This is one of those headline cheats that my journalism friends heap merciless scorn upon, the question lead for which the answer is “no”. Sometimes thinking through the implications of the doctrine of prior appropriation pretzels my brain. The idea, in short, is that the people who were there first get to use the water, …
Lee’s Ferry is a storyteller’s delight, one of those connect-the-dots places that is simply irresistible. On the Colorado River just downstream from Glen Canyon Dam, it is where John D. Lee was sent into hiding (exile?) following the Mountain Meadows Massacre, where John Wesley Powell split his second Grand Canyon trip in two, where the …
Continue reading ‘“He called the place Lonely Dell, and it was not a misnomer”’ »
A couple of (possibly connected?) things that crossed my desk this morning – According to the latest data from the San Francisco Fed, Las Vegas (Nev.) has huge foreclosure numbers. And then this good news, from Henry Brean at the Las Vegas Review Journal: [W]ater use continues to decline in the valley, where the water authority …
Tom Yulsman and Brendon Bosworth have an excellent piece over at Climate Central looking at drought and water supply on my favorite river*. They capture what I think is one of the key elements in understanding what’s happening on the Colorado: the realization that, independent of the drought that has plagued the river for more …
With the mondo snow pack and good runoff forecast, Arizona may no longer need to leave some of its annual share of Colorado River water in Lake Mead, Shaun McKinnon reports: The CAP had been discussing a plan to forfeit as much as 80,000 acre-feet of its allocation this year to help keep water levels …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: AZ May Not Need to Leave Water in Mead’ »
What a difference a wet, wet month in the Colorado Basin makes. In December, the long range forecasts for the big reservoirs at Lake Powell (upstream) and Lake Mead were flirting with trouble. Lake Mead’s levels for the end of the 2010-11 water year were forecast to drop to 1076.68 feet above sea level, close …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: What a Difference a Month Makes’ »
udpate: full column here (sub/ad req) When I first began seriously trying to sort out New Mexico’s place in the scheme of Colorado River water management, I kept banging unsuccessfully up against what seemed like a simple question: If long term drought or permanent climate change reduces the river’s flow, how would the shortage be …
Continue reading ‘Climate Change on the Colorado: The Devil In the Details’ »
I was delighted by the National Science Teachers association recommendation of The Tree Rings’ Tale, especially this bit from science teacher Teri Cosentino: I was so inspired by the book that when a tree was felled on campus, we counted and measured the tree rings to see what happened during the tree’s life during the …
At the Dry Lake snotel station near Steamboat Springs in northern Colorado, there’s more than 4 feet of snow on the ground. By snow water content, that’s 32 percent above average for Jan. 7. Snow that melts there flows down into the Yampa River, which flows into the Green, which flows into the Colorado, which …
I’ve been watching Lake Mead rise remarkably as a result of last week’s storm that blew through Nevada before drenching the Virgin River watershed on the Arizona-Nevada-Utah border area. It looks like Mead will finish December at a surface elevation of about 1086.25 feet above sea level, 2 feet above the level forecast a month …