to be in the canyon at that time? Yikes.

From: “A 4500 Year Record of Large Floods on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon, Arizona,” by Jim O’Connor et al.

A study of floods on the Colorado near Moab found that, as is the case on the Animas River, there were a lot of large floods between the 1880s and 1930s, but peak streamflows have followed a decreasing trend ever since. One study suggested this resulted from: land-use changes, particularly a severe reduction in grazing after 1932; greater regulation of the river by upstream dams and so forth; greater upstream water consumption; and a decrease in intense, large flood-producing storms.
The Colorado River near Moab has experienced 44 floods during the last two millennia with flows ranging from 63,500 cfs to 325,000 cfs. (For context, the 1983 runoff, which threatened Glen Canyon Dam, reached 62,000 cfs on this stretch of river and in 1984 it hit 70,300). Most of those floods occurred during the last 500 years.

From “A 2000 year natural record of magnitudes and frequencies for the largest Upper Colorado River floods near Moab, Utah” by Greenbaum et al.

Warming temperatures, like those resulting from human-wreaked, fossil fuel burning-exacerbated climate change, can increase the intensity of storms and the amount of precipitation. That could, potentially, lead to bigger floods. So even though climate change has mostly manifested as drought in the Four Corners Country, it could also have the effect of putting a 1911-like storm on steroids. And with El Niño brewing in the Pacific, we might see some whopper storms sooner rather than later. Or not. Either way, though, it seems silly to assume the 1911 flood won’t repeat someday. Maybe next time it will be even worse.

That 1911 storm dissipated over the next couple of days, leaving a bright sun to illuminate the river valleys, newly scoured of the roads, houses, bridges, railroad tracks, and other detritus that humans had littered the valleys with over the previous decades. But the folks of the San Juan Basin soon went to work rebuilding — quite often in exactly the same spots that had flooded so catastrophically.

I used to see that as a combination of foolishness, hubris, obliviousness, and stubbornness all woven into a tapestry of denial. Surely they couldn’t have believed a flood of that magnitude would never occur again.

Looking from Main Avenue in Durango (or thereabouts) toward the Day House. The Animas Brewing Co. now stands about where the right, foreground house is.

And yet, now that I’ve fallen victim to a flood, or at least my home has, I finally get it. What do I know about their circumstances? Maybe they had invested everything they owned into this little plot of land and a home, and they have nowhere else to go. Maybe they are just so wedded to this particular place that they figure it’s worth the risk to build in a 100-year flood plain. Maybe they were just tenacious bastards shaking their fist at the sky in defiance.

What I do know is that if and when there is a repeat of the 1911 flood, or that whopper that sent 700,000 cfs into the Grand Canyon, it will leave some serious destruction in its wake.

The 1911 flood wrecked a lot of infrastructure, but the human death toll was much smaller than one might have expected. Among the handful of fatalities was Frank B. Tice, of the Navajo Methodist Mission, whose body was found 20 miles downstream from where he was swept away.

But there was something else, too. On an island in the San Juan River, somewhere between Farmington and Shiprock, a man huddled next to a small fire, cooking apples that he had snagged as they bobbed past. After falling in the water he had grabbed ahold of some debris, and it had carried him for miles until he finally reached the island, cold, wet and hungry but, maybe miraculously, alive. It was J.N. Simmons, of the Navajo mission.1

A 1998 paleo-flood investigation determined the measurement was in error and it was more likely that about four inches fell across a wider area. In any event, the author of the report does not dispute the magnitude of the flood that resulted.

San Juan River Basin. Graphic credit Wikipedia.

Stakeholder meeting held for proposed #water regulations — The #PagosaSprings Sun #SanJuanRiver #DoloresRiver #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification

Ralph Parshall squats next to the flume he designed at the Bellevue Hydrology Lab using water from the Cache la Poudre River. 1946. Photo Credit: Water Resource Archive, Colorado State University, via Legacy Water News.

Click the link to read the article on the Pagosa Springs Sun website (Hailey Sams). Here’s an excerpt:

The Colorado Division of Water Resources (CDWR) met Wednesday, Aug. 9, to go over and develop water measurement rules for Division 7. According to its water administration Web page, the Division of Water Resources (DWR) “has focused on measurement rules in recognition of the importance of measuring both surface water and groundwater diversions. DWR is now beginning a formal effort to develop measurement rules in Division 7 by conducting stakeholder meetings in Southwestern Colorado in late July and early August.”

A draft of 18 possible rules was released and can be found at https://swwcd.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/2023-07-25-Rules-for-Initial-Stakeholder-Meetings.pdf.

The rules are based off of the rules appointed in Division 6. The CDWR is “in charge by law to make sure the people that divert water off the river according to their water rights, or pump water out of the ground do it according to their water right and … don’t injure other people” said Kevin Ryan, state engineer for the CDWR, at the Aug. 9 stakeholder meeting. Injury is used to describe when someone’s water flow is negatively impacted by an upstream user.

A gorgeous #Colorado canyon will be raftable for the first time since 2019 thanks to heavy snowpack: But the #DoloresRiver is just one of many rivers where the rafting outlook is great this season — The #Denver Post #runoff

Ponderosa Gorge, Dolores River. Boating is popular on the Lower Dolores River, which is being considered as a National Conservation Area. Photo credit RiverSearch.com.

Click the link to read the article on The Denver Poste website (John Meyer). Here’s an excerpt:

The Dolores River in southwestern Colorado can be one of the best rafting destinations in the country when it has enough water. It offers gorgeous scenery in the high desert of the Colorado Plateau and history dating back to the ancient Anasazi, who used it as a highway to and from Mesa Verde not far to the south. There are many years when the Dolores is not runnable for commercial rafting outfitters because of insufficient water, though. When they can operate there, as they will this year thanks to Colorado’s abundant mountain snowfall this past winter, rafters and outfitters rejoice. The last time the Dolores could support rafting was in 2019…

When snowpack is meager, runoff from the upper Dolores is stored in McPhee Reservoir near the town of Dolores for agricultural needs. This year, thanks to the great snowpack at its headwaters in the shadow of the 14,246-foot Mount Wilson near Telluride, there will be some left over for recreation, which happens down river from the reservoir…

With rafting season beginning this week for many outfitters in the state, the snowpack in nearly every Colorado river basin is near normal or above, some way above normal. The San Miguel, Dolores, Animas and San Juan basin this week stood at 88% above normal, and the adjacent Gunnison River basin was 71% above normal. Drainage in the northwest part of the state — which includes the Yampa, White and Green rivers — is 41% above normal, and the Colorado River headwaters is 24% above normal. Colorado rafting companies are expecting good things. The Arkansas basin’s overall snowpack stands at only 78% of normal, but its flows can be augmented by diversions from places in the high country where snowpack is better. Those water management decisions are made primarily for other purposes, such as agriculture, but rafters get to recreate on that water first. The Arkansas is Colorado’s most popular river for rafting by far…The Blue River, north of Silverthorne, may be runnable this year.

Check out the fill spike for this season!

River levels expected to close #Colorado 141 between #Naturita and #Gateway — The #Montrose Daily Press #DoloresRiver #runoff

A photo captured on May 3, 2023 shows the Dolores River flowing underneath a CDOT bridge structure located on Colorado Highway 141 at mile point 88.5. River flow rates are nearing 10-year flood event levels. (Courtesy photo/CDOT)

Click the link to read the release from the Colorado Department of Transportation on The Montrose Daily Press website:

The Colorado Department of Transportation is strongly considering closing Colorado 141 between Naturita and Gateway Friday evening, May 5, due to water levels on the Dolores River and extra caution over the structural integrity of the bridge at Roc Creek.

If the river reaches expected levels, CDOT plans to close the highway at 5 p.m. Friday, with the highway remaining closed until the flood danger has subsided. According to a CDOT news release, the closure is dependent on various factors, including snowmelt and reservoir releases. As flow amounts fluctuate, the bridge over Roc Creek may require additional closures

“River flows in the area have not been observed at these levels in 18 years. With the flood event expected to peak this Friday, we are taking proactive and cautionary measures at this particular bridge. Engineers and maintenance personnel will be assessing the structural integrity throughout this high-flow event,” Regional Transportation Director Julie Constan said in the news release.

For safety, CDOT has determined that the bridge structure at Roc Creek should be closed to traffic while peak water flows are occurring. The structure is located approximately 27.5 miles north of Naturita at mile point 88.5. The northbound closure point is located north of Naturita and the County Road CC junction at mile point 64. The southbound closure point is just south of Gateway, at mile point 110.

CDOT hydraulics engineers are closely watching forecasts, as well as tracking the anticipated releases from McPhee Reservoir in Montezuma County, CDOT spokeswoman Lisa Schwantes said.

“It’s going to be a combination of those things that really have an effect on how high the water flow is,” she said. With respect to whether CDOT in fact closes 141: “We’re leaning toward the side of caution.”

The National Weather Service (NWS) has issued a flood advisory for the Dolores River due to the increased release of water from McPhee Reservoir. The flood advisory also includes the Dolores and San Miguel Rivers due to heavy runoff from snowmelt. The flood advisory is in place until further notice and covers Montrose County, as well as the counties of Montezuma, Dolores and San Miguel.

CDOT is less concerned that water will overflow the top of the bridge — projections have the river hitting about 2 to 4 feet below. Rather, the concern is how the bridge structure might respond to a high flow at a rate not seen in close to 20 years, Schwantes said. There is some concern about the bridge piers, as well as large debris that could wash down and lodge beneath it.

“We’re confident of the integrity of the bridge, but we don’t want anyone driving over it when those high peak flows are occurring,” she said.

The northbound closure point is located north of Naturita and the County Road CC junction at mile point 64. The southbound closure point is just south of Gateway, at mile point 110.

The National Weather Service (NWS) has issued a flood advisory for the Dolores River due to the increased release of water from McPhee Reservoir. The flood advisory also includes the Dolores and San Miguel Rivers due to heavy runoff from snowmelt. The flood advisory is in place until further notice and covers Montrose County, as well as the counties of Montezuma, Dolores and San Miguel.

#Rico Reprieve + BLM revokes Moab-area lithium permit — @Land_Desk #DoloresRiver

Rico, Colorado, during its heyday in 1891. William Henry Jackson photo, Denver Public Library Special Collections.

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

CONTEXT: I’ve long been intrigued by Rico, a former mining town of about 300 people in the western San Juan Mountains in southwestern Colorado. On paper, Rico looks a lot like Silverton: It was platted in the 1870s on Ute land as a mining hub and flourished during its early years; it sits at about 9,000 feet in elevation, surrounded by high mountains; and it was serviced by a railroad built by Otto Mears.

Yet Rico, just 20 miles as the crow flies from Silverton, ultimately followed a far different trajectory. The 1893 Silver Panic hit both towns hard initially, but Silverton ultimately recovered and its mining industry continued to support a fairly healthy population until the early 1990s. Rico, not so much — the population in 1890 was about 4,000; by 1900 it had shrunk to 811 and continued to ebb, bottoming out at just 75 in 1980.

Prior to mining, snowmelt and rain seep into natural cracks and fractures, eventually emerging as a freshwater spring (usually). Graphic credit: Jonathan Thompson

Mining in Rico didn’t collapse after the Silver Panic by any means. Throughout the decades, big and little firms gouged and tunneled, drilled and blasted, stoped and mucked, milled and smelted in the Rico Mountains. Sulfide-bearing iron pyrite — the active ingredient in acid mine drainage — is abundant here. So much so that in the 1950s the Rico-Argentine Mining Company and Vanadium Corporation of America began mining pyrite to produce sulphuric acid at a plant at the St. Louis Tunnel. The acid was used mainly for uranium processing at mills in surrounding lowlands. In 1980 Anaconda, a subsidiary of Atlantic Richfield, bought the Rico Argentine Mine site and surrounding lands with an eye toward molybdenum mining, but never actually pulled any ore out of the ground.

All of the mining activity permanently scarred the land, sullied the waters of the Dolores River, which passes through town, and contaminated town soils with lead. But it was never enough to revive the town’s early glory or population. Rico lost the Dolores County seat to the powerful Dove Creek pinto bean and Grange lobby in the 1940s, and the Rio Grande Southern railroad abandoned the community shortly thereafter.

Silverton, meanwhile, held onto its branch of the Denver & Rio Grande Western railroad, helping that town to become the backdrop of many a mid-century western film and a major tourist attraction. And the relatively prosperous mining industry there had left behind infrastructure to support the new economy. Despite its scenic location, mining history, and proximity to public lands, Rico never developed a strong tourist economy — perhaps by design. In 1990 Silverton’s population was about 800; Rico’s was roughly one-eighth of that. But what Rico lacked in economic development it made up for with a rough and rustic sort of charm.

Over the years, various entities have hatched economic development schemes. In the 1980s, the Rico Development Corporation bought most of the Anoconda/Atlantic Richfield land and other property, compiling 1,800 acres of patented mining claims and hundreds of in-town lots (and in so doing took on responsibility for water treatment at the old Rico-Argentine mine site, which didn’t end so well). Real estate developer Rico Renaissance acquired the land in the mid-1990s and worked with Rico officials to come up with a grand plan to revive, spiff-up, and build out the infrastructure needed to substantially grow the old mining town. Meanwhile, economic exiles from Telluride — 26 miles and one mountain pass away — began moving in and opening a few businesses, including a live music venue that attracted folks from around the region.

Rico Renaissance’s plans fell apart in 2007 for various reasons, and they tried to sell the land to Bolero Mining, which wanted to build a molybdenum mine nearby, to the dismay of some and delight of other locals. The effort failed, in part because the global financial crisis diminished demand for minerals, in part because opening a new mine in this day and age ain’t easy. As if to drive home the point, in 2011 the Environmental Protection Agency ordered Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO) to clean up the Rico-Argentine Mine site just north of town; it had been oozing high concentrations of zinc and other heavy metals into the Dolores River since the mid-1990s. The company has spent at least $63 million on the effort so far, even though it never made any money off of the property.

What was left of Rico Renaissance became Disposition Properties, which continued to toy with developing the properties, but never progressed very far. Meanwhile Rico’s population has continued to grow, albeit slowly, and real estate prices have climbed. There are no homes in Rico listed for sale on Zillow, just a couple of lots priced around $200,000. But a 12-bedroom log-cabin monstrosity a handful of miles downriver from town is priced at $2.95 million. Still, the place isn’t what I’d call gentrified in any pervasive way; it retains its small-town funkiness. I passed through there last Fourth of July and was delighted to see the aftermath of a down-home parade and just dozens of folks milling about the sidewalks eating burgers (as opposed to the thousands that mob Silverton on the Fourth).

Last April, Disposition finally threw in the towel and put 181 parcels covering 1,146 acres on the market for $10 million. Telluride Properties, the listing agent, marketed the property — and its potential — aggressively. It touted its geothermal properties (hot springs resort), the space for 300 new homes, potential for a land swap with the Forest Service, a parcel for a riverside lodge, and so on. It even suggested the possibility of building a chairlift, perhaps to access a Silverton Mountain-esque backcountry ski area. It did not mention the Superfund site or lead contamination; lack of infrastructure; floodplains and other geologic hazards; or Rico’s 2004 master plan objective of avoiding a “predominant resort character.”

Many locals were not amused. A resort and hundreds of new homes would certainly bring jobs and money to the area, but it would also completely overwhelm the existing community and smother its scrappy spirit. Rico townsfolk only needed to look around the region to see that amenity-economy-based prosperity has its downsides, ranging from housing crises to the widening abyss between the ultra-wealthy and everyone else.

Rico still may get gentrified, but the threat of it becoming a glitzy destination resort appears to have subsided. On April 5, the Dolores County clerk recorded a real property transfer and a special warranty deed conveying dozens of Disposition Properties’ parcels to Atlantic Richfield. While the property transfer document remains under wraps — it’s labeled a “sensitive document” — the warranty deed includes a list of what appears to be all of Disposition’s remaining properties. The transfer fee is listed as $778.94, indicating that the sale price was about $7.79 million.

