If I wanted to make mischief, I’d write a blog post pointing out that Lake Mead ended May at a historic low right after release of 105,392 acre feet of water for a historic environmental flow through the Colorado River Delta. I’d calculate how much higher Lake Mead would be if that 105,392 acre feet …
Continue reading ‘That thing I wrote about Lake Mead being the lowest ever turned out to be true’ »
Black Canyon on the Colorado River, from the 1871 Wheeler survey, courtesy USGS. This is the area eventually chosen some years later for what was called Boulder or Hoover Dam:
Unless tropical depression Amanda does something miraculous, and quickly, Lake Mead will end May at its lowest level for this point in the year since Elwood Mead and his buddies filled the reservoir in the 1930s, 20 feet in surface elevation below last year at this time. The “tropical storm Amanda” thing was a joke. …
Continue reading ‘Lake Mead: lowest end-of-May levels in history’ »
I suppose if you work this image from yesterday’s Landsat pass over the Colorado River Delta hard enough, you could find a path of wet connection between river and sea: Image courtesy USGS Earth Explorer
When I first ran across the rantings of George Maxwell as the Colorado River Compact was being developed in the 1920s, their racism seemed almost comical. Here he is in a written submission to the 14th Meeting of the Colorado River Commission, Nov. 13, 1922 (pdf from University of Colorado): The flood menace must not …
Continue reading ‘George Maxwell, Colorado River irrigation and the “Asiatic menace”’ »
In no part of the wide world is there a place where Nature had provided so perfectly for a stupendous achievement by means of irrigation as in that place where the Colorado River flows uselessly past the international desert. – William Smythe, Sunset Mangazine, 1900, quoted in Eric Boime, “Beating Plowshares into Swords”: The Colorado …
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Kyle Mittan had some nice straight talk recently in the Tucson Weekly from the University of Arizona’s Sharon Megdal about Arizona’s projections that it’ll need another million acre feet per year of water by 2060: “A million acre-feet is a lot of water,” she said. “But is that the right number, or is that symbolic …
When last we met, I showed you the San Juan River looking like the only water for miles (and not much water at that) as it flows across the Ute Mountain Ute Nation near Four Corners. Today, after miles of driving around the high country of the Four Corners region (vacation road trip) I have …
Continue reading ‘Water in the Desert, San Juan River edition II’ »
My search for water in the desert took Lissa and I this afternoon up US 160 from Teec Nos Pos in Arizona’s far northeastern corner, past the Four Corners Monument and into Colorado, where the highway crosses the San Juan River. Teec Nos Pos has a weather station that averages 8.09 inches (20.55 cm) of …
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Driving up through the Imperial Valley in March, I chanced upon this example of the fading hopes of the town of Brawley. In his maddeningly intriguing book Imperial, William Vollman briefly slips out of the obtuse into this rare moment of clarity: When I began to study the history of the period, my mind remained …
Continue reading ‘Vollman on the economics of Imperial Valley farming’ »