Lake Pleasant, Arizona

Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck.

It was 95 F (35 C) when I went up to Lake Pleasant Friday afternoon. Remember this is mid-October. You couldn’t see the water evaporating off the lake, but I’m pretty sure it was happening.

Located in the hills north of Phoenix, Arizona, Lake Pleasant is the storage reservoir for Colorado River water pumped into central Arizona via the Central Arizona Project Aqueduct. The energy used to get it here is huge, the evaporation is not insignificant (something like 3 to 4 percent of the total supply, most of it from the lake), but if building a giant city in the middle of a very dry desert is your goal, this is definitely the way to go. (Phoenix averages less than 8 inches (20 cm) of rain a year. I’ll leave it to the Arizonans to discuss whether building a city in a place like that is a reasonable goal. It’s their state.)

The interesting thing to me is the way people gravitate around the lake, as we always seem to do when there’s water in the desert. You can see the boats in the picture. Up the hill behind me, I stopped to talk to a couple up from Phoenix for the weekend, as they often do, sitting in the shade of their big RV having a beer, with a fishing boat on a trailer nearby.

As I sat on the bank overlooking the lake, watching the birds, a couple of old hippies who’d driven a relic of a van in from California picked their way down the hillside, looking for a place to swim. The found their way down through the rocks to the best approximation of a beach, slipped into the water, and paddling around delightedly.

Water in the desert is a strange and wonderful thing.

Petrified Wood

Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck.

Like the old tease, “Don’t think about a pink elephant,” it’s hard to not think about water in Holbrook, Ariz., a place that doesn’t have much. It sits along the Little Colorado River, which mostly isn’t what you’d normally think of as a “river” – that is, a thing with water. Holbrook averages a bit more than 8 inches (20 cm) of rain a year.

Nora and I, on a road trip to Phoenix, stopped this afternoon at Stewarts, one of those strangely attractive tourist extravaganzas with large sculptures, ostriches, and petrified wood just east of Holbrook. While Nora was taking pictures of the wacky roadside art, I wandered inside to ask about water.

But before I could raise the question on my mind, Leonard, the clerk, brought it up. “This whole place used to be under the ocean,” he explained. “You can’t drink the water.” I’m not sure he had the geologic history quite right, but his point was that whatever water you could pump up from the ground was too brackish to drink. They have to truck in what water they use on the site.

Just down the road is a little junction called “Goodwater”. It has always looked to me like one of the driest places on earth.

There are places in the arid West where the use of greywater is a force multiplier – taking the water you already used to wash your clothes and piping it into the garden rather than “wasting” it by dumping it down the sewer. But it does not always make as much sense as our intuition might suggest.

I’m reminded of the issue by a nice piece by Ben Preston in Miller-McCune about Art Ludwig, guru of California’s greywater movement:

Although nothing new, diverting greywater — water from washing machines, showers and sinks containing far less bacteria than the funky brew toilets and kitchen sinks emit — for irrigation has become one of the primary tools in a growing arsenal of conservation methods being examined.

Greywater is great in places where the effluent is “wasted”, such as coastal cities where outflow from sewage treatment plants is discharged into the ocean. But in a place like Albuquerque, the saving is not as great as it appears. Here, the effluent from my washing machine goes through a sewage treatment plant, then into the Rio Grande, where it is available to the ecosystem and downstream water users. (Albuquerque’s sewage treatment plant is the largest “tributary” on the Middle Rio Grande.) Every gallon I might divert from the washing machine to my garden results in one less gallon in the river.

It’s another example of the fact that there is very little free water left in the system.

This project is too small to be anything more than intriguing, but intriguing it is. Crop insurance for some of the world’s poorest farmers:

A quarter-century after famine killed one million Ethiopians and seared the world’s conscience, peasant farmers there are enduring an ever-faster barrage of droughts. Nearly 14 million people in Ethiopia are going hungry this year.

Those poor rains would not be fatal for American farmers, who have elaborate crop insurance programs to protect them in dry years. But such risk protection has been unthinkable in Ethiopia, one of the world’s poorest countries.

Now, however, thanks to the innovative work of Oxfam America, the Boston-based global development organization, the risks are no longer as severe for hundreds of farmers in Tigray Province in northern Ethiopia. If the rains fail and their crops wither, their losses will be covered. And they won’t starve.

Via the Christian Science Monitor – I’m guessing a strict adherence to California’s water laws is probably low on these folks’ priority list:

Large marijuana plots hidden deep in California’s public lands have illegally diverted hundreds of millions of gallons of water, compounding shortages caused by the state’s ongoing drought.

At least the water’s being diverted to a high-value crop.