In 1879, one John Codman published, as was the fancy of the day, the journals of his travels “Round Trip By Way of Panama through California, Oregon, Nevada, Utah, Idaho and Colorado.” His travels took him across the lower Colorado River desert, and he seems not to have liked it much: This is the great …
This is a graph of the declining construction employment in Nevada, not the declining water levels in Lake Mead. In fact, if we were statistically clever enough, we could no doubt find a negative correlation between the two. As construction booms, more houses are built, and our friends in Vegas consume more water. Construction up, …
Continue reading ‘This is not a graph of the water level in Lake Mead’ »
As Emily Green likes to point out, low is bad when it comes to flow and water storage on the Colorado, and it’s increasingly clear that low is what we’ll get this year: According to the forecast out today, flow into Lake Powell on the Upper Colorado, which is the key point on the western …
The energy-water nexus is an issue all over the western United States. Many new sources of energy, from concentrating solar plants to oil shales, need water. New sources of water, whether pumping it long distances or desalinating brackish groundwater or ocean water, take energy. Few examples on the energy side are as interesting as the …
It must have seemed like a good idea. Southwestern Colorado had coal. California needed it. And the Colorado River provided what seemed like a relatively level route to get from Point A to Point B. Thus was R.B. Stanton dispatched in 1889 to survey a route for the Denver, Colorado Canyon & Pacific Railroad. The …
Continue reading ‘The Colorado River, Looking South, Circa 1889’ »
The Bureau of Reclamation has tuned up its estimates of the chances of release of extra water to help Lake Mead, now putting them at one in four this year, according to an update published today (Wed. 2/10). The jargon here is “equalization,” which happens when there is enough extra water upstream in Lake Powell …
Continue reading ‘Chances of Extra Water for Mead Remain Low’ »
Following a trail of bread crumbs from James Lawrence Powell’s Dead Pool led me to the tale of Tom Udall’s trip down Glen Canyon with his dad as a boy (sub/ad req). Udall, now a U.S. Senator from New Mexico, is the son of former Arizona congressman and Kennedy-Johnson Interior Secretary Stewart Udall: Glen Canyon …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: The Udalls and Glen Canyon Dam’ »
The median forecast for flows on the upper Colorado River, out this morning, is 5.8 million acre feet, 73 percent of normal. That is down 400,000 acre feet from a month ago, and represents a continued reduction in the probability that there will be extra water upstream to pass down to replenish Lake Mead. Flows …
Working on a piece last year about the Colorado River Delta, a couple of people mentioned the remarkable thing that happened when surplus water spilled Lake Mead in (I think, going from memory here) the El Nino year of 1983 and for a brief shining time the Colorado made it all the way to the …
Bob Berwyn has a nice rundown on the process now underway at the Colorado Water Conservation Board to determine how much water is left in the Colorado River for the state of Colorado to develop. Here’s the nut of the issue: After conducting what they say is one of the most rigorous studies ever of …
Continue reading ‘How Much Water Does the State of Colorado Have?’ »