Federal officials today declared a first-ever shortage on the Colorado River—meaning there’s just not enough water in the huge system for all the folks who have dibs on it. The Tier 1 shortage declaration will lead to cutbacks for downstream users starting next year. Arizona will feel the cuts most acutely, losing about 18 percent of its Colorado River water.
A Tier 1 shortage is triggered when Lake Mead’s surface elevation drops below 1,075 feet as of the first of the year. It is currently sitting just under 1,068 feet and is not expected to recover by January. The reservoir is shrinking thanks to the prolonged drought or, if you prefer, aridification, that has plagued the Southwest for more than two decades. Yet the roots of the shortage go back a century or more.
In 1922, the states in the Colorado River Basin divvied up the river’s water. Based on just a couple dozen years of record-keeping, the folks in charge believed that 15 million acre feet of water flowed past Lees Ferry, just below the current location of Glen Canyon Dam, each year. So they allocated 7.5 million acre feet to the Upper Basin States—Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico—and 7.5 million to the Lower Basin States—California, Nevada, and Arizona. In 1944 they came up with another 1.5 million acre feet for Mexico.
That turned out to be a heck of a lot more water than was actually in the river. Analysis of nearly a millennium of tree ring data has shown that the actual flows are closer to 14 million acre feet per year, meaning hundreds of billions of gallons of “paper” water don’t actually exist and never really did. And over the past 20 years, as cities and farmers and lawn-waterers have maxed out their allocations, the flows have decreased even further. The “unregulated inflow” to Lake Powell—the Bureau of Reclamation’s estimate of how much water would run into the lake without upstream diversions or withdrawals—averaged just 8.62 million acre feet from 2000 to 2021. You can’t say they weren’t warned:
Clearly something had to give. So, here we are. Farmers who draw from the Central Arizona Project, which sucks water from the river below Lake Mead and sends it via canal hundreds of miles across the desert to Phoenix and Tucson, will take the biggest hit, losing 65 percent or more of their water. Nevada’s allocation will also be cut, but the state’s water supply likely will be unaffected since the state currently uses less than its share (and because it has bolstered its allocation with some nifty tricks with treated wastewater). California won’t take any cuts at all, but water managers from Lower Basin states plan to pay some California farmers to stop irrigating and fallow fields to reduce overall demand.
Lake Mead’s levels have hovered at the current level for the last month or so. Meanwhile, its upstream cousin, Lake Powell, continues to shrink, in spite of some healthy monsoonal storms in Utah and Colorado and increased releases from reservoirs even further upstream. And as Powell gets smaller, the number of headlines about its fate grows. Even the New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert visited to see the once-flooded treasures that have been revealed.
The Associated Press took a different angle, looking at the impact to recreation at the reservoir. Only the Wahweap boat ramp near Page, Arizona, is still marginally useful and it will close today until National Park Service workers can build a new low-water ramp nearby. In the past, Glen Canyon Recreation Area has seen more than 4 million visitors per year. This year visitation is likely to be half that or less, dealing a blow to the economy of Page, which is still reeling from the shutdown of the Navajo Generating Station two years ago.
Reading the perspectives of some of the sources for these stories can be rather enlightening to someone like me, who has mourned the flooding of Glen Canyon for much of his life. Not only are these folks crestfallen, but they also seem oblivious of the reasons the lake is shrinking and of the far-reaching impacts. One guy told the AP reporter: “It’s really sad that they're allowing such a beautiful, beautiful place to fall apart.”
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President Joe Biden has been known to make a gaffe or two in his time. Since getting elected, however, he’s gained some control over his verbiage. Or so it seemed until last week, when he went off and made a whopper: He pleaded with OPEC to pump more oil and increase the global supply of crude in order to bring down gas prices to help the economic recovery.
It wasn’t a slip up, after all, but more like a manifestation of a quirk of modern politics: A president can botch the federal response to a deadly pandemic without falling out of favor, but if gas prices rocket past $3 per gallon, watch out. When the pandemic hit last year and air travel ground to a virtual halt, global demand for petroleum plummeted, taking the price of oil—and gasoline—along with it. The low price at the pump was a boon to American drivers who favor gargantuan gas guzzlers, but a bane to oil companies’ bottom lines.
But as the economy recovered so did the price of oil—ratcheting up into the $70+ per barrel range by late July. That threatened to drive up prices on everything that relies on oil, which is to say, well, just about everything. But it also incentivized oil corporations to start drilling again, which meant more jobs for the beleaguered economies in southeastern New Mexico and Wyoming. This dynamic always puts the fossil fuel industry-loving politicians into a pickle: What’s good for their fuel hungry constituents isn’t good for their oil executive donors’ bottom lines, a reality that is often lost on the politicians. Rep. Lauren Boebert provides a classic example of this discombobulation.
And then there’s Biden, who also seems to be disconnected. That he wants gas prices to stay low makes sense from an economic point of view, but it makes no sense environmentally. Demand for gasoline is somewhat elastic, meaning that consumption of the commodity is inversely proportional to price. Cheap gas means more driving means more climate-changing emissions, which is to say that Biden was encouraging emissions even as he decried the impacts of climate change. Politically it made almost no sense to openly plead with OPEC—rather than domestic drillers—to do his bidding.
Besides, it was probably unnecessary. In the past week, oil prices have dropped about 10 percent, not because of Biden or OPEC or an uptick in drilling in New Mexico or Wyoming, but because the COVID’s delta variant is running rampant.
