The Ella Ditch, in the Crystal River Valley, placed a call for the first time ever during the drought-stricken summer of 2018. That meant the Town of Carbondale had to borrow water from the East Mesa Ditch under an emergency water supply plan. CREDIT: BRENT GARDNER-SMITH/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Representatives from the Colorado River Water Conservation District say their efforts to develop a solution to a water shortage on the Crystal River will probably include natural fixes before a dam and reservoir and that the plan should not impact a future Wild & Scenic designation.
Staff from the Glenwood Springs-based Colorado River Water Conservation District presented some preliminary findings of a study of a back-up water supply plan, known as an augmentation plan, to Pitkin County commissioners Tuesday. They said their preference is to find and develop natural infrastructure like aquifer recharge or wetlands restoration before proposing a dam and reservoir.
Water could be diverted and stored in an underground aquifer during peak flows and then be allowed to slowly seep back into the river when it’s needed. Restoring wetlands can raise the water table throughout the valley floor, creating a sponge that holds water.
River District staff said they would absolutely not consider storage on the main stem of the Crystal — any potential small reservoir would be on a tributary — and that whatever solutions they come up with shouldn’t affect the long-held goal of some residents to get a federal Wild & Scenic designation to protect the free-flowing nature of the river.
River District Director of Government Relations Zane Kessler said the River District is working with environmental groups like American Rivers to find a solution to the shortage.
“We see a real opportunity to do something cool here and think outside the box,” he said. “I don’t know that natural infrastructure could take care of all of it, but we want to prioritize that first and look at opportunities.”
The Crystal River in August 2018 was running at 8 cfs near the state fish hatchery. Colorado River Water Conservation District staff said a study of a back-up water supply will look at natural infrastructure before dams and reservoirs to address a water shortage. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Water shortage
The River District, along with Rifle-based West Divide Water Conservancy District, undertook the study, paid for by a state grant, to examine a problem that became evident during the summer of 2018: that in dry years there may not be enough water for both irrigators and residential subdivisions.
“2018 was a wake-up call for water users on the Crystal,” Kessler said.
That August, the Ella Ditch, which irrigates land south of Carbondale, placed a call on the river for the first time ever. That meant that junior water rights holders upstream were supposed to stop taking water so that the Ella Ditch, which has water rights dating to 1902, could receive its full amount. Under Colorado’s prior appropriation system, those with the oldest water rights have first use of the river.
The Colorado Division of Water Resources did not enforce the call by turning off water to homes, but instead told water users they must work together to create a basin-wide augmentation plan.
Most junior water rights holders have augmentation plans, which allows them to continue using water during a call by replacing it with water from another source, like releasing it from a reservoir. The problem on the Crystal is that several residential subdivisions don’t have augmentation plans.
Until water users come up with a permanent solution, DWR has said it may not allow outdoor water use when a senior call is on as a temporary fix. Water managers expect once-rare calls by irrigators to become more frequent as rising temperatures result in less water in streams.
Sprinklers irrigate land on the east side of the Crystal River (in foreground) in August 2018, one of its driest years in recent history. A call by a downstream senior water rights holder during the drought of 2018 illustrated a long-simmering problem: several subdivisions in the Crystal River Valley don’t have back-up water plans.C REDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Demand quantification
River District staff presented the first step in the study: a demand quantification or putting numbers on the amount of water needed for different uses throughout the year.
Engineers found 90 structures — many of them wells for in-house water use — that take water from the river system and which would need to be included in the augmentation plan. These 90 structures deliver water to 197 homes, 80 service connections in Marble, nearly 23 irrigated acres, Beaver Lake and Orlosky Reservoir in Marble, 16,925