We weren’t able to get in touch with anyone at Atlantic Richfield — now the valley’s largest landowner — about the purchase or their intentions. We can rest assured, however, that they aren’t going to be building a Rico Mountain mega-resort. Rico Town Manager Chauncey McCarthy said the mining company likely will hold onto contaminated and mining-impacted claims in order to remediate and reclaim them (which is probably why they bought the property in the first place). They may sell off other parcels and have expressed an interest in working with the town to make use of the in-town properties. The Montezuma Land Conservancy reportedly wanted to buy the property and put conservation easements on some parcels while possibly building affordable housing on others. Those kinds of scenarios seem far more likely now.

Rico, undoubtedly, will continue to grow. But what that growth looks like and how fast it will occur seems now to be far more within the control of the community and its residents.

Mining Monitor

NEWS: In April, the Bureau of Land Management withdrew its permit for A1 Lithium Incorporated’s Paradox Lithium exploratory drilling project near Dead Horse Point State Park outside of Moab.

CONTEXT: The Nevada firm and its many associated companies (Blackstone, Anson, etc) has been staking claims like crazy in the region, as reported by the Land Desk over the last six months or so, and has big plans to extract and mechanically process lithium. Last September, the Moab BLM office approved A1’s proposal to drill two exploratory wells (actually, to reopen abandoned oil and gas wells for exploratory purposes) near the road to Dead Horse Point State Park and Canyonlands National Park’s Island in the Sky unit. Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance appealed the decision.

The Utah BLM’s acting state director Anita Bilbao decided to set aside the permit. Bilboa ordered the Moab Field Office to re-open its analysis to “address SUWA’s concerns regarding a reasonable range of alternatives and to complete additional analysis regarding the cumulative impacts to water quantity.”

A1/Anson also has the Green River Project in the works north of the aforementioned wells. In March, the company announced it had filed a notice of intent with the BLM to drill three exploratory wells there.

Prior to 1921 this section of the Colorado River at Dead Horse Point near Moab, Utah was known as the Grand River. Mike Nielsen – Dead Horse Point State Park

Flooding in the county from rapid snowmelt primarily poses a flood threat on the #ColoradoRiver and the #GunnisonRiver — The #GrandJunction Daily Sentinel #COriver #aridification #snowpack #runoff (April 23, 2023)

Click the link to read the article on The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel website (Dennis Webb). Here’s an excerpt:

The county Department of Public Works says in a news release that the threat of flooding in the county from rapid snowmelt primarily poses a flood threat on the Colorado and Gunnison rivers, but several creeks and washes also can be at significant risk of flooding.

Colorado’s snowpack on Friday was at 133% of median for that date, according to the Natural Resources Conservation Service. Snowpack is at 143% of normal in the Yampa/White river basins, 123% in the upper Colorado River Basin in Colorado, 159% in the Gunnison River Basin and 184% in the combined San Juan/Dolores/San Miguel/Animas basins…Snowpack at three measurement sites on Grand Mesa ranges from 137% to 238% of normal. The Columbine Pass site on the Uncompahgre Plateau is holding four times the normal amount of snow for this time in April.

Flooding already has occurred in places such as Dolores, Montrose County and Hayden in Routt County. Delta County and the city of Delta have been making preparations for high waters on waterways including the Gunnison and Uncompahgre rivers, through measures ranging from checking and cleaning culverts and storm drains…Gudorf said anywhere from Palisade to Fruita along the Colorado River has potential for flooding in lower-lying areas…Among other areas she is concerned about are Plateau Creek, and the Dolores River in Gateway. She said drainages in the Redlands area also may be susceptible to high waters from snow melting at higher elevations…

Gudorf said that when temperatures started warming up quickly a while back she got nervous about rapidly increasing runoff, but the cooldown that followed gave her some hope for a slow but steady runoff season. But she said a lot of snowmelt needs to come off Grand Mesa. Another concerning factor is a recent windstorm that deposited dust on a lot of Colorado’s mountains, which can accelerate snowmelt as the dark dust absorbs heat from the sun.

Southwestern Water Conservation District’s 2023 annual seminar recap — The #Durango Herald #snowpack #runoff

Click the link to read the article on The Durango Herald website (Reuben Schafir). Here’s an excerpt:

The Southwestern Water Conservation District held its 39th annual seminar Friday [March 31, 2023] in Ignacio to address the topic of “seeking common ground in crisis.”

About 300 people were in attendance, including both chairmen of the Southern Ute and Ute Mountain Ute Indian tribes, ranchers, farmers and officials from agencies involved in water conservation at the federal level all the way down to local districts. U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert was a surprise guest…The event’s schedule included panels on reusing treated wastewater, seeking common ground in the distribution of the river’s resources, and the connection been food and water for agricultural producers on the Western Slope, Front Range, and the upper and lower Colorado River Basin…From the Front Range farmers, like panelist Robert Sakata, the owner of a 2,400-acre farm nestled in the expanding urban boundaries of Brighton, to lower basin users such as panelist Bart Fisher, a farmer and former chairman of the Colorado River Board of California, the impacts of the historic drought are top of mind. The need to reduce water use has affected what they grow as well as the quantity…

“Buy-and-dry” programs have become a tense topic of conversation among farmers. The concept is to reduce water consumption by paying farmers annually for water to which they have a right but do not use. Although this can be done in any number of ways, the program’s epithet refers to the common method of fallowing – or intentionally not cultivating – land. Despite protections that ensure unused water rights will not be forfeited, as is historically the case, farmers are skeptical. From a financial perspective, the incentive is small. The upper basin program offers only $150 to farmers per acre-foot of water saved (an acre-foot is the amount needed to submerge an acre of land in 1 foot of water), while farmers can typically harness far more in profits from that water if they use it for irrigation.

“When you diminish agriculture significantly by fallowing, you diminish the economic engine of the community that supports agriculture,” Fisher said…

Harvesting a Thinopyrum intermedium (Kernza) breeding nursery at The Land Institute By Dehaan – Scott Bontz, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5181663

Simon Martinez, the general manager of Ute Mountain Ute Farm and Ranch, said he is more interested in testing out water-efficient crops…Like many farmers looking to save water, the Ute Mountain Ute Farm and Ranch is experimenting with Kernza. The wheatgrass variant can significantly reduce water consumption compared to a crop such as alfalfa…Martinez hopes to test the new grain as potential cattle feed and intends on sowing 46 acres with the seed, likely this spring. Although the concept is experimental – Martinez said the crop has not been grown in the region and its exact efficacy as a cattle feed is unclear – success could mean a significant water savings for the farm. In addition to reducing the amount of water needed to irrigate, which Martinez estimated could near 50% compared to alfalfa, grazing the farm’s herd on Kernza would increase profits by enabling the farm to sell more of the alfalfa that it does produce. The perennial grain has grown in popularity as its viability as an alternative crop becomes increasingly intriguing to farmers. The outdoor brand Patagonia adopted it into the company’s line of sustainable foods and now produces pasta and beer with the grain. Martinez said he is unsure of how the experiment will go. But to test out the grain on 46 acres of the 7,700-acre farm is a small sacrifice…

West snowpack basin-filled map April 6, 2023 via the NRCS.

With future weather predictions becoming increasingly unpredictable, farmers are endorsing an array of solutions. Although this year’s ample snowfall does little to reverse the long-term impacts of the historic drought, water aficionados in the Four Corners are nonetheless grateful for the supply.

Saturation Watch (4/1 #Snowpack Update): Unprecedented precipitation? Probably not, but a whopper of a winter, nonetheless — @Land_Desk #AnimasRiver #DoloresRiver #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification

What a difference a couple of years makes, no? This is the Animas Valley/Durango and surroundings two years ago and today. Notice how at the end of March 2021 nearly all the snow was gone from the north face of Smelter Mountain, a sign that it’s almost time to plant crops outside — which in times of yore often came around Mother’s Day. I’m guessing there may still be snow on Smelter come early May this year. Source: Sentinel Hub

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

There’s some crazy s$#%t going down out there. Or perhaps I should say, falling down out there, from the sky, as in precipitating. Moisture-laden storm after moisture-laden storm has pounded a good portion of the Western United States all winter long. Equally remarkable is that the snowpack-building precipitation and snowpack-preserving cold temperatures have continued up to the end of March and look like they will persist into April, at least (it’s snowing in Colorado as I write this). That will extend the longevity of the snowpack and make a robust runoff more likely.

How robust will the runoff be? That’s anyone’s guess, honestly. I had imagined I simply could find a year when snowpack levels were similar to today’s, and then look at that year’s runoff peak, and voila, I’d be able to ballpark this year’s peak date and flow. And then I’d be able to win the San Juan Citizens Alliance’s “Predict the Peak” contest. But when I looked back on the Animas River, for example, I found that runoff peaks and April 1 snowpack levels corresponded only loosely. The timing of the snowpack peak, which determines how quickly the snow melts, also plays a big role in runoff levels. And we don’t know yet when the snowpack will peak in most watersheds.

And even if we did, there’s just some strange stuff going on, as this graph from the USDA reveals. Notice how in 1993 the snowpack at its peak was far greater than in 2005, and yet the peak runoff in 1993 was significantly lower than in 2005, even though the peak date was nearly identical. So trying to use the past snowpacks to predict the peak runoff this year isn’t as straightforward as I hoped. That said, I’m going to guess the Animas River will peak above 7,000 cfs in late May this year.

The snowpack in the San Juan Mountains in southwestern Colorado is currently at record levels — for the last 36 years, that is. This collection of SNOTEL sites only have records going back to 1987, meaning they leave out the bountiful snow years of the early 1980s. Peak flows are measured in cubic feet per second. SOURCE: USDA NRCS.

Graphs and statistics aside, let me just assure you that there is a sh¶§t ton of snow in the Animas River watershed right now. That’s just a personal observation, but damn …

Predicting the total annual inflows into Lake Powell using snowpack levels is easier, it turns out, than predicting the peak streamflow of a given river. Which makes sense, when you think about it. Here’s the chart for the watersheds that feed Lake Powell, with inflows for selected years. Keep in mind that the records don’t go back to the whopper years of 1983 and 1984, when Lake Powell inflows exceeded 20 MAF:

Currently the snowpack above Lake Powell is tracking higher than on the same date in 1997, 1993, and 2011, some of the biggest years during this period of record (since 1986) for Lake Powell inflows. If snowpack is used as an indicator, then there should be at least 13 million acre-feet of water running into Lake Powell this year, and maybe as much as 16 MAF. Now consider this: Currently there is only about 5.3 million acre feet of water in Lake Powell, meaning the total content could double or more this year (assuming between 7.0 MAF and 9.0 MAF releases from Glen Canyon Dam). Sources: USDA NRCS; Lake Powell Water Data.

And, just one more chart, this one from the La Sal Mountains in southeastern Utah. I include it here because it’s one of the few charts in the region that goes back before 1983, which was a huge year in the Colorado River Basin (as were 1980 and 1984). And because this SNOTEL site has had near record high snowpack levels all winter, and are now exceeding even those from 1983. This bodes well for flows in Mill Creek that runs through Moab as well as the Lower Dolores River.

Graphic credit: Jonathan P. Thompson/The Land Desk

So am I going to win this year’s predict the peak contest? Probably not. But I will predict this: If you’re one of the lucky 2% who got a permit to float one of the West’s rivers this year, you’re probably going to have some big, big water to contend with. So if you wanna give that permit up, I know a few folks who would gladly accept it.

Intrepid boaters in Arizona didn’t even have to wait until spring runoff for some monster water: Heavy rains and snowmelt combined to swell up that state’s rivers on March 22. Some sample flows:

Salt River near Chrysotile: 16,700 cubic feet per second on 3/22;

Verde River below Tangle Creek: 99,100 cfs on 3/22;

Fossil Creek near Strawberry: 6,800 cfs on 3/22;

Oak Creek near Sedona: 17,500 cfs on 3/22.

Low-elevation snow stacks up this season: Experts unsure why SNOTEL sites below 10,000 feet performing better than high-elevation sites — @AspenJournalism #snowpack (March 6, 2023)

This SNOTEL site at about 8,774 feet at the top of McClure Pass was measuring 154% of median snowpack on March 1, 2023. Lower elevation SNOTEL sites across the West Slope are showing a higher percentage of median snowpack than those at a higher elevation (above 10,000 feet). CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM

Click the link to read the article on the Aspen Journalism website (Heater Sackett):

Snowpack on the Western Slope is tracking above average for this time of year, which has some forecasters feeling optimistic about spring runoff. But there is also an interesting phenomenon that they don’t yet know what to make of.

The snow-water equivalent — a measure of how much water is contained in the snowpack — for the headwaters of the Colorado River stands at 116% of average. That number is measured by snow telemetry (SNOTEL) sites, which are remote sensing stations throughout the West’s mountainous watersheds that collect weather and snowpack data.

Most of the lower-elevation SNOTEL sites (10,000 feet and below) have a higher percentage of median snowpack than high-elevation sites (above 10,000 feet). For example, in the Colorado basin, low-elevation SNOTELs are at a combined 121% of average while high-elevation ones are at 112% of average.

This trend holds true across the Western Slope with the Gunnison, Southwest and Yampa/White/Green river basins at 155%, 152% and 142% of average, respectively, for low-elevation sites and 119%, 136% and 122% for high-elevation sites. In the Roaring Fork basin, snowpack is at 110% for the four high-elevation sites and 134% for the four low-elevation sites.

“I can pretty confidently say sites below 10,000 feet have that trend pretty clearly exhibited,” said Karl Wetlaufer, a hydrologist and assistant supervisor at the National Resources Conservation Service’s Colorado Snow Survey. “It’s certainly an interesting observation.”

Why this counterintuitive trend is occurring is unclear. This winter’s storm patterns may be favoring lower elevations. Or colder-than-average temperatures and overcast days in February may have allowed the snowpack at lower elevations to continue accumulating. The February temperatures for western Colorado were on average about 2 degrees below normal, according to the NRCS.

“We’ve been cloudier, colder, and that has probably helped prevent some melting at lower elevations that might typically take place,” said assistant state climatologist Becky Bolinger. “We will definitely want to look into why the lower elevations are performing so much better than the higher elevations.”

Snowpack above average

Snowpack overall on the Western Slope is above average, with some basins — the southwest, which includes the San Miguel, Dolores, Animas and San Juan rivers and the northwest, which includes the Yampa, White and Little Snake rivers — already surpassing the average seasonal peak. Snowpack typically peaks the first week or two in April.

What more snow at lower elevations means for the timing of this spring’s runoff is also unclear, but forecasters say runoff volume should be above average.

“Big picture, this year is looking very, very favorable for all of western Colorado, and it’s a really big turnaround from the last couple of years,” Wetlaufer said. “It’s kind of tough to parse out the impact of this lower-elevation snow being at a higher percent of median than higher-elevation snow, but, in a general sense, I would certainly say it’s quite encouraging for ample snowmelt runoff this season.”

This is partly because lower elevations encompass more surface area than higher ones; there is simply more land below 10,000 feet than above, and if it is covered in an above-average snowpack, that is a good thing for streams and soils.

“Having that lower-elevation snowpack is going to help keep soil-moisture levels high, which can help the efficiency of the higher-elevation snow when it does melt at a later date,” Wetlaufer said. “Substantial low-elevation snow is going to wet up the soil conditions and allow most of that snowmelt to actually transition to the stream channel.”

In recent dry years, thirsty soils have sucked up runoff before it made it to streams. For example, 2021 was historically bad, with an upper basin snowpack that peaked about 90% of average but translated to only 36% of average runoff into Lake Powell, according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. It was the second-worst runoff on record after 2002.

Although water managers are feeling confident that this year will be better and give a boost to depleted reservoirs in Colorado, they caution that one good year is not enough to pull the entire system out of a crisis. Lake Powell, which is the storage bucket for the upper basin states of Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming, is at about elevation 3,521 feet, or about 23% full, the lowest since filling.

“Is this going to solve the Lake Powell and Lake Mead crisis? Not even close,” Bolinger said. “But the forecasted inflows into Powell are above average right now. There’s a silver lining there.”

Aspen Journalism covers water and rivers in collaboration with The Aspen Times.

#LakePowell: What is it good for? — @Land_Desk #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification #snowpack (February 2, 2023)

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

Absolutely nothing?

Sometimes it seems that way, doesn’t it? Unlike other dams, Glen Canyon does not provide any meaningful flood control (except for in the Grand Canyon). It doesn’t regulate streamflow to stretch out the irrigation season (because there are virtually no fields to irrigate between Glen Canyon Dam and the upper end of Lake Mead). And it isn’t so great at storing excess water since, well, there is no excess water. At best it serves as an overflow basin for when Lake Mead fills up. But with both Lake Powell and Lake Mead holding only about 25% of their total capacity, the upper reservoir has become redundant — at least from a water storage standpoint.