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The pale, iconic, pyramid-shaped Engineer Mountain rises up from verdant aspen-covered slopes in southwestern Colorado. It’s no fourteener, and even falls a bit short of being a thirteener, but that hasn’t stopped the masses from piling up at the trailhead each summer day to make a bid for the summit. It is without a doubt the most popular summit in southwestern Colorado. A network of trails that make for good mountain biking, hiking, and trail running wind around the peak’s base, luring even more people. On a recent Sunday morning, the trail parking lots were overflowing, the approach trail was jammed, a steady stream of mountain bikers huffed their way up the highway after doing the downhill trail plummet, and a line of climbers clung to the talus slope of Engineer like a platoon of ants. It was a prime example of the inundation—or overcrowding, if you prefer—of our public lands.
A few friends and I led the Sunday morning convoy of Subarus and Toyotas heading north out of Durango that morning, the handsome figure of Engineer Mountain dominating our view. But instead of stopping at the Engineer parking lot atop Coal Bank Pass, we skidded to a halt at a little pull off less than two miles away, took a last swig off our coffee cups, and, groaning a little with age, climbed out of the truck, put on our packs, and headed into the woods onto public land and the slopes of a no-less-iconic, yet far less traveled, peak.
We had neither map nor established trail to follow, meaning we had to move slowly, almost meditatively, to find our way through the deadfall scattered among the standing trees. Some of the timber had fallen on its own, but the biggest, tangled pile were brought down in a massive avalanche years ago. Now the logs with impressive girth and tangled roots were barkless and smooth, some of them rotting out from within. Tucked underneath or between the old trees were little pockets of biodiversity—tiny flowers of white, alien-like fungi, mini-ferns.
A huge pile of bear poop greeted us at the bottom of the talus-covered slope of the peak, itself. Next to that huge bolete mushrooms grew in a line, probably where a log had long ago decayed into earth, looking like a procession of hamburger buns. The ancient remains of a campfire sat amongst trees garlanded with Spanish moss. We slowly climbed the peak and sat on the grassy summit telling stories and discussing the geology of the surroundings and occasionally breaking into song. But we didn’t disturb anyone with our discordant crooning because there was no one around to disturb. The swarms of humanity that were almost within shouting distance had sped right on past this place, which was just fine with us.
As we made our way back to the car and the constant thrum of car wheels on pavement, I thought about various proposals for solving the problem of overcrowding on the public lands, especially certain national parks. The idea that seems to have gained the most favor is to divert the crowds away from the Zions and the Arches and Engineer Mountains of the world and disperse them into less frequently visited areas—such as the slopes where my friends and I trod.
The thought of such a scheme, of even a fraction of the Engineer Mountain-goers scrambling around in the trail-free woods, makes me shudder. Nor would it make any more sense to move a couple hundred thousand Zion visitors to, say, Natural Bridges. Zion would only be mildly less crowded while Natural Bridges would be overwhelmed. Besides, that’s not what the masses want. There’s a good reason Zion is popular: It’s spectacular, there’s a river running through it, and, most importantly, there are a ton of amenities just outside the entrance gates, from nice hotels to upscale restaurants and coffee shops. And there’s something else, namely other people. Humans tend to be social animals and mostly gravitate towards others of their kind. For that type of person, crowded national parks are not a liability, but an asset.
So here’s an alternate solution: Give the public land agencies a far bigger budget and adequate staffing so that they can keep the crowds in check. Repair and build more infrastructure in the popular places to mitigate some of the impacts. And let the less-visited places remain less-visited. No, there are no “secret” places, nor can the obscure places remain so in this age of information. But for federal land managers to try to alleviate crowds in one place by funneling them to another is folly.
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News Roundup: There ain't enough water to go around
Insightful and thought provoking posts...as always. Keep it up!
While I agree with your unassailable contention that moving a few thousand people from Arches to Natural Bridges would be a fruitless exercise, I don't think it's as simple overall as just giving the parks more resources to "keep visitors in check." While some significant percentage of humans will deal with the crowds, a meaningful percentage will not. That means they're destined for places like Bears Ears, often searching for the "less crowded" options.
In my view, what's needed is not only more resources but a thoughtful strategy on where to send people. That strategy can't, IMO, be successful by just sending more people to the already over crowded places. There does need to be some thoughtful development of "new" Engineer Mountains and House on Fires. The infrastructure from 30, 40 or 50 years ago just will never accommodate the amount of humans in the outdoors these days. So, in order to save the 98% of public lands to be relatively human free, there needs to be some new, more thoughtful development. The choices about where to send these folks aren't easy and are fraught with NIMBY issues. But a real, proactive strategy is needed or else we just let Google and Instagram manage our public lands.
Those uncrowded public lands of the backcountry are critical habitat for all the iconic critters of the West, who are increasingly hemmed in and threatened by humans. That is the main reason to not encourage people to go elsewhere than the popular parks. And the parks need to restrict and even ban cars. In the late 1970s Yosemite considered banning cars in the Valley, building big parking lots on the entrance roads and providing bus access. But the NPS brass didn’t have the guts to do it. Zion did and that helps a lot. If we charged the actual cost of oil and gas with carbon taxes that reflected the climate, pollution and health costs caused by burning fossil fuels, the cost would be about 4 times the present price per gallon…