Southern California water policy is looking like a game of speed chess right now. Amid the moves to supplement its Colorado River flow with extra water from Las Vegas and Imperial (agenda pdf), Met’s board also is considering spending money on cleaning up and reusing more of the sewage effluent Southern California currently dumps in …
Continue reading ‘Met eyeing sewage recycling for Southern California supply’ »
From the Paris Review, poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s journal of his 1961 visit to El Centro and the Salton Sea: Even at the Salton Sea, the face of death has its smile. In the morning the wind is still blowing but the sun is bright, and life is stirring. Even at the bottom of a well, there’s …
Continue reading ‘That time Lawrence Ferlinghetti visited the Salton Sea’ »
The green strip in the fading sunlight is pasture, irrigated with Colorado River tributary water.
Since I wrote last month about the impact (or lack of impact) of El Niño on Colorado River flows, Paul Miller at the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center has done a new, more detailed analysis than the one I showed (which I had attributed to the Central Arizona Project folks, but which originally came from CBRFC): …
The federal Climate Prediction Center’s seasonal forecast, out this morning, looks promising for the Colorado River Basin: These forecast maps can be visually deceptive. The greens mean a shift of odds toward wetter weather, not a forecast that we should expect wetter weather. Dice, loaded slightly in our favor. You can see all the precip …
Continue reading ‘A promising seasonal forecast for the Colorado River Basin’ »
I assume this bluff above Palisade, Colorado, explains the name: Those are peach trees in the foreground, irrigated by water from the Orchard Mesa Irrigation District, which first turned water in 1904 onto what a friend calls “as fertile a swath of God’s green earth as there is in the West.” The district’s water now …
Continue reading ‘A Colorado River water use I can get behind: Palisade peaches’ »
The question of what is included in the “Colorado River Basin” is in part a legal one. The seven-state Colorado River Compact of 1922 defined a weird legal geography: [T]he term “Colorado River Basin” means all of the drainage area of the Colorado River System and all other territory within the United States of America …
Continue reading ‘Grand Junction: A view from higher up in the watershed’ »
The pass between Silverton and Ouray was closed yesterday for roadwork, so Lissa and I (headed for Grand Junction) ended up on a long but gorgeous detour. The canyon country of the West is so beautiful:
Mike Cohen, writing for National Geographic’s “Water Currents”, explains what’s at stake in the current discussions over what to do to mitigate reduced flows to the Salton Sea as ag water conservation efforts in Imperial Valley grow: The shrinking Salton Sea will expose tens of thousands of acres of lakebed. The dry lakebed could emit …
Continue reading ‘Cohen sees signs for Salton Sea optimism’ »
I don’t remember exactly where this is. It was a short walk down an arroyo from US95, the two-lane that runs north from Blythe along the Colorado River to Parker. The farming here is all on the Arizona side of the river. This was all underwater during the river’s pre-dam spring high flows, big desert …
Continue reading ‘Couldn’t’ve had boat docks here before they built Hoover Dam’ »