Paddling Powell. Photo by Jonathan P. Thompson.

It is from this redundancy that the Fill Mead First philosophy has emerged. Wouldn’t it make more sense, adherents of this school ask, to drain Lake Powell and put what water remains there into Lake Mead, so that you’d have one half-full reservoir rather than two quarter-full ones? So that you’d have billions of gallons of water evaporating off just one reservoir rather than two?

It’s a great question. And it brings up another one: Why Lake Powell? As in, what purpose does Glen Canyon Dam still serve in a climate-changed, diminished Colorado River world?

Let me start by saying that I believe the construction of Glen Canyon Dam was a crime against Nature. It inundated countless cultural sites, killed 186 miles of the mainstem of the Colorado River along with hundreds of additional miles of side canyons and tributaries, and deprived everyone born after 1963 of the opportunity to experience one of our nation’s natural marvels. It radically altered the ecology of the Grand Canyon and further endangered already imperiled native fish.

Delph Carpenter’s original map showing a reservoir at Glen Canyon and one at Black Canyon via Greg Hobbs

For what was this sacrifice made? Primarily it was to enable the Upper Colorado River Basin states to comply with the Colorado River Compact.

The Compact did two big things: First, it divided the assumed average annual flows of the river between the Upper Basin states (Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico) and the Lower Basin states (California, Arizona, Nevada). The Lower Basin got 8.5 million acre-feet per year; the Upper Basin got 7.5 million acre-feet per year. Mexico was added later, getting 1.5 million acre-feet.

But there was something else: To ensure the Lower Basin would get its share, the Compact mandates that the Upper Basin “not cause the flow of the river at Lee Ferry to be depleted below an aggregate of 75 million acre-feet” for any 10-year period. In other words, the Upper Basin couldn’t merely take out its 7.5 MAF share each year and let whatever remained run down to their downstream compatriots. It had to deliver an annual average of 7.5 MAF.

That’s no problem during big water years, but during years when less than 15 MAF is in the river, the Upper Basin would have had to reduce its take accordingly, while the Lower folks would still get their share. During some dry years, the total flow of the river has been lower than 7.5 MAF, meaning the Upper Basin States would be left high and dry.

September 21, 1923, 9:00 a.m. — Colorado River at Lees Ferry. From right bank on line with Klohr’s house and gage house. Old “Dugway” or inclined gage shows to left of gage house. Gage height 11.05′, discharge 27,000 cfs. Lens 16, time =1/25, camera supported. Photo by G.C. Stevens of the USGS. Source: 1921-1937 Surface Water Records File, Colorado R. @ Lees Ferry, Laguna Niguel Federal Records Center, Accession No. 57-78-0006, Box 2 of 2 , Location No. MB053635.

Unless they had a savings account. Or, in this case, a dam and reservoir above Lee Ferry capable of storing enough water during wet years to be able to release the Lower Basin’s 7.5 MAF during even the driest years, i.e. Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell. If not for Lake Powell, the Upper Basin States would have been in deep doo doo over the last couple of decades, because they would have had to substantially cut consumption or go to war with California for failing to deliver the required water to the Lower Basin.

So you could say that the Colorado River Compact’s downstream delivery mandate is the main reason we now are cursed or blessed with Lake Powell. It’s also perhaps the biggest hurdle for Fill Mead First folks to clear: You can’t really get rid of Glen Canyon Dam without scrapping the Compact, for better or worse.

The mandate and the reservoir have another consequence: It forces the Upper Basin States to count evaporation losses against its consumptive use of the River (because it has to deliver the 7.5 MAF after evaporation occurs). Meanwhile, the Lower Basin States can simply take their allotted share out of the river, regardless of evaporation: Another inequity baked into the system.

Glen Canyon Dam serves other purposes, too, such as:

Silt Control: Well, control may not be the right word, since no one has control over the clay and mud and sand (and other less savory sediments) that are carried down the Colorado and San Juan Rivers. But Lake Powell does a good job of catching the silt and keeping it from continuing downstream to clog up Lake Mead. Silt was piling up in Mead at a rate of up to 137,000 acre-feet per year before Glen Canyon. Now it’s down to less than 10,000 acre-feet annually, thanks to that big silt-catcher upstream.

Hydropower Production: We’ve written about this one a lot. The short version: If you did away with Glen Canyon Dam, you’d be depriving the grid of enough electricity annually to power about a quarter of a million homes in the Southwest. It would also drain between $100 million and $200 million annually from dam electricity sales, which helps fund endangered fish recovery programs. That said, by putting that water in Lake Mead, you’d offset some of that loss by increasing the generating capacity of Hoover Dam’s hydroelectric plant.

Recreation: I will confess that when the Blue Ribbon Coalition announced its “Fill Lake Powell: The path to 3,588” initiative last year, I laughed. After all, the motorized recreation lobbying group was calling for massive consumption cuts by all of the Colorado River’s users not to save the River or keep the system from collapsing, but to keep Lake Powell boatable. That just seemed like some slightly lopsided prioritizing. But then a friend and Lake Powell lover called me out on it, and I do have to admit that I’ve done some recreating on Powell, myself, and loved it.

The first time I saw Lake Powell was in the mid-1970s when the reservoir was still filling up. My parents’ friends had rented a houseboat and we spent a week or so with them exploring side canyons, camping, swimming — which for me was floating around in my life jacket — in the warm waters, and hiking to out-of-the-way places that the reservoir and boat had made easily accessible.

There’s something surreal, even shocking about this vast body of water within an arid sea of stone. It’s easy to imagine someone heading off from their houseboat for a hike, getting lost, running out of water, and dying of thirst on a precipice hanging out over a 300-foot vertical drop to a trillion gallons of water. It’s otherworldly in that it seems horribly out of place on this world, which maybe is why it played the part of a post-apocalyptic planet in the opening scene of Planet of the Apes.

But the otherworldliness is part of the appeal, I suppose. Over the years I would return to Lake Powell with friends to camp out on the sandstone shores, sometimes getting there with boats, other times taking creaky old cars on sandy backroads to sections of shoreline that are now miles from the water. We spent a Summer Solstice or two on the reservoir and it was so damned hot and the days so long that early each morning I’d peel myself out of my sun-cooked and sweat-soaked sleeping bag and head straight for the tepid water.

It was usually a lot of fun: A luxurious change from the death march backpacking trips I tended to go on and a sort of novelty to be able to go on a big swim behind the Slickrock Curtain. Well, besides that time that some friends and I encountered a half-submerged cow carcass in the murky water near shore, its legs jutting skyward out of a horribly bloated body, Coors Light cans floating nearby like offerings to a bovine God. But hey.

Back in 2006 or 2007 my wife Wendy headed to Powell for a different sort of trip, setting out from Halls Crossing Marina in sea kayaks for a three-day tour. There’s something eerie about being right down in the glassy, dark water like that. When out in the main channel I tried not to think about how those waters went down below me for hundreds of feet. I tried not to think about the story my cousins used to tell about how divers searching for one of the reservoir’s many victims didn’t find the body but did encounter 12-foot-long catfish in the depths. I tried not to think of what would happen if one of those monster houseboats crashed into me in my skinny little skiff. But all in all it was a marvelous trip and a great way to see that part of the world. I’ve been plotting a longer journey ever since, one in which maybe we hitch a ride with a motor boat up the Escalante or something.

My experiences notwithstanding, recreation at Lake Powell is not only big business, but has also become critical to the economies of the communities that have sprouted near its shores. A National Park Service study found nearly 3 million visitors to Glen Canyon National Recreation Area spent $332 million in and around the park in 2021 (down from $420 million in 2019 when reservoir levels were higher).

Page, Arizona, was established to house the workers who constructed Glen Canyon Dam, and later became the park’s main gateway community, housing its employees, boats, and businesses that cater to park visitors. When the Navajo Generating Station coal plant shut down in 2019, a lot of folks worried that Page would collapse, economically. But it’s stayed afloat — pardon the pun — thanks in part to Lake Powell tourism.

If you drained Lake Powell would tourism to the area dry up, too? I doubt it. Plenty of folks — myself included — would flock to the place to see what the actual canyon looks like, even if it is half silted over. Others, I’m sure, would want to witness the carnage of climate change wrought collapse. Hell, I’d pay good money to be on a house boat as the reservoir drained just to see the place revealed in real time.

I suspect Powell will be drained or drain itself in the next few decades, but I doubt it will happen in the next few years. The Bureau of Reclamation is clearly intent on keeping reservoir levels viable for as long as possible, even if it means bringing the hammer down on the states and forcing cuts in consumption. Combine those efforts with a few good snow years and, who knows, the reservoir might just rebound somewhat.

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West snowpack basin-filled map February 1, 2023 via the NRCS.

I don’t want to jinx it, but maybe, just maybe, this is going to be one of those good spring runoff years of yore. The snow is piling up at above average rates, but it is still early: We may be two-thirds of the way through meteorological winter (Dec-Feb), but not even halfway through the big snow season, which can stretch into May. There’s still time for the snow-deluge to turn to drought.

Oh, and then there are the party poopers who are saying a good snow year is actually bad because it will cause people to let their guards down and ease up on efforts to conserve.

But what the hell, I’m gonna celebrate. Because you know what? There’s a s%$t-ton of snow out there, which is great for the ski areas and the rivers, sure, but best of all it means even lowlanders can go nordic skiing at the golf course, just like in the good ol’ days. Here’s some of the graphs that really stood out for me:

Wait, what?! Not only is the snowpack in Southeastern Utah’s La Sal Mountains nearly double what it normally is this time of year, but it’s 15% above the median peak level for the entire year. More remarkable, it’s higher than ever for this date — there’s even more liquid than in the monster years of 1983 and 1984 (when Glen Canyon Dam had a little spillover problem).

The Dolores River Basin has suffered from a string of drought years which has left irrigators a bit high and dry and the Dolores River downstream from McPhee Dam even drier. So, it’s good to see things looking a bit better this year, albeit not quite as snowy as the La Sals (which also feed the lower Lower Dolores). If snowfall trends continue, it might mean McPhee will fill up enough that dam operators will release enough water to make a river downstream. Who knows, maybe there will be enough flow for a few days for boating? Cross your fingers.

And, finally, we have the Colorado River Basin above Lake Powell. It’s well above median levels, and far surpasses 2021. The question now is whether the black line for 2023 will keep climbing, or plateau like it did around this time last year. In any event, it should probably keep the reservoir from sinking below critical minimum power pool levels this summer.

The San Juan Mountains receive 52 inches of snow, schools close — The #PagosaSprings Sun #snowpack #SanJuanRiver #ColoradoRiver #COriver #ardification (January 22, 2023)

Click the link to read the article on the Pagosa Springs Sun website (Josh Pike). Here’s an excerpt:

Heavy snows came to Pagosa Country this week, causing Archuleta School District to call snow days on Jan. 17 and 18, among other disruptions. Sites in Archuleta County received between 22.4 and 35.6 inches of snow in the storms be- tween Saturday Jan. 11 and Jan. 18, according to the Community Collaborative Rain Hail and Snow Network website. Snowfall totals varied throughout the county, with the highest amount reported near Village Lake. A report from Wolf Creek Ski Area indicates that Wolf Creek had received 16 inches of snow in the previous 24 hours and 52 inches from the latest storm as of approxi- mately 6 a.m. Jan. 18, bringing the midway snow depth to 106 inches and the year-to-date snowfall total to 219 inches.

According to the U.S. Depart- ment of Agriculture National Water and Climate Center’s snowpack report, the Wolf Creek summit, at 11,000 feet of elevation, had 22.2 inches of snow water equivalent as of 11 a.m. on Wednesday, Jan. 18.

The Wolf Creek summit was at 131 percent of the Jan. 18 snowpack median.

The San Miguel, Dolores, Animas and San Juan river basins were at 152 percent of the Jan. 18 median in terms of snowpack.

Reeling in the last of last year’s news: Dying coal; parking vs. people; housing silliness; snow, snow, snow — @Land_Desk #snowpack (January 3, 2023)

Click the link to read the newsletter on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson). Here’s an excerpt:

Aridification Watch

Okay, “aridification” may be the wrong header this time, since the West is getting battered by atmospheric rivers and bomb cyclones and power grid-wrecking snows and winds and rains. It’s record-breaking craziness — at least it seems that way, since we haven’t had much like it in a bit. But is it really all that unusual? Here’s a mini-Data Dump on early winter snowpack levels to help us figure it out:

19: Number of monthly precipitation records broken during the first 28 days of December 2022 in the Western climate region (the final three days aren’t yet recorded in the system).

8.2: Inches of precipitation recorded during a 24-hour period at Sierraville Ranger Station in California on Dec. 2, 2022, shattering the previous all-time record set in 1913.

27: Inches of new snow that fell in the Tahoe City, California, area on Jan. 1, 2023. It contained about 3.33 inches of water. On Dec. 11 the area received 31 inches of snow in one day.

210,000: Approximate number of utility customers who lost power along the West Coast as a result of the late December storms.

30,000: Number of utility customers who lost power in the Northwest after vandals attacked four electrical substations in Washington state on Christmas day.

3: Number of people killed by avalanches so far this season, including two skiers/snowboarders in Colorado and a snowmobiler in Montana.

Further inland, the moisture is giving a needed boost to the giant snowpack “reservoir” that feeds the beleaguered Colorado River system. After tracking close to median levels for the first three months of the 2023 water year, this year’s Upper Colorado Basin snowpack shot up to 142% of the Jan. 3 “normal.” It may be a little too early to get excited, though — last year’s snows followed the same early season abundant pattern before dropping off in January.

Zooming in on the San Juan Mountains and Southwest Colorado we see a similar but slightly less wet pattern. Levels are above the median, but still below last year and 2020.

And zooming in even further to our three go-to SNOTEL stations, all located in Southwest Colorado, we find that snowpack levels are about at the average for each station’s period of record (which varies from station to station), but are still tracking ahead of 2019, which turned out to be a BIG snow year.

All of which is to say, it’s too early to really know what winter will bring us. So be sure to enjoy the snow while it’s here!

Conserving the #DoloresRiver: a decades-long effort — KSJD #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification

Click the link to read the article on the KSJD website (Gavin McGough). Here’s an excerpt:

The Dolores River starts high in the San Juans southwest of Telluride, passes through Dolores, Colorado, where it fills the Reservoir at McPhee Dam. From then on it trickles north through hundreds of miles of desert, meeting the San Miguel and feeding eventually into the Colorado River. Those who have boated it say it’s a river like no other.

“You start below the dam and you head into the Ponderosa Gorge with these big canyon walls and amazing majestic Ponderosa Pines, and you start to see more and more of this red rock coming out,” said Amber Clark, director of Dolores River Boating Advocates (DRBA) which promotes stewardship and recreation along the river.

“Then you transition down into less trees and more red rock canyon walls, and the Wilderness Study Area, and at different places it opens up more, and it’s kind of this ever-changing landscape, but the majesty of it never diminishes,” she said…

The DRBA is one of dozens of stakeholders who have been working to protect the Dolores as a National Conservation Area, or an NCA. Some rivers are protected by Congress under The Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, but protection as an NCA is less controversial, especially amongst agricultural interests. Al Heaton, a cattle rancher in Dolores, is involved in the conservation effort.

“Wild and Scenic comes with some rules and regulations, some laws, that are pretty dramatic and would affect a lot of things, private property and things down the river,” said Heaton.

“Of course, grazing could continue in a Wild and Scenic setting but it could also be restricted, so I felt there had to be a better way.”

Pick your #ColoradoRiver metaphor — @BigPivots #COriver #aridification

On a day in late May [2022] when wildfire smoke obscured the throat of an ancient volcano called Shiprock in the distance, I visited the Ute Mountain Ute farming and ranching operation in the southwestern corner of Colorado. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots

Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):

The river is in deep doo-doo, and worse may very well come. So why such a sluggish reaction?
On a day in late May when wildfire smoke obscured the throat of an ancient volcano called Shiprock in the distance, I visited the Ute Mountain Ute farming and ranching operation in the southwestern corner of Colorado. It was my first visit.
Turning off the paved highway, I drove about 10 miles around the toe of Sleeping Ute Mountain, past a few irrigation ditches, one carrying water, and a lot of fields and center-pivot sprinklers. I knew the runoff the San Juan Mountains, the source of water for the 7,700-acre farming operations by the Utes, was bad. I didn’t realize just how bad it was.
Unlike many tribal rights in the Colorado River Basin, the water rights of the two Ute tribes in Colorado were negotiated in 1986. The agreement resulted in delivery of water to Towaoc, where I ate at the casino restaurant twice on that trip. Before, potable water had to be trucked in.
Mike Preston, filling in for a Ute leader at the Colorado Water Center conference this week, remembers a time before that delivery of water. “There were stock tanks sitting in people’s yards, and a water truck would back up and fill those tanks, and people would go out with buckets to get their potable water.”
The Utes got other infrastructure, too, including water from the Dolores River stored in the new McPhee Reservoir that allows the Utes to create a profitable farm enterprise. But to get the use of McPhee water, the Utes conceded the seniority of their water rights. It worked well for a lot of years, but now in a warmer, drier climate, it leaves the Utes in a hard, dry place: They got 10% of their full allocation in 2021 and 40% this year.
They have been forced to adapt. Instead of planting alfalfa, they planted corn and other crops that use less water and can be fed to cattle. They culled cattle from their herd of 650. The tribe – as are others in Colorado – is exploring the viability of kernza, a new perennial grain created at The Land Institute in Kansas.
Still, some adaptation is impossible. The agricultural enterprise has laid off about half of its employees. And last year, despite securing all available government grants created to allow farmers to make it through hard times, the operation lost $2 million.

On a day in late May when wildfire smoke obscured the throat of an ancient volcano called Shiprock in the distance, I visited the Ute Mountain Ute farming and ranching operation in the southwestern corner of Colorado. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots

Listening to that story related by Preston in a video feed to the conference on the campus of Colorado State University, I wondered whether this was a metaphor for what faces the 40 million people who, in one way or another, depend upon water from the Colorado River.
During this same conference, “Living with the Colorado River Compact: Past, Present and Future,” I heard allusions to hospital emergency wards and over-drafted bank accounts. The latter came from Jim Lochhead, who had several decades of Colorado River experience before arriving at Denver Water as chief executive in 2010.
“No wonder Lakes Powell and Mead are in the condition that they are in today,” he said after accounting the over-drafting of the two big reservoirs, now down to 24% and 26% of storage respectively. “The bank account has been drawn down,” he said, “and we’re looking at a zero balance with no line of credit.”
By now, the 21^st century story of the Colorado River has become familiar in its broadest outlines, part of the national narrative of despair. The pivoting reality came on hard in 2002, when the Colorado River carried just 4.5 million acre-feet of water.

Brad Udall: Here’s the latest version of my 4-Panel plot thru Water Year (Oct-Sep) of 2021 of the Colorado River big reservoirs, natural flows, precipitation, and temperature. Data (PRISM) goes back or 1906 (or 1935 for reservoirs.) This updates previous work with @GreatLakesPeck. Credit: Brad Udall via Twitter

To put that into perspective, as Eric Kuhn, co-author of “Science Be Dammed,” did at this conference, those who framed the Colorado River Compact in 1922 assumed 20.5 million acre-feet as they went about apportioning the river’s flows. In the 21^st century, the river has averaged 13 million acre-feet.
Alarm has been sounded but…
Now, scientists are warning that river managers should plan for no more than 11 million acre-feet, a reflection of the new hotter, and in some places, drier climate. Some think that figure is overly optimistic.
The seven basin states – particularly the thirsty states of California and Arizona – have cinched their belts with various agreements. But they have not responded in ways proportionate to the risk they now face. There is a very real danger of the reservoirs dropping to just puddles of dead pool, too little to be released downstream. Imagine the Grand Canyon without water. Imagine no water below Hoover Dam. Do these images leave you dumbstruck?
A public official on the Western Slope recently confided to me that he and others had grown weary of what they called “drought, dust and dystopia” stories. That troubled me, leaving me to wonder how my own stories are being received.
At the conference this week on the campus of Colorado State University in Fort Collins, I heard something of the same self-doubt.
“With all due respect to my fellow panelists, I live in an area where some of the topics that are mentioned, we’re not uniformly and broadly received,” said Perry Cabot, the lead researcher at Colorado’s State University’s Western Colorado Research Center near Grand Junction. “I think as researchers, we tend to believe that just more educating is going to change the dynamics of the narrative.”
Other panelists agreed with Cabot’s observation that new narratives, not just information, would better convey the gravity of the situation.
“I think the scientific community has gotten its head handed to itself,” said Brad Udall, who has dome some of the pioneering research that shows that “aridification” – as much or more than drought itself – is driving the reduced flows. Drought ends, but aridification resulting from atmospheric greenhouse gases? Not any time soon.
That has gone against the grain of water managers. A decade ago, there was still skepticism about climate change, and water always has been variable. Surely, good winters would return in the mountains of Colorado and other upper basin states that produce 90% of the river’s flows. Colorado alone is responsible for 60%.
After all, every batter goes through slumps, every best-selling author can tell of rejection slips.
By now, however, a clear trend has become evident. Even in good snow years, the runoff lags.

Andy Mueller, general manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District, described various outcomes of a river with continued declines in flows. Photo/Allen Best

At the Colorado River Water Conservation District’s annual seminar in Grand Junction, Brendon Langenhuizen offered no hope for refilling the glass that is now far less than half-full in the coming year. It will be the third La Nina in a row, he pointed out, likely producing above-average temperatures and hence below-average precipitation.
Even so-so precipitation has been coming up as something worse. For example, the snowpack in the Gunnison River watershed last year was 87% of average, but the runoff was only 64%.
Dry soils have sopped up moisture, and then there is the heat. The last year has been among the six warmest in the last century in Colorado, said Langenhuizen, a water resources engineer for the River District. Summer rains the last two years have helped. Still, the reservoir levels drop, the seven basin states so far unable to apportion demand to match supply. After all, there’s money in the bank, and for probably a year more, enough water in the reservoirs to generate electricity.
At water meetings, an element of collegiality has remained, at least until recently. Testiness has crept in, an element of what Andy Mueller, the general manager of the Glenwood Springs-based River District, calls finger-pointing.
Colorado water officials, Mueller included, are doing some of that themselves.
They point out that Colorado and the other upper-basin states get nicked for 1.2 million acre-feet in evaporative losses in their delivery of water to Lake Mead, outside of Las Vegas. California, Arizona, and Nevada do not. “It’s like running two sets of books,” said Mueller.
Mueller was negotiating with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation on the day of the conference in Fort Collins. His stand-in, Dave Kanzer, explained that the Law of the River —the Colorado River Compact and other agreements – don’t necessarily apply anymore. It is “based on long-term stable water supply, and we no longer have that,” he said.

Herbert Hoover presides over the signing of the Colorado River Compact in November 1922. Members of the Colorado River Commission stood together at the signing of the Colorado River Compact on November 24, 1922. The signing took place at the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover presiding (seated). (Courtesy U.S. Department of Interior, Bureau of Reclamation)

Renegotiate the compact?
The Colorado River Compact assumed too much water and also used precise numbers when ratios would have been better, Mueller has observed. Instead, those who gathered in Santa Fe in November 1922 apportioned
7.5 million acre-feet to each of the two basins, upper and lower. In practice, the lower-basin states have been using twice as much water as Colorado and other upper-basin states.
Colorado’s average annual consumption from the Colorado River and its tributaries is 2.5 million acre-feet. In terms of the compact, what mattes entirely is when the diversion began, before or after the compact.
About 1.6 million-acre feet- mostly older agriculture rights – are pre-compact, but 900,000 acre-feet came later. This includes water for Western Slopes cities and the nearly all of the 500,000 acre-feet diverted across the Continental Divide to cities along the Front Range and farms in the South Platte and Arkansas River valleys. This water is most imperiled.
Kuhn, the former general manager of the Colorado River District, said he does not believe it’s practical to attempt to amend or renegotiate the Colorado River Compact.
“But within a few years, maybe after we have figured out how to get out of the current crisis, we’re going to essentially ignore all of the provisions of the compact except perhaps article one, which defines the purpose and the signatures page.”
Lochhead has much the same opinion about the much-disputed element of the compact about the obligations of Colorado and other upper basin states to deliver water. It really won’t matter, he said. The real problem is that the basin states need to align demand with supply that, during the last few years, has been close to 11 million acre-feet. (Keep in mind, the compact assumed more than 20 million acre-feet).
“We’re literally in a situation of triage,” said Lochhead. “Something needs to be done in the very near term to lay a foundation for actions that can be taken in the medium and longer term to manage the river to a sustainable condition.”
The feds need to step up
Lochhead outlined three possibly overlapping alternatives.
First: involuntary regulations and restrictions. The federal government – although it has been using it with restraint – does indeed have authority to regulate use of water that enters into Mead. The U.S. Supreme Court has characterized its power as such. The Bureau of Reclamation must be seen as delivering a coherent threat.
“That gives the U.S. government enormous authority over what happens in the lower basin,” Lochhead said. This is unlikely to happen until after the November election, he said, but it absolutely must happen.
Voluntary agreements must also occur. The Bureau of Reclamation imposed an August 2022 deadline for agreements. If the deadline had been a hard one, the states would have failed. Lochhead said it came down to finger pointing. Arizona and California “stared across the river at each other, seeing who’s going to blink first.”
The federal government has now put $4 billion on the table – through the Inflation Reduction Act —to “grease” the skids in terms of voluntary agreements. (Think, perhaps voluntary retirement of water rights). “They’re going to have to buy down demands in the lower basin,” said Lochhead, conjecturing on deals involving the Imperial Irrigation District, the giant ag producer just north of the border with Mexico.

We will need to sort through what grasses we want and can afford, both in residential settings and in pubic areas, such as Colorado Mesa University, above. That will extend to grasses grown to feed livestock. Top, the Colorado River at Silt, Colo. on Sept. 17. Photo/Allen Best

Lochhead also described the need for reductions in water use in the municipal sectors. Denver Water and several other water agencies in Colorado – but also in Nevada and California and Arizona—announced an agreement in August in which they will try to pare their consumption. For example, Denver wants to end irrigation of medians along roads and highways and crimp the amount of water used for turf. But Denver and other cities need to continue to have trees, said Lochhead.
More cities will join this pact to reduce water use for residential consumption in coming weeks and months, Lochhead said.
But he said Colorado may need state legislation to ensure that real-estate developers can’t create landscaping in the future that requires lots of water, offsetting these gains.
That brings me back to the Ute Mountain Ute lands that I visited in May. By virtue of their 1986 agreement, reality has smacked them hard. There is pain, but there is also adjustment. They have had to adjust.
Something of the same thing must occur in the broader Colorado River Basin. So far, it’s easier to postpone action. But another so-so year – or worse? While the states are trying to make the cuts necessary for a river that is delivering 12 million acre-feet per year, Mueller warns that the plans must contemplate a 9 million acre-foot river, as some scientists have said may come to pass.
But in Grand Junction, one of the scientists pointed out to me that it’s just possible the river may deliver 7 million acre-feet – and that could be next year and the year after.
Then, we may need a new metaphor, something worse than an empty bank account.

A day in Uranium Country — @Land_Desk #DoloresRiver

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan Thompson):

It’s one of those days when the clouds pile up in the azure blue, their shadows gliding across the sandstone and sage, offering a bit of relief from the late June heat. They also promise rain, but I have my doubts. This is the Paradox Valley, after all, which lives up to its name in more way than one, a place of beauty and brutality.

Manhattan Project 1944, Uravan. Photo credit: Uravan.com

The Uravan Mineral Belt, which roughly follows the lower Dolores River in western Colorado, slices perpendicularly across the Paradox Valley just like the river, giving it its name. The mineral belt, meanwhile, got its name from the elements that lie within: vanadium and uranium. The belt was the center of the radium boom from the early 1900s into the 1920s and was ravaged for uranium from the 1940s into the 1980s. Vanadium was mined here in between.

Jennifer Thurston, the executive director of the Colorado mining watchdog group INFORM, tells me there are 1,300 mining sites, abandoned and otherwise, in the Dolores and San Miguel River Basins, making it among the most heavily mined sites in the West. And it shows.
I’m here with Thurston and Soren Jespersen to take a look at myriad wounds inflicted by the mining industry, most still gaping and oozing with uncovered waste rock, rusty equipment, and other detritus decades after they were last active. But this is more than a journey into the past, it’s also a look at what might happen again in the not-so-distant future. A renewed interest in nuclear energy as a low-carbon power source and a desire to source reactor fuel domestically could wake the U.S. uranium industry from its long dormancy and rouse some of the mineral belt mines back into action.
“Here we go again,” Jespersen, of Colorado Wildlands Project, said earlier in the day, as we examined what looked a tombstone-looking monument marking the internment site of nearly 1 million tons of radioactive tailings from the Naturita Mill. “Are we going to stumble blindly down the same path?” Thurston and Jespersen are both working, in their own way, to prevent that from happening.

Abandoned car and uranium mine in the Uravan Mineral Belt. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

The U.S. uranium industry has been on a downward slide since the eighties. First the 1979 Three Mile Island incident gave Americans the nuclear power jitters (Chernobyl, in ’86, didn’t help matters). Then the Cold War ended, allowing the fissionable material in dismantled nuclear warheads to be downgraded to a concentration that could be used as reactor fuel, and opening up Russian and former Soviet republic markets to the world. Uranium prices dropped significantly, gutting the domestic mining industry. Now at least 95% of all of the uranium used to fuel American reactors is imported from Kazakhstan, Canada, Australia, Russia, and other countries.
After the Fukushima disaster it seemed as if nuclear power would gradually fade away, at least in the U.S. New conventional reactors are simply too expensive to build and low natural gas prices and a flood of new renewables on the power grid threatened to make the existing, aging nuclear fleet obsolete. But as the effects of climate change become more and more apparent, and the sense of urgency around the need to decarbonize the power sector intensifies, climate hawks are giving nuclear power a new look.
The Diablo Canyon nuclear plant outside San Luis Obispo, California, for example, is scheduled to shut down in 2025, but now California Gov. Gavin Newsom is leading a push to keep it open longer. His reasoning: The state’s grid doesn’t have the renewable generation capacity yet to replace the big plant, meaning if it were to close now grid operators would have to rely on carbon-emitting natural gas-fired generation.
Meanwhile, a Bill Gates-backed firm called TerraPower is working to build an advanced nuclear reactor in Kemmerer, Wyoming, and Oregon startup NuScale is looking to install a battery of small modular reactors at the Idaho National Laboratory and sell power to small, Western utilities.
Any of these initiatives, on their own, can’t revive the U.S. uranium industry. But this mild resurgence in nuclear power, paired with the fallout (only figurative, we hope) of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has caused the price of uranium to double over the last couple of years. If that trend continues—and if the federal government pitches in subsidies for the industry—it might be enough to make U.S. uranium mining economically feasible and spark renewed interest in the Uravan Mineral Belt.

The JD-7 open pit mine in the Paradox Valley. The landscape was torn apart to remove the overburden, but the mine never produced any ore. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

“Mining has to be part of this energy solution,” Thurston says. “The problem is, mining is not just about siting, but also bringing regulations into modern times and the future. It’s about convincing the government it’s not 1872 anymore.”
Thurston has tirelessly worked to bring regulations and regulators out of the 19th century, sometimes by dragging them into court. She was instrumental in the fight to block a proposal to build a uranium mill in the Paradox Valley several years ago and more recently has forced regulators to revoke long-idled mines’ “temporary cessation” status, clearing the way for them to be cleaned up. (For more on her efforts, check out this Land Desk dispatch from March.
Jespersen is taking a different tack, he explains as we stand next to the confluence of the San Miguel and Dolores Rivers, swatting away pesky horse flies. His organization was formed with the aim of achieving landscape level protection for Bureau of Land Management lands on the Colorado Plateau. In this case, they are looking at the Dolores River watershed, specifically the lower, northern end, which manages to be spectacular, remote, and industrialized by uranium mining, all at once.
A piece of that is moving forward. In July, Sen. Michael Bennett introduced a bill that would establish a National Conservation Area along the Dolores River from McPhee Dam to the San Miguel County line, just upstream from Bedrock and the Paradox Valley. That would add a layer of protections to a 76-mile stretch of the river corridor, including prohibiting new mining claims. However, it would not stop mining on existing claims or Department of Energy leases, both of which are abundant.

Looking down the Dolores River from its confluence with the San Miguel. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

But, thanks to local political opposition, Bennett’s bill leaves out the lower 100 river miles—along with serpentine canyons, slickrock expanses, isolated mesas, and the western edge of the Uncompahgre Plateau. Jespersen and Colorado Wildlands Project are looking to up protections on that remaining section, specifically the area from the Dolores River’s confluence with the San Miguel River downstream. During uranium mining times, much of that section of river was dead, thanks to tailings and other waste dumped into the river from the mills and mines. But still other areas remain relatively unmarred and even qualify for wilderness designation.
We drive along the Dolores River, stop for lunch at the Bedrock recreation area, which was once a well-tended and crowded takeout zone for Dolores River rafters. But since McPhee Dam’s operators have released little more than a trickle into the river due to aridification, the picnic area no longer serves much of a purpose and is sad-feeling and overgrown. Thurston tells us mining speculation has picked up in the area, but not much else. And then she explains a sort of ore pre-processing technique called ablation that some mining companies are hoping to use to save costs and maybe get around regulations.

Jennifer Thurston walks near the head frame of the JD-5 mine above the Paradox Valley. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Then we drive into the heart of the wreckage on a nearby mesa. From there we see the JD-7, a big, open pit mine in the Paradox Valley that never even produced ore. Now it sits idle and unreclaimed. We peer down into the darkness of a mine shaft and poke around in a dilapidated building where packrats have taken up residence among old equipment. This is one of the mines that INFORM won a cleanup case against, but regulators haven’t approved a reclamation plan, so nothing’s happened. “This whole formation is basically Swiss cheese,” Thurston says as we ponder yet another abandoned site, replete with a couple of ancient cars with “straight eights” under the hoods. And we go out to a point where we can look out on the landscape and see the web of roads scraped through the piñon, juniper, and sagebrush decades ago to give prospectors access to every inch of this vast space.
It’s heartbreaking to see, but hopeful, too, as the land is slowly healing. Yet it’s infuriating to think that the wounds may one day be torn open again.

Sylvie’s Seat and the La Sal Mountains. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Well how about that. You may remember our story last month about the Horseshoe-Gallup oil field and about how a determined group of activists and land protectors were trying to bring regulators’ attention to the blight there. Not only did they get the Bureau of Land Management’s attention, but they got their boss—Interior Secretary Deb Haaland—to come out and see one of the worst sites. Haaland also announced $25 million in federal funding to plug and reclaim orphaned oil and gas wells in New Mexico during her visit.

"Prior to the event the delegation toured the Chuza oil and gas wells…"

Thank You @SecDebHaaland & Thank You all the orgs/people that worked to spotlight these neglected wells –@SJCAlliance @DineCARE1 @westernlaw @Earthworks and the whole BIYA Team!https://t.co/Yr82Bo2OTf pic.twitter.com/kwuse2k7BD
— Methane Mad Man! (@vivarioarriba) August 29, 2022

Farms use 80% of the West’s water. Some in #Colorado use less, a lot less — @WaterEdCO

Cattle of the Bow & Arrow herd, graze in a frosted corn field on the 7,770 acre Ute Mountain Ute Farm & Ranch Enterprise near Towoac, Colorado. About 700 head of cattle, graze on the farm and ranch lands during the winter. During the summer the herd is moved to mountain pastures. (Dean Krakel photo, special to EWC)

Click the link to read the article on the Water Education Colorado website (Allen Best):

At Spring Born, a greenhouse in western Colorado near Silt, you see few, if any, dirty fingernails. Why would you? Hands never touch soil in this 113,400-square-foot greenhouse.
You do see automation, long trays filled with peat sliding on conveyors under computer-programmed seeding devices. Once impregnated, the trays roll into the greenhouse.
Thirty days after sprouting, trays of green and red lettuce, kale, arugula, and mustard greens slide from the greenhouse to be shorn, weighed and sealed in plastic clamshell packages. Hands never touch the produce.
Spring Born says it needs 95% less water compared to leafy greens grown using Colorado River water a thousand miles downstream in Arizona and California. That region supplies more than 90% of the nation’s lettuce. At Silt, the water comes from two shallow wells that plumb the riverine aquifer of the Colorado River, delivering about 20 gallons per minute. The water is then treated before it is piped into the greenhouse. This is agriculture like nowhere else.

he all-mechanized operations at Spring Born’s large greenhouse near Silt, Colo., produce leafy greens by maximizing the use of water. Spring Born says it needs 95% less water compared to greens grown using Colorado River water 1,000 miles downstream in Arizona and California.
*From the Hip Photo courtesy of Spring Born*

Great precautions are taken to avoid contamination and prevent the spread of pathogens. Those entering the greenhouse must don protective equipment.
There’s no opportunity for passing birds or critters to leave droppings. As such, there is no need for chlorine washes, which most operations use to disinfect. Those washes also dry out the greenery, shortening the shelf life and making it less tasty. The Spring Born packages have an advertised shelf life of 23 days.
Spring Born likely constitutes the most capital-intensive agricultural enterprise in Colorado. Total investment in the 250-acre operation, which also includes traditional hay farming and cattle production, has been $30 million. The technology and engineering come from Europe, which has 30 such greenhouses. The United States has a handful.
Agribusiness in Colorado generates $47 billion in economic activity but it ties to one reality: The future is one of less water. So how exactly can agriculture use water more judiciously?
The Thirsty Future
A Desert Research Institute study published in April 2022 concluded that the warming atmosphere is a thirstier one. Modeling in the study suggests that crops in some parts of Colorado already need 8% to 15% more water than 40 years ago. Agricultural adaptations to use less water are happening out of necessity.

Colorado has warmed about 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the last 120 years. Warming has accelerated, with the five hottest summers on record occurring since 2000.
Higher temperatures impact the amount of snowfall and amount of snowpack converted to water runoff. “As the climate warms, crops and forested ecosystems alike use water more rapidly,” says Peter Goble, a research associate at the Colorado Climate Center. “As a result, a higher fraction of our precipitation goes into feeding thirsty soils and a lower fraction into filling our lakes, streams and reservoirs. Essentially, a warmer future is a drier future.”
This year was a good example of the drying trend.

Snowpack was around average in the San Juan Mountains, but spring arrived hot and windy. Snow was all but gone by late May, surpassed in its hurried departure only in 2018 and 2002. Farmers dependent on water from the Dolores River, still reeling from last year’s meager supplies, were required to accept lesser supplies yet again as the growing season began this year.
The Ute Mountain Ute Farm and Ranch Enterprise, the most southwesterly agriculture operation in Colorado, expected less than 30% of its regular water delivery from McPhee Reservoir. This was on top of a marginal year in 2021, too. Simon Martinez, general manager of the operation, said just 15 of the 110 center pivots had crops under cultivation in early June. Employment was cut in half, and the 650-head cow-calf operation had been slimmed to 570.
Pressured by compacts
The warming climate is not alone in spurring adaptations. In many river basins, irrigators must also worry about delivery of water to downstream states specified by interstate compacts.
Water conservation districts formed in the last 20 years are paying farmers to decrease pumping and planting to save the water that remains in the aquifers, comply with compacts, and transition to less water use.

Kansas River Basin including the Republican River watershed. Map credit: By Kmusser – Self-made, based on USGS data., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4390886

Directors of the Republican River Water Conservation District, in northeastern Colorado were successful in voluntarily retiring 4,000 acres by June 2020. They are confident about retiring 10,000 acres in the area between Wray and Burlington before 2025. They’re less sure of achieving the 25,000 acres that compact compliance will require by 2029.
Rio Grande Water Conservation District directors in south-central Colorado have an even greater lift. They must figure out how to retire 40,000 irrigated acres by 2029. They’re at 13,000.
High commodity prices have discouraged farmer participation. The pot of local, state and federal money hasn’t been sufficient to fund high enough incentives to compete with commodity pricing. A bill, SB22-028, Groundwater Compact Compliance Fund, which passed in the Colorado Legislature in May, will allocate $60 million to both the Republican and Rio Grande basins to help them comply with interstate river compacts by reducing the acreage outlined above. The law says that if voluntary reductions cannot be attained, Colorado may resort to mandatory reductions in groundwater extraction.
From Sprinklers to New Crops
Even as center-pivot sprinklers are removed in the Republican River Basin and San Luis Valley, they are going up in the Grand Valley of western Colorado. There, instead of drafting groundwater, they are distributing Colorado River water, because they are reducing labor costs and reducing water use.
The geography of the valley from Palisade to Fruita and Loma does not immediately favor center pivots. They work best as a pie within a square, a full 40 or 160 acres. Parcels in the Grand Valley tend to be more rectangular. That means a pivot can arc maybe three-quarters of a circle. That slows the payoff on investment.
Why the pivot, so to speak, on pivots? Perry Cabot, a water resource specialist with Colorado State University’s Western Colorado Research Center near Fruita, sees two, sometimes overlapping, motivations. (Cabot also serves on the Water Education Colorado Board of Trustees.)
The greater motivation is the desire to save labor. That itself is good, he says, because the investment reflects an intention to continue farming. “People are obviously doing it for the long haul,” he says.
The other motivation appears to be water related. “The feedback I get is, to paraphrase the farmers, at some point in the future we are going to have less water to farm with and so we must prepare for that,” Cabot says.
Incremental improvements have improved efficiency. Experiments at the CSU research center in Walsh have shown conclusively the advantage of long-drop nozzles that spray the water just a couple feet off the ground, reducing evaporation.

*Jason Lorenz with Agro Engineering talks about irrigation, soil moisture and chemistry during a soil workshop for students in Colorado’s San Luis Valley.* *Courtesy of AgroEngineering*

Technology can help perfect a producer’s irrigation set up. Consider work in the San Luis Valley by Agro Engineering, crop consultants who seek to assist growers in producing maximum value with minimum water application. Potatoes, the valley’s largest cash crop, thrive in warm, but not hot, days and cool nights. They need 16 to 18 inches of water per year, of which 13 to 15 inches comes from irrigation. This includes two inches applied during planting, to moisten soils sufficiently for germination. They do not do well with too much water, explains Jason Lorenz, an agricultural engineer who is a partner in the firm. That, and the need to align use with legal requirements, gives growers compelling reason to closely monitor water.
The company uses aerial surveys conducted from airplanes to analyze whether the desired uniformity is being achieved. The latest advancement, multispectral aerial photography, enables the detection of green, red and near-infrared light levels. These images indicate the amount of vegetative biomass, vegetative vigor, and the greenness of the leaves. Variations show where crops are healthier and where there are problems, including insects and diseases, water quality, or soil chemistry problems.
Any discussion of water and agriculture in Colorado must include a focus on corn. In 2021, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, almost 1.4 million acres in the state were devoted to corn, with well more than half of that irrigated.
Corn is also thirsty. So far, efforts to produce corn with less water have come up short, says Colorado State University water resources specialist Joel Schneekloth. But if corn still needs the same amount of water, researchers have succeeded in producing greater yields.
How about alternatives to corn? Sunflowers, used to make cooking oil but also for confections, came on strong, but acreage shrank from 132,000 acres to 59,000 acres statewide between 2010 and 2019. For farmers, corn pays far better.
Quinoa may be possible. It consumes less water. But no evidence has emerged that it’s viable in eastern Colorado. The demand is small. Demand also remains small for black-eyed peas, which a bean processing facility in Sterling accepts along with pinto, navy and other beans.
“We can find low-water crops, but they just don’t have huge markets,” explains Schneekloth who conducts studies for the Republican and South Platte basins at a research station in Akron. There has to be enough production to justify processing facilities, he said. One such processing facility proximate to the Ogallala aquifer in Colorado—it was in Goodland, Kansas—closed because it didn’t have enough business.
Nearly all of the corn in Colorado is grown to feed livestock. What if, instead of eating beef or pork, we ate plant-based substitutes? The shift, says Schneekloth, would save water. It takes seven pounds of forage and grain to produce one pound of meat. For a meat substitute, it’s closer to one for one. But that tradeoff isn’t that simple in most places. Much of the cattle raised in Colorado start on rangeland, feeding off of unirrigated forage, which is not suitable for crop production.
Besides, Schneekloth says he has a hard time imagining a mass migration to meat substitutes in the near future. Plant-based substitutes cost far more and the product, to many people, remains unsatisfactory. “Mass migration will be a hard one to sell,” he says. “Maybe eventually, but it won’t happen for a long time, I don’t think.”
Healthier Soils
Soil health has emerged as a lively new frontier of research and practice and the integration of livestock and crop production is one of its tenets—manure adds nutrients to the soil and builds organic matter, improving soil health.
Soil, unlike dirt, is alive. It’s full of organisms, necessary for growing plants. Wiggling worms demonstrate fecund soil, but most networking occurs on the microscopic level. This organic matter is rich with fungi and bacteria. Iowa’s rich soils have organic content of up to 9%. The native soils of Colorado’s Eastern Plains might have originally had 5%. The farms of southeastern Colorado now have 1% to 3%.
Derek Heckman is on a quest to boost the organic matter of his soil to 5% or even higher. It matters because water matters entirely on the 500 acres he farms in southeastern Colorado, just west of Lamar.

Derek Heckman, who farms near Lamar in eastern Colorado, is implementing various soil health practices to build the organic matter of his soil, improve water retention, and stretch limited water supplies farther. *Allen Best*

“Water is the limiting factor for our farms a majority of the time,” he explains. “We are never able to put on enough water.”
Heckman’s water comes from the Fort Lyon Canal, which takes out from the Arkansas River near La Junta. In a good year, he says, his land can get 25 to 30 runs from the ditch. Last year he got 16 runs. This year? As of early May, Heckman was expecting no more than 10 runs.
“The more organic matter there is, the more the moisture-holding capacity of the soil,” he explains. This is particularly important as water supplies dwindle during the hot days of summer.
“Let’s say we have 105 degrees every day for two weeks,” says Heckman. “Organic content of your soil of 3% might allow you to go four additional days without irrigation and without having potential yield loss or, even worse, crops loss.”
Heckman, 31, practices regenerative agriculture.
In explaining this, Heckman shies away from the word sustainable. It’s too limiting, he says. “I don’t want to just sustain what I’m doing. Regenerative is bringing the soil back to life.”
Growing corn in the traditional way involved plowing fields before planting. The working of the field might involve five passes by a tractor, compacting the soil and reducing its porosity. The plows disrupt microbial life.
For several decades, farmers and scientists have been exploring the benefits of less intrusive tilling of the soil. Beginning about 20 years ago, Heckman’s father was one of them. The scientific literature is becoming robust on the benefits of what is generically called “conservation tillage.”
Irrigated corn fields of eastern Colorado can require 10% less irrigation water depending upon tillage and residue management practices, according to a 2020 paper published by Schneekloth and others.
Heckman experiments continuously, trying to find the best balance of cover crops, minimal tilling, and the right mix of chemicals.
“A lot of guys are comfortable with what grandpa did and what dad did, and that’s what they do,” he says. “I want to see changes in our operation.”
On the Western Slope, soil health restoration is being tested in an experiment on sagebrush-dominated rangelands south of Montrose. Ken Holsinger, an ecologist with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, says the intent is to restore diversity to the lands and improve the water-holding capacity of the soil.
Holsinger says the federal land was likely harmed by improper livestock grazing, particularly prior to adoption of the Taylor Grazing Act in 1934, but may well have continued until the 1970s prior to implementing modern grazing practices.
This experiment consists of a pair of one-acre plots that have lost their topsoil and have become dominated by sagebrush and invasive vegetation. Such lands produce 200 to 300 pounds of forage per acre but should be producing 800 to 1,000 pounds per acre of native grasses. The soil will be amended with nutrients to restart the carbon cycle. Afterward, 50% of the sagebrush will be removed.
“We are looking at restarting the carbon cycle and ultimately holding more water in the soil profile,” says Holsinger.
One way these enhanced, restored soils help is by preventing the monsoonal rains that western Colorado typically gets in summer from washing soil into creeks and rivers, muddying the water. If the experiment proves successful, then the task will be to cost-effectively scale it up, ideally to the watershed level.
Back in Silt, at the site of Spring Born, Charles Barr, the company’s owner, speaks to the need for innovation. “That will be the model going forward for all of these agricultural areas,” he says. “They have to find new sources of revenue, they have to find new ways of doing business, and they have to find new ways to conserve water.”
An earlier version of this article appeared in the Summer 2022 edition of Headwaters magazine.
Allen Best grew up in eastern Colorado, where both sets of grandparents were farmers. Best writes about the energy transition in Colorado and beyond at BigPivots.com.

San Juan Water Conservancy (#NM) official says status of local watersheds is better than other areas of Southwest — The Farmington Daily-Times #CRWUA2022

New Mexico Lakes, Rivers and Water Resources via Geology.com.

Click the link to read the article on the Farmington Daily-News webisite (Mike Easterling). Here’s an excerpt:

A presentation for San Juan County commissioners on the status of local watersheds on Sept. 6 illustrated that while the Four Corners region remains locked in the grip of a long-running drought, it is in relatively good condition compared to other parts of the Southwest. The 14-minute presentation delivered by Aaron Chavez, executive director of the San Juan Water Commission, was designed to bring commissioners up to speed on the health of the county’s two main watersheds, those associated with the Animas and San Juan rivers.

New Mexico Drought Monitor map September 6, 2022.

But Chavez, who is beginning a two-year term as president of the Colorado River Water Users Association, also devoted a significant amount of attention to the status of that watershed, which serves as a crucial water supplier to tens of millions of residents of New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Arizona, Nevada, California and Mexico…Chavez began his presentation by noting that while last winter’s snowpack in southwest Colorado was close to normal, it did not yield the kind of runoff one might have expected because the soil moisture content in the region was down substantially after years of substandard precipitation…
Nevertheless, most of the indicators Chavez examined this year were an improvement over the recent past, he said, as he noted the Four Corners area has had a good monsoon season this year that has helped make up for the relatively poor spring runoff. Most river basins in the area, he said, are at 90% to 100% of average…

Navajo Reservoir, New Mexico, back in the day.. View looking north toward marina. The Navajo Dam can be seen on the left of the image. By Timthefinn at English Wikipedia – Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4040102

According to figures from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation cited by Chavez, Navajo Lake was 55% full as of Aug. 24 — a level that was roughly equal to other local reservoirs, as Vallecito Lake northeast of Durango, Colorado, was at 49% and McPhee Reservoir north of Cortez, Colorado, was at 53%. The good news was that Lake Nighthorse west of Durango was listed at 99% full…But those figures stood in sharp contrast to the Southwest’s two mammoth reservoirs fed by the Colorado River. Lake Powell in Utah and Arizona was only 26% full, while Lake Mead in Nevada and Arizona was at only 28% of capacity.

How this tribe survives in #Colorado’s worst #drought region with as little as 10% of its hard-won water supply — The #Denver Post #DoloresRiver #SanJuanRiver #COriver #aridification

South of Hesperus August 2019 Sleeping Ute Mountain in the distance. Photo credit: Allen Best/The Mountain Town News

Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Bruce Finley). Here’s an excerpt:

“A lot of reckoning” as Colorado low water flows imperil farming and ranching

The Utes are surviving, for now, by relying on a unique asset: a mill built in 2014 where tribal crews de-husk, grind and package all the corn they can harvest: “Native American Grown whole grain Non-GMO.” Sales nationwide to whiskey distilleries, health-oriented grocery stores and others help make ends meet — even as less water is available. Dry times led reservoir operators to cut the Utes’ water to 10% of their allotment last year and 25% this year. Only 13 of the tribe’s 110 center pivot irrigation sprinklers can run…

Mcphee Reservoir

The agricultural economy of far southwestern Colorado once encompassed more than 75,000 irrigated acres, including 7,700 acres on the Ute Mountain Ute reservation. It relies on the huge McPhee Reservoir completed in 1986, one of the largest and last that the federal government built to enable settlement in the arid Southwest. The reservoir is less than half full. Snowpack in the high San Juan Mountains has been shrinking — recent federal research has found these mountains will be dry before 2080 — and the cumulative impacts are such that runoff toward the reservoir disappears more quickly into parched terrain. The snow melts earlier, complicating planting, and unusually high winds and heavy dust accelerate water depletion.

Towaoc-Highline Canal via Ten Tribes Partnership/USBR Tribal Water Study

By tribal leaders’ own reckoning and multiple historical assessments, the Utes have been dealt repeated bad hands, forced in the 19th Century onto some of North America’s harshest land – high desert southwest of Cortez — with limited access to water.

For thousands of years, Utes migrated in sync with nature’s seasons across valleys and deserts that became Colorado, Utah and New Mexico. A tribal website video celebrates Utes’ role as stewards of the mountains. European settlers displaced them and disrupted nomadic lifestyles. A 1908 U.S. Supreme Court ruling said water on reservations had to fulfill the purpose of the reservations, which included agriculture. Yet, access to sufficient water remains difficult. Ute Mountain Utes lacked domestic drinking water in Towaoc, the tribal capital, until the late 1980s. Tribal members had been hauling snow down from Sleeping Ute Mountain on their backs and melting it.

Ute Mountain Ute Tribe faces another devastating #drought year, but recent rain, wheat prices bring hope — @WaterEdCO

Click the link to read the article on the Water Education Colorado website (Rachelle Todea):

Low snowpack and soaring temperatures made 2020 the third-driest year on record in Colorado. When similar conditions repeated in 2021, tribal farmers in southwest Colorado had to scramble, fallowing thousands of acres of land and laying off workers at the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe’s farm and ranch outside of Cortez.

“It made me very aware that our farm is in the desert. We have to look at it that way,” says Simon Martinez, general manager for the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe Farm and Ranch Enterprise and the Bow and Arrow Brand non-GMO cornmeal business. The 7,700-acre farm is located on the tribe’s 553,008-acre reservation in southwest Colorado, less than 20 miles from the Four Corners.

When Dolores River flows below McPhee Reservoir were reduced to just 10% of normal in 2021, the tribe was able to operate only eight center pivot sprinklers, compared to its usual capacity of 110 sprinklers. A single center pivot sprinkler system irrigates circles of crops ranging from 32 to 141 acres in area. Lack of water meant fallowed acres, leaving the tribe to use only 500 acres in 2021, compared to 4,500 acres of alfalfa alone grown in 2020.

Without irrigation water, the farm’s ability to grow its mainstay crops of alfalfa and corn was majorly reduced, and without crops to harvest, employment, too, was cut to 50%. Twenty farm workers lost their jobs.

This year the tribe is expecting slightly more water, 20% to 25% of its normal allocation, or roughly 6,000 acre-feet of water, according to Mike Preston, president of the Weenuch-u’ Development Corporation, which oversees the farm’s operations. But some 6,000 acres of its 7,700-acre farm remain fallowed, a situation that requires the tribe to spend millions of dollars to keep weeds in check.

There is also hope in rising wheat prices, which are expected to reach $11.16 a bushel by December, according to Wall Street Journal crop pricing data. Preston said the tribe hopes to plant a late wheat crop this year to capitalize on the world-wide wheat shortages triggered by the war in Ukraine.

Overall, the tribe’s farm and ranch enterprises operate for economic empowerment and employment. And operations are largely successful—before the drought, the farm had been productive and profitable since it began operating in the late 1980s.

For Bow and Arrow Brand, operations didn’t slow, even last year. The cornmeal operation was launched years ago in order to stretch the shelf life of the tribe’s corn. Fresh sweet corn can last about two weeks, but by creating cornmeal, the produce remains profitable for around 18 months. Even during the drought and pandemic, sales continue. Full staff employment has been maintained.

Sustaining everything has been a challenge, but Martinez is up for the challenge, as he must be, he says. “We’re going to do our best to keep employment.”

Some help and funding is available to make up for losses, such as drought impact funding. And Martinez is working to help the farm adapt. He’s spreading the limited amount of water as far as possible through work with the Natural Resources Conservation Service to upgrade sprinkler nozzle packages and continued consultations with agronomists on crop selection for increased drought tolerance. But those efforts can only go so far.

Martinez is hopeful that McPhee, the third-largest reservoir in Colorado, which serves the tribe, will see its water levels restored to meet tribal needs.

“We’re kind of teetering on the brink,” says Preston. The Dolores River watershed relies entirely on snowpack. But conditions aren’t looking great—100% of Montezuma county remains in severe or extreme drought, according to the National Drought Mitigation Center. Forecasts for the Dolores River Basin, as of June 1, project 45% to 60% of water supply availability this year, according to the Colorado River Basin Forecast Center.

What seems clear to many in the region is that desert-like conditions are likely to continue and that means the Ute Mountain Utes must shift their operating plans to accommodate drier conditions.

“We’ve got to adapt,” Martinez says.

An earlier version of this article appeared in the Spring 2022 edition of Headwaters magazine. Additional reporting was contributed by Fresh Water News Editor Jerd Smith.

Rachelle Todea is Diné and a citizen of the Navajo Nation. She is a freelance reporter based in Westminster, Colo., who reports on climate change and Indigenous peoples.

Six-month test of injection well begins at Paradox Valley Unit — Reclamation #DoloresRiver #ColoradoRiver #COriver

Paradox Valley Unit Facility in western Colo. Photo credit: Reclamation

Click the link to read the release on the Reclamation website (Justyn Liff and Becki Bryant):

The Bureau of Reclamation today [June 1, 2022] restarted operations of the Paradox Valley Unit (PVU), a crucial salinity control facility for the Colorado River system. For the next six months, the PVU will operate at a reduced capacity to gather data that will help guide future operational decisions.

Located in a remote area of western Colorado, along the Dolores River in Montrose County, the PVU removes an average of 95,000 tons of salt annually from the Dolores and Colorado rivers. It does this by extracting brine groundwater in the Paradox Valley and injecting it into a deep injection well, thereby preventing it from entering the Dolores River, which is a major tributary of the Colorado River. Saline concentrations of this naturally occurring brine groundwater have measured in excess of 250,000 milligrams per liter—about eight times saltier than seawater—and have contributed up to 200,000 tons of salt per year to the Colorado River system.

Prior to the restart, the Paradox injection well had been shut down since March 2019, when a 4.5 magnitude earthquake was recorded at the site. Though there was no damage to the well or surrounding area, injection was suspended to model injection formation pressure, monitor and analyze seismic activity, and to perform a seismic hazard analysis to ensure safe operation. Reclamation has determined that seismic activity at the site has significantly decreased and that resuming operations at a reduced rate under close watch is acceptable.

“The safety of our personnel and that of the community is our primary concern,” said Upper Colorado Regional Director Wayne Pullan. “After ceasing operations of the unit and thorough inspections, we want to ensure the community that we are ready to test the site by operating the unit at a reduced capacity for continued evaluation and assessment.”

The six-month-long operational test will consist of injecting brine groundwater into the 16,000-foot-deep well at a reduced rate of 115 gallons per minute, which is 67% of past operations. Modeling indicates that this reduced rate will have a negligible impact on seismicity and Reclamation will closely monitor the injection pressure and seismic response. If any unfavorable conditions develop, such as increased magnitudes in seismicity, operation will be suspended until it is deemed safe to continue.

“The injection test results will be used to evaluate well conditions and help Reclamation create a plan for potential future injection operations,” said Western Colorado Area Office Manager Ed Warner. “A seismic risk analysis will be completed in 2023 and an operations plan may be developed, based upon the injection test results.”

The PVU started operations in 1996 and provides substantial benefits, up to $23 million annually, including improved water quality, increased life of municipal and industrial infrastructure, and increased crop yields for all downstream water users in the Colorado River Basin.

The Colorado River Basin Salinity Control Forum meeting was held May 11, where the Basin states participated in discussion and coordination regarding PVU operations, seismic risk analysis, and post-EIS direction, to include the start of this six-month injection well test.

For more information about the PVU, visit our website.

Click the link to read “Reclamation resumes salt-water injection at reduced level as it evaluates seismic threat” on the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel website (Dennis Webb). Here’s an excerpt:

The agency’s Paradox Valley Unit has been used for decades to help keep salt from reaching the Dolores River, and ultimately the Colorado River. Salinity in the Colorado River watershed harms water quality, impacts municipal and industrial infrastructure and impairs crop yields within the river basin. The Bureau of Reclamation facility extracts brine groundwater in the Paradox Valley and injects it into a 16,000-foot-deep well, keeping it from reaching the Dolores River, a tributary of the Colorado River.

The groundwater has been measured to be about eight times saltier than seawater, with saline concentrations exceeding 250,000 milligrams per liter, according to the Bureau of Reclamation. It estimates that its project has kept an average of about 95,000 tons of salt a year from reaching the rivers through operation of the injection well from 1996, when operations started, through 2019. This has resulted in up to $23 million in annual benefits by reducing river salinity and its impacts. The wastewater injection has a drawback, however, in that it induces seismic activity that has worsened over the years. In March 2019 a magnitude 4.5 associated with the facility was felt as far away as Grand Junction and Moab. It was the largest quake that has been linked to the injection well.

Following that quake, the Bureau of Reclamation suspended operations at the well for more than a year before briefly resuming them on a test basis. It also considered alternative salinity control measures in the Paradox Valley, including drilling and operating a new well at one of two new locations, using evaporation ponds, or building a plant to heat the brine to crystallize and remove the salt. But it ultimately decided against pursuing any of those due to concerns about things such as cost and potential aesthetic and wildlife impacts.

Is #ColoradoRiver demand management unfair to farmers? It’s complicated — @Land_Desk #COriver #aridification

Sprinklers and Four Corners Power Plant. San Juan County, New Mexico, 2022.

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan Thompson):

Last week, [a Colorado online daily] ran an opinion piece about the dwindling Colorado River and what role agriculture may or may not play in helping to shore it up. It was written by Don Schwindt, a Cortez, Colorado, farmer, and Dan Keppen, Executive Director of the Family Farm Alliance. Along with praising a Southwestern Colorado dam, they argue that agriculture is important and “must be protected by ensuring water remains on-farm.”

They go on to say:

“Now, the narrative in some recent media coverage is even more troubling. For some, the current severe drought provides a platform to advocate taking water from farmers to make more available for cities and the environment.

“The hydrology of the West may be changing, but that should not drive hasty decisions. Agricultural water cannot be simply viewed as the default “reservoir” to meet other growing water demands.”

They are referring to “demand management,” which can include encouraging farmers to plant less thirsty crops, to increasing efficiency, to paying farmers to stop watering their fields and leave the water in the river (either buying water rights and permanently transferring them, or leasing them when needed on a temporary basis).

As I read the piece, I was struck less by the arguments, which were fairly predictable, than by my reactions to the arguments. One sentence would have me scoffing, the next nodding in agreement, and another both nodding and snorting derisively. That’s not because I’m insane. It’s because these issues—the “Law of the River,” agriculture’s role in culture and ecosystems, and the Colorado River system—are complicated as all get out. And that sometimes means that the only workable solutions to the growing problems on the river are not always vary palatable. I like farmers, for example, but I also like rivers and the fish in them. It’s getting more and more difficult to have both.

The following is an attempt at a Data Dump response of sorts to the column.

The Colorado River is facing a serious supply-demand imbalance. A century ago, when the framers of the Colorado Compact got together to divvy up the river’s waters, they made a few mistakes. First, and most egregious, they didn’t include tribal nations in the negotiations, despite the fact that tribes are sovereign nations and collectively are entitled to first rights to all the water in the river. That was just wrong. Second, they overestimated the amount of water in the river, which in some ways was an honest screw up, given the records they had to work from. And, third, they parceled out too big a portion of the water they thought was in the river, leaving too small of a buffer in case their calculations were off (they were).

Natural Flow is an estimate of how much water would have naturally run past Lee’s Ferry if there were no dams or diversions upstream. It is calculated using the actual flow, historic flows, and upstream consumptive uses. Bureau of Reclamation modeling is complete to 2019; I extrapolated 2020 and 2021 based on Lake Powell inflows. The 1922 Colorado River Compact gave 7.5 million acre feet to the Upper Basin, 7.5 MAF to the Lower Basin, and (in the ‘40s) 1.5 MAF to Mexico, based on early 1900s observations. As the graph above shows, the average flows dropped below that level a decade later and stayed there aside from a brief respite in the 1980s. Source: USBR

The result: The river is over-allocated, and would be even if climate change were not a factor. So, supply was already lagging behind demand two decades ago, when the Southwest entered the megadrought in a dramatic way (i.e. 2002, the year of our desiccation). Now the supply is diminishing while demand holds steady, which is rapidly drawing down Lakes Powell and Mead (and other reservoirs). With those huge water “banks” at a critically low level, the Colorado River Basin is at its breaking point. Demand must be slashed, quickly and significantly.

While overall demand on the Colorado River trended upward from 1970 to the late 1990s, it plateaued when the region entered the current megadrought. Although this data only goes to 2010, the plateau has pretty much held. But at over 14 MAF per year, demand is significantly higher than what the river has supplied most years. Note that more water is lost to reservoir evaporation than is sent to Mexico. Source: USBR Colorado River Basin Water Supply and Demand Study.

The logical way to make big cuts in consumption is to go to the biggest consumers. And the biggest user of Colorado River water, by far, is not lawns, not golf courses, not the Bellagio fountain in Vegas. It is agriculture: all of those orchards, cornfields, alfalfa fields, ranches, and so on. It’s true in the Upper Basin, in the Lower Basin, and in each state except Nevada, which uses virtually all of its relatively minuscule portion of the river to keep Las Vegas from shriveling up and dissolving back into the desert.

Please visit this post at http://LandDesk.org to see larger, higher resolution images. Note that in New Mexico energy takes up a relatively large share of water. This is mostly for the coal-fired power plants in the Four Corners region, which use billions of gallons of water each year for cooling, steam-generation and other purposes. In some cases, some of this water is returned to the river, but the San Juan Generating Station—scheduled to close this year—is a zero-discharge facility, meaning all of its water use is “consumptive.” Source: USBR.

Farms’ outsized water guzzling may seem surprising, especially since residential development has been gobbling up farmland in recent decades and ag makes up a smaller and smaller portion of these states’ economies. But crops need water in the arid West and, besides, the farmers tend to have most of the water rights. And Western water law and custom encourage folks to use all of the water they have a right to, conservation be damned—the motto, “use it or lose it,” is pounded into many a Western irrigator’s head: Take all of the water to which you’re entitled and then some, whether you need it or not, or else it might end up on your neighbor’s field or, God forbid, flow back into the river!

Montezuma Tunnel entrance.

Schwindt/Keppen write, in reference to diverting Dolores River water onto the farms of Southwest Colorado’s Montezuma Valley:

“The valley’s irrigated ecosystem also improved, further enhancing critically important environments for wildlife and generating other cultural benefits. Irrigated agricultural lands provide groundwater storage, open space, and riparian habitat and wildlife corridors. They also serve as important buffers between public wildlands and expanding urban and suburban areas.”

And it’s true, kind of. It’s a stretch to say irrigation enhances the existing ecosystem, but it certainly creates its own, new ecosystems which can be quite vibrant and beautiful. Leaky ditches are especially good at feeding new wetlands, willows, cattails, cottonwoods, and birds and other wildlife. But what irrigation bestows on previously arid landscapes, it takes from once wild rivers. That is especially true on the Dolores, where in the late 1800s irrigators began diverting its waters out of the Dolores River watershed and into the San Juan River watershed, meaning the runoff did not go back into the river. That essentially dried the lower Dolores right up.

The same was happening all over the region. In the late 1880s ichthyologist David Starr Jordan surveyed area rivers. Here’s what he observed, not about the Dolores, specifically, but about the general state of streams in Colorado at the time:

Via The Land Desk.

But then came the Dolores Project, McPhee Dam and Reservoir, which Schwindt and Keppen say “put water in the dry Dolores riverbed.” Well, no, not really. What it did is take water out of the river during spring runoff and then release some of it later in the year into the riverbed that had been dried out by irrigation diversions.

McPhee Reservoir. JERRYE AND ROY KLOTZ MD / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)

The dam started impounding water in 1983, in the midst of a string of unusually wet years. During that era, the dam did its job. The current irrigators got a more stable supply of water. The Ute Mountain Ute Tribe got both drinking water from the project as well as enough to irrigate a major agricultural enterprise near the toe of Ute Mountain, providing much needed economic development. The Town of Dove Creek receives water from the project as do the formerly dryland farmers, allowing them to diversify their crops. And still the year-round flows below the dam were enough to build and sustain a cold-water fishery for trout in the first dozen or so miles below the dam and a habitat for native fish below that. In some ways the dam had set the stage for a win-win-win situation.

The Dolores River shows us what’s at stake in the fight to protect the American West — Conservation Colorado

Until it didn’t. That riverbed below the dam? It’s dry more years than not. Last year farmers had to fallow some or all of their fields. The Ute Mountain Ute Tribe received only about 10 percent of its usual irrigation water, forcing it to fallow fields; the Town of Dove Creek faced the prospect of losing its drinking water supply altogether; and releases from the dam for the lower river were cut to 10 cubic feet per second, a mere trickle. For several consecutive weeks in June and July the river gauge at Slickrock registered zero. Fish died off, boating has been nearly non-existent most years, and the dearth of high spring water has allowed tamarisk and Russian olive to proliferate.

This spring’s flows on the Dolores River above the dam have actually been somewhat healthy, peaking out (rather early) at nearly 2,000 cubic feet per second.

And yet virtually none of that is making it past the dam (yes, that flat black line at the bottom represents releases. It’s at about 7.5 cubic feet per second, a mere trickle, and water managers say they will increase it to a whopping 25 cfs later this year, which is about enough to float a stick):

And even with good flows and low releases, Dolores Project irrigators are expected to get only 18% of their allocation this year. That’s up from 10% last year, but still. The dam isn’t doing the job it’s meant to do, which is to insulate users from drought. And yet, Schwindt and Keppen say the solution is not to try to reduce demand, but rather to “seriously assess projects that enhance water supplies.” They and the Farm Alliance suggest forest restoration, as well as building more water storage, i.e. dams. That won’t be enough.

Anyway, back to demand management. I think most of us can agree that farms shouldn’t be dried to allow cities to grow heedlessly, or to allow urban folks to water big lawns or keep parks green. And we can also all agree that everyone needs to manage their own demand, from the coal power plants to cities and towns to ski areas. Cities need to enhance efficiency and incentivize conservation by banning lawns, structuring water rates to discourage waste, requiring water-efficient appliances in new homes, and limiting growth. Reusing treated wastewater should be the norm. Coal plants should be shut down. Data centers, which can use as much as 1 million gallons of water per day, probably shouldn’t be sited in water-scarce areas (i.e. the Southwest).

But as the consumption graphs above make clear, all of that will only go so far. Agriculture is the biggest consumer of water, so demand management in that realm will also pay the highest dividends. This doesn’t necessarily mean fallowing vast tracts of farmland. It might just mean irrigating more efficiently, plugging leaks on ditches, or switching to less water-intensive, more nutritionally dense crops. Land Desk readers will probably know what I’m saying: Maybe plant a little less alfalfa, instead of more of it!

I know, I know, we need that alfalfa to feed the cows to make our cheeseburgers. I get it. But here’s the thing: A lot of that alfalfa is going overseas.

In other words, we are exporting our increasingly scarce Colorado River water—in the form of hay bales—to China, Saudi Arabia, and Japan. I think the agriculture industry can probably handle a little bit of demand management.

The #DoloresRiver and the #RioGrande are melting-out quickly (May 17, 2022) — @Land_Desk

Should take post-May 1 snowpack levels w/ grain of salt, but still: looking grim on the Dolores, where levels are on par w/ 2018, worse than 2021. pic.twitter.com/JW8dwtEHmG

— The Land Desk (@Land_Desk) May 17, 2022

Meanwhile, in the Rio Grande Headwaters, the snow is gone, vanishing 2 wks earlier than last yr and earlier even than in 2002. Oof. pic.twitter.com/7FZdcwId1h

— The Land Desk (@Land_Desk) May 17, 2022

The earliest melt out in last 30 yrs for the Upper San Juan Basin years was in 2002. On 3/18, there was nearly twice as much snow (SWE) in the basin compared to 2002: 16.3 vs 8.5 inches. But after a few weeks of wind and dust, the runoff is already ending https://t.co/9uLQ0EhcTf

— Zak 🦦 Podmore (@zak_podmore) May 16, 2022

#Aridification Watch: May edition As the snow season wraps up, how are things looking? — @Land_Desk #snowpack #runoff

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan Thompson) and to drop some dough in the tip jar:

It’s that time of the year, again, folks. Yep, you guessed it, it’s … Yukigata Time! Okay, maybe you didn’t guess it. Maybe you have no idea what the word even means. But I’m willing to bet you are familiar with the concept and, if you are a farmer or a gardener, you probably use a yukigata.

A yukigata is a pattern formed by melting snow on a mountain slope or hillside in the spring. They often serve as agricultural calendars, letting farmers know when to plant certain crops, or when the danger of a tomato-killing freeze has passed. The calendars can be simple: over in the Montezuma Valley gardeners wait until Ute Mountain is free of snow to plant. Or more elaborate: In the Grand Valley of Colorado, it would be foolish to plant before the Swan’s Neck has melted. And in the North Fork Valley of Western Colorado, gardeners wait for the Devil’s Neck on Mt. Lamborn to “break.”

But the yukigatas have been doing their thing, or disappearing, sooner than in the past, tricking people into planting too early and making their crops vulnerable to the inevitable spring freeze. In Durango, Colorado, for example, gardeners once planted according to when the snow melted off the north face of Smelter Mountain. Now that can happen as soon as March—if there’s snow on the mountain at all—which is just too early.

This also messes with plants’ internal calendars, tricking fruit trees into blossoming too early. A study published this spring found wildflowers in the sagebrush ecosystem now bloom weeks earlier than they did in the 1970s. And here’s a cool map from the National Phenology Network showing where trees leafed out earlier (or later) than usual this year.

Clearly the premature melting of the yukigata is caused by less snow to begin with combined with warming temperatures. Dust on the snow causes it to melt faster, too. As does, wait for it, atmospheric thirst! That’s right, the increasing temperatures are making the atmosphere thirstier, and it’s guzzling up snow, drying out plants, sucking up reservoirs, and so on. Last month, scientists from the Desert Research Institute published a study tracking changes in evaporative demand and found it is increasing everywhere, especially in the Southwest.

As evaporative demand increases, it pulls more water from the land into the air via evaporation and transpiration from plants (and snow and reservoirs), leaving less in the streams and soil. In the Rio Grande Basin, the authors say, that means crops need 8% to 15% more irrigation now than they did in 1980. They go on to note, “These increases in crop water requirements are coincident with declining runoff ratios on the Rio Grande due to warming temperatures and increased evaporative losses, representing a compounding stress on water supplies.”

The authors conclude:

“These higher evaporative demands mean that, for every drop of precipitation that falls, less water is likely to drain into streams, wetlands, and aquifers across the region. Soils and vegetation spend more time in drier conditions, increasing potential for forest fire, tree mortality, and tree regeneration failure.”

So the thirsty atmosphere is likely a factor in the catastrophic fires currently burning in New Mexico. The Hermits Peak Fire—in the Pecos River watershed, east of the Rio Grande—has grown to a monstrous 166,000 acres and is threatening Las Vegas, Mora, and Montezuma.

This year neither the Rio Grande nor the Pecos watershed has done all that well, snowpack-wise. Not many watersheds have, although Southwest Colorado is in better shape than it was last year. Snow season is pretty much over. That doesn’t mean it won’t snow any more in the high country. It’s just that the snowpack peak has almost certainly passed, runoff is underway, and many lower elevation SNOTEL stations are registering zero, which can throw off basin-wide graphs. So, below we offer the snowpack season finale with May 1 readings at our three go-to high country SNOTEL , plus the current graph for the Rio Grande Basin.

The bright spot is definitely Columbus Basin, high in the La Plata Mountains. It’s below the average level for the period of record, but still doing far better than 2021. The La Platas feed the Animas, La Plata, Mancos, and Dolores Rivers. Last year the Dolores had an awful year. Things are looking up this time around—relatively speaking. The Dolores River through its namesake town shot up to 1,800 cfs at one point, dropped, then shot back up again, pushing up levels at McPhee significantly. Still, don’t goo excited. McPhee’s only at 59% of capacity and water managers are releasing virtually nothing from the dam.

River runners better get out on the water now, while they still can.

#Water managers see runoff as positive sign (April 29, 2022): Heading into summer, forecasts aren’t great, but they are slightly better than last year — The #Durango Herald

Click the link to read the article on The Durango Herald website (Aedan Hannon). Here’s an excerpt:

Water forecasts remain below average, but above last year’s troubling lows – a positive sign for water managers adapting to sustained drought in the region. Yet, much will depend on the impact of recent dust events and summer monsoons.

According to SNOTEL data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Resources Conservation Service, a little more than half of the snowpack in the San Miguel, Dolores, Animas and San Juan basins has melted so far. Snowpack is measured using the metric of snow water equivalent, or the water content of the snow.

The Animas River was flowing at 669 cubic feet per second in Durango on Wednesday afternoon, the Dolores River at 556 cfs in Dolores and the San Juan River at 895 cfs, according to Colorado Basin River Forecast Center data. Southwest Colorado’s rivers have slowed since Friday, but the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center predicts that flows will again increase over the next week and a half. Forecasts show the Animas River will peak at 3,100 cfs in late May or early June, slightly above last year’s peak of 2,910 cfs on June 7. Forecasts project peaks of 1,500 cfs for the Dolores River and 1,600 cfs for the San Juan River also in late May and early June…

Snow is melting earlier than average this year, according to the SNOTEL data, a trend that Wolff and other water managers have noted. Typically, snowpack would peak around April 1 and runoff would last from April through May and even into June, Wolff said…While runoff is happening earlier this year, water supply forecasts suggest more optimism. The Animas, Dolores and San Juan rivers are hovering just above 70% of average, according to Colorado Basin River Forecast Center forecasts…

Ken Curtis, general manager for the Dolores Water Conservancy District, told Wolff the district was hoping to get at least 70% of its average water.

Home court for #Colorado #climate lawsuits — @BigPivots #ActOnClimate

Suncor refinery Commerce City. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots

Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):

San Miguel County and Boulder lawsuits against two oil companies will be heard in Colorado. That helps. But these cases will still have an uphill struggle to prove damages that might seem obvious.

Colorado has abundant evidence of destruction caused by the warming, and more volatile, climate. Wildfires, ever larger and more destructive, now happen year-round, including the ghastly Marshall Fire of late December and the much smaller fires of recent weeks. Rising temperatures have robbed flows from the Colorado River, from which Boulder and Boulder County get substantial amounts of water. Air conditioning has become more necessity than luxury.

But can Boulder and other jurisdictions show harm from burning of fossil fuels — the primary cause of warming — in their climate liability lawsuits against oil companies?

Marshall Fire December 30, 2021. Photo credit: Boulder County

In 2018, Boulder (both the city and the county) as well as San Miguel County sued two oil giants, ExxonMobil and Suncor. These Colorado cases are among more than 20 climate lawsuits now in courts from Hawaii to Massachusetts. They’re the only cases from an inland state claiming actual damages from climate change — and after a recent legal victory, they could be among the first where substantive arguments are heard in court. (Only Honolulu’s case is on a faster track.)

Despite all the evidence of climate destruction, the legal case will be challenging, according to Pat Parenteau, a professor of environmental law at Vermont Law School.

“In a court of law, you have to prove by the preponderance of evidence and you have to convince the jury, all 12 of them,” says Parenteau, who has advised some parties who filed similar lawsuits, but is not currently involved directly in the litigation.

He points to the difficulty of pinning health impacts on tobacco companies in the 1990s. “Cigarettes kill people. Global warming, per se, kills people: Heat waves kill people. High tides kill people.”

Proving responsibility in a courtroom will be the tricky part. “There are multiple links in the causal change that you have to prove with climate change,” Parenteau says. “It was difficult enough to prove with tobacco. It never was proven [in court]. It was just settled. Just imagine how difficult it is for climate change.”

Suncor operates a refinery in Commerce City northeast of downtown Denver that processes 98,000 barrels of oil daily. “We purchase crude oil from the Denver-Julesburg Basin, process it in Commerce City, and sell nearly 95% of our products within the state,” Suncor’s website says.

Exxon’s private prediction of the future growth of carbon dioxide levels (left axis) and global temperature relative to 1982 (right axis). Elsewhere in its report, Exxon noted that the most widely accepted science at the time indicated that doubling carbon dioxide levels would cause a global warming of 3°C. Illustration: 1982 Exxon internal briefing document

Exxon has no refinery in Colorado, but it does sell fuel in the state.

“They are the two most consequential oil companies in Colorado, given their local operations,” says Marco Simons, the lead attorney with EarthRights International, the organization representing the three jurisdictions in Colorado.

So far, the arguments in the Colorado cases (and others) have been about process, namely where the cases should be tried.

In legal cases, as in basketball, home court matters. This is likely why Exxon and Suncor wanted lawsuits filed against them by Boulder and San Miguel heard in federal courts instead of Colorado district courts.
“Basically, their argument was that you can’t let state law allow these people to seek remedy before climate change injury when federal law doesn’t provide that remedy,” Simons explains.

The oil companies lost that round. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit ruled on Feb. 8 that the two lawsuits should be heard in Colorado. The court then ordered, on March 2, for that mandate to take effect.

“The court is basically saying there’s nothing wrong with using ordinary state law to hold oil companies accountable to their contribution to climate change,’” says Simons. “That does not in any way violate federal law. It’s not something inappropriate for states to do.”

arenteau agrees there is value to the climate cases being heard in state courts. The empirical evidence is clear: “Where do the states and cities find the best success? It’s in their own courts. The faster these cases get back to state courts from federal courts, the better.”

Colorado’s cases, originally filed as one, have been separated. San Miguel County’s case is to be heard in Denver District Court, and the Boulder and Boulder County case in Boulder County District Court.

Telluride. San Miguel County alleges damages to its skiing economy at Telluride. The case will be heard in Denver District Court.

Home-court advantage goes only so far. Attorneys for EarthRights International must now prove that the fossil fuels sold by Suncor and ExxonMobil in Colorado have produced damages from a changing climate to the local jurisdictions.

While many legal analysts say that will be difficult to prove, some observers think the Colorado lawsuits could be successful, even short of total courtroom victories.

One of those making that case is Cara Horowitz, co-executive director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change & the Environment, a program embedded in the law school at the University of California Los Angeles. She has coordinated with counsel for several jurisdictions in California that filed climate change lawsuits in 2017, but is no longer involved in those other climate liability cases.

“On an even more deep level, one goal that the plaintiffs have across the set of cases is undermining the social license of the corporations to do what they have been doing for decades,” says Horowitz. “They just need one good victory to hang their hats on.”

That could help supporters of these suits win verdicts in the court of public opinion.

Neither Suncor nor Exxon responded to requests for comment, but the premise of the fossil fuel companies is that they have been doing nothing wrong by peddling gasoline, diesel and other fossil fuel products.

Climate change-related lawsuits have been filed since the mid-1980s. Early lawsuits generally sought to force actions by state governments and federal agencies. The most notable such case is Massachusetts v. EPA, which resulted in the Supreme Court’s landmark 2007 decision that gave the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency authority to regulate carbon pollution under the Clean Air Act. Other lawsuits, such as Connecticut vs. American Electric Power in 2011, targeted energy companies. For complex legal reasons, these cases using federal courts have struggled to go forward.

Investigative reports in 2015 by Inside Climate News and independent work by the Los Angeles Times about ExxonMobil, the world’s largest oil and gas company, were important in triggering the wave of lawsuits of the last five years. The journalists showed that the oil giant misled the public about what it knew about climate change and the risks posed by fossil fuel emissions decades ago. The investigative series were based largely on the company’s internal records.

Since then have come a wave of lawsuits by state and local governments.

California jurisdictions — first Marin and San Mateo counties along with the city of Imperial Beach in July 2017, followed by Oakland and San Francisco that September — were at the forefront of suits by state and local governments. Currently pending are lawsuits filed by seven states and the District of Columbia and 19 by cities and counties, according to the Center for Climate Integrity.

These lawsuits fall into primarily two overlapping buckets. The two cases in Colorado fall into both.

In one bucket of lawsuits are claims of fraud and deception by oil companies, primarily by Exxon. The second bucket consists of suits alleging the oil companies have created “nuisances” that have caused damages. In the Colorado cases, local governments have suffered harm as a result, the lawsuits say.

“It’s about fundamental principles of tort law that basically boil down to, ‘If you harm someone, you have to pay for it,’” explains Simons, the EarthRights attorney.

Brad Udall: Here’s the latest version of my 4-Panel plot thru Water Year (Oct-Sep) of 2021 of the Colorado River big reservoirs, natural flows, precipitation, and temperature. Data (PRISM) goes back or 1906 (or 1935 for reservoirs.) This updates previous work with @GreatLakesPeck.

The 2018 lawsuits for the Colorado jurisdictions cite many climate impacts from fossil fuels. Rising temperatures will affect water supplies. Emergency management services will have to be ramped up because of increased wildfires, heavy rainfall and other extreme weather events. Warmer temperatures will worsen the already problematic ground-level ozone in Boulder County.

This car in Superior was among the victims of the Marshall Fire in late December 2021 that burned 1,084 homes and caused 30,000 residents of Superior and Louisville to flee. Photo/Allen Best

Some increased costs have already occurred, the lawsuit filed by the three Colorado jurisdictions in 2018 says. It points to the West Nile virus spread by mosquitoes amid rising temperatures. Prior to 2002, Boulder had no mosquito control program. That was the year the virus first appeared in Colorado. After that, costs of mosquito abatement grew steadily. By 2018 mosquito management nicked the city budget roughly $250,000. In Boulder County, the cost approached $400,000.

Buildings will have to be modified, the lawsuit says. “Due to the expected continued heat rise in Boulder County, a place that historically rarely saw days above 95 degrees, Boulder County and the City of Boulder are expected to see increased public health heat risks, such as heat stroke, and their associated costs,” the lawsuit filed in 2018 says.

This increasing heat, the lawsuit continues, will drive up costs, such as that of cooling infrastructure for buildings. “Cooling centers that are available during heat waves, and/or assisting with home air-conditioning installation, could cost Boulder County and the City of Boulder millions of dollars by mid-century.”

The lawsuit cites the $37.7 million of a $575.5 school construction bond for the Boulder Valley School District used for air-conditioning and better ventilation.

How the Colorado cases are different

Colorado’s lawsuits were the first filed in an interior state. Even now, the only other states without coastlines to have filed climate change lawsuits against oil companies are Minnesota and Vermont. They claim fraud. That makes the Colorado cases the only ones claiming damages.

This duality, an inland state claiming actual damages from climate change, sets Colorado’s cases apart from all others.

“It’s easy to imagine a city like Miami or other coastal cities being imperiled by climate change,” says Horowitz, the UCLA law professor. “The Boulder case is helping to illustrate that even inland cities, cities in the middle of America, are being harmed by climate change.”

One long-sought goal of the litigation is getting to what in courts is called the discovery phase. That’s the stage where documents, emails, other correspondence and information related to the suits could reach the public and prove devastating to the company. (That is essentially what happened to the tobacco industry, with the release of memos and documents in discovery.)

Horowitz, the law professor in Los Angeles, expects the filings and rulings to accelerate. “You will start to get state court decisions sooner rather than later, by which I mean probably in the next year,” she says. Appeals will follow, but these Colorado cases — and those similarly proceeding in other states — will move along.

“I wouldn’t think it will take five to 10 years,” she says.
And the fact that Colorado has no beach-front property could spur other similar cases. Sea level rise is not imminently threatening Boulder the way it is in Imperial Beach, a city of 26,000 people near San Diego that has also filed a climate change lawsuit.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if more jurisdictions realize they will need help in funding climate change adaptation,” Horowitz says, “and the fossil fuel companies are logical places to look as sources for that funding.”

This story was prepared in collaboration with the Boulder Reporting Lab, whose editing and suggestions enormously improved the story.

Wright’s Mesa awarded $110k for #water: Water engineering analysis is on the way — The #Norwood Post

Click the link to read the article on the Telluride Planet website. Here’s an excerpt:

Local leaders are celebrating a win this week, after learning last Friday that the Norwood area was awarded a $110,000 grant for water. The Wright’s Mesa Water Planning and Prioritization Project (WMWPPP) partners are the recipients, and they were supported in the application process by the West End Economic Development Corporation (WEEDC)…

WMWPPP is a group that includes the Town of Norwood, San Miguel County, WEEDC, Norwood Water Commission, Farmers Water Development, the Lone Cone Ditch Company, the Norwood Fire Protection District, and the San Miguel Watershed Coalition.

The idea to go for funding came together in the summer of 2021, when Norwood Town Trustee Candy Meehan and District 3 Commissioner Holstrom were both students in Water Education Colorado’s program “Water Fluency.” One session in Water Fluency was focused on funding, and learning about the availability of funds for just the type of infrastructure needed in the local region “lit a fire” for Meehan and Holstrom. Meehan spearheaded the grant application effort, and she and Holstrom worked with Deanna Sheriff, of WEEDC, and April Montgomery, of the Telluride Foundation, to flesh out their idea of looking for ways to get some of the $80 million in monies available for known water projects identified by the Southwest Basin Roundtable…

With funding secured, an engineering firm will be chosen to conduct a collaborative water infrastructure planning and prioritization analysis for all of Wright’s Mesa…

Though this winter appears to be looking good regarding snowpack, the local region is still classified in drought — with a changing climate, the need for housing and development, and the critical need for repairing and updating the town’s current water infrastructure…

The Colorado Water Conservation Board made its decision to fund Norwood during its March 15 meeting and announced the decision on March 18.

Say hello to the new newsletter “Nine Basins Bulletin”

Click the link to read the newsletter at Nine Basins Bulletin. Here’s an excerpt:

This is your new water newsletter.

The Nine Basins Bulletin is the new newsletter from the Southwestern Water Conservation District and the Water Information Program, a summary of the latest updates from southwest Colorado. In this email forum, we want to raise awareness, engagement, and coordination among our nine distinct watersheds—and share our successes with the state. It’s for you.

Send your updates, jobs, and events to lauras@swwcd.org.

What would you like your newsletter to be called? Submit the best newsletter name and win free admission to the seminar and kudos in the next edition…

Southwestern Water Conservation District Awards $197,500 to Local Water Projects

At their February meeting, the Southwestern Water Conservation District Board of Directors approved grants to support the following local water projects:

$60,000 for the Eaklor Ditch Company’s emergency piping project in the Navajo river basin

$28,500 to repair Lone Cone Reservoir’s outlet and intake in the San Miguel river basin

$25,000 toward the Mancos Conservation District’s remote metering program for three historic irrigation ditches

$16,500 to support the Dolores River Restoration Partnership’s ongoing monitoring and stewardship of their tamarisk removal project

$30,000 for the Town of Pagosa Springs’ Yamaguchi South river restoration project on the San Juan river

$16,000 to help Animas Watershed Partnership launch a basin-wide stream management planning process

$5,000 for the Mancos Conservation District’s urban water quality and conservation plan

$16,500 for Science on the Fly’s innovative partnership with anglers to collect water quality data in the San Miguel, Animas and La Plata basins

Outstanding waters: At a time when #water in the Southwest is becoming increasingly scarce, more than 20 streams in the region are being proposed for protective safeguards — The #Durango Telegraph

Priest Creek. Photo credit: Four Corners Hikes

From The Durango Telegraph (Jonathan Romeo):

At a time when water in the Southwest is becoming increasingly scarce, more than 20 streams in the region are being proposed for protective safeguards in an attempt to preserve the waterways for years to come.

For the past two decades, a prolonged drought driven by climate change has snowpack levels in the Southwest on a continual downward trend. Obviously, that’s not good – less snow means less runoff for rivers and streams, and less water available for use.

As a result, a few years ago, a coalition of environmental groups started a process to locate and identify streams in the high country of Southwest Colorado that would qualify as Outstanding Waters (OW). The designation protects defined reaches of rivers, streams and lakes that have exceptional water quality.

The thinking, environmental groups say, is saving these pristine high-alpine streams in the face of climate change and worsening drought will ensure the long-term protection of tributaries that are vital for the region’s most important rivers, such as the Animas, Dolores, Gunnison, San Juan and San Miguel – which all feed into the Colorado River…

Really special rivers

The Outstanding Waters designation was established as part of the Clean Water Act of 1972. For streams to qualify, they must meet a set of criteria based on water quality and national resource values. And, the streams also must serve as critical habitat for aquatic life and have a component of recreational value, such as fishing or river running. Once designated, the water quality in those streams must be maintained and protected from any future development or use.

The Clean Water Act, however, left it up to states to create a process and specific criteria for streams to qualify as OW. In Colorado, that job falls to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. “We protect every stream in Colorado, but this is the highest level of protection,” Blake Beyea, a water standards unit manager with CDPHE, said. “And it needs to be supported by water quality data, as well as evidence it’s an outstanding resource that requires protections.”

While the designation is somewhat seldom used, as of February 2020, Colorado had an estimated 78 stream segments and bodies of water, covering 5,869 river miles, classified as OWs, mostly located within wilderness areas and national parks. The environmental groups’ proposal – which includes SJCA, Trout Unlimited, American Waters and Pew Charitable Trust, among others – would be unique in terms of the amount of streams proposed and the fact the waterways are located outside wilderness areas, mostly on Forest Service lands…

Setting a standard

Back in 2019, the environmental groups started conversations on what streams might qualify as OWs. They looked at maps for high-altitude waterways that showed the potential for pristine water quality and impeccable habitat for aquatic life, while also escaping historical impacts from uses like mining and development over the years.

In all, nearly 30 streams emerged as potential OW candidates. Then, the next step was to prove it with on-the-ground water testing, an effort led by the Durango-based Mountain Studies Institute. That process lasted two years, with samples taken four times a year from each stream. In the end, the environmental groups ultimately proposed 26 stream segments (five in the Animas; nine in Dolores; seven in Gunnison; three in San Juan; and two in San Miguel).

An OW designation does not affect water rights and would not prohibit future development in these watersheds, Gaztambide said. It would, however, establish a baseline of water quality that cannot be impacted or degraded in the face of that development. And in some circumstances, it’s not just development; the waterways are also protected from things like an increase in recreation, which can result in elevated levels of E. coli.

Essentially, uses and development can change on the landscape; the existing, high-level water quality standards cannot…

Unintended consequences

Gaztambide and the environmental groups are optimistic all the streams they’ve proposed will attain the OW designation. And indeed, there doesn’t seem to be much pushback from other water users in the region, such as agriculture and water districts.

Steve Wolff, manager of the Southwestern Water Conservation District, which represents nine counties in Southwest Colorado, said it’s unlikely the district’s board will take a stance either way for the OW designation. To date, the board has just monitored and asked questions about any possible unintended consequences the listing may have.

One potential concern, Wolff said, is what outside impacts and degradation, like rising water temperatures driven by climate change, would have on the designation and the requirement to maintain those standards. “If that happens, what does that mean from a regulatory aspect?” Wolff said. “We really don’t know yet.”

Since most of the streams are located on Forest Service lands, another question has been raised on the impacts to grazing and logging. A Forest Service representative said Tuesday “we don’t have information to share about the designation at this time” and did not provide comment for this story. Gaztambide, however, said an OW designation does not impact uses like grazing.

A critical time

Peter Butler, who serves as a consultant for SWCD and has worked on water quality issues in the region for years, said he wasn’t aware of too many issues with the OW designation in Colorado over the years. In 2009, Hermosa Creek, for instance, was designated as the first OW outside of a wilderness area or national park, and the situation hasn’t run into any problems or controversy…

To nominate nearly 30 streams in one proposal is a big project, Butler said. But OW, though rarely used, is a way to protect precious water resources at a critical time, in a way that’s more regulatory and doesn’t have to go through a political process. In June, CDPHE’s nine-person Water Quality Control Commission is expected to vote on the proposal…

Gaztambide said the designation will also protect these vital tributaries, which provide a boost of clean water to major rivers should a large event, like the Gold King Mine spill or mudslides from the 416 Fire, seriously impact water quality and threaten drinking water for downstream towns.

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Parting Cheeseburger Query

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Our River of Sorrow Jonathan P. Thompson October 27, 2021

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Big questions from water users

A program to help the Upper Basin

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Reminder

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Mining Monitor

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Snowpack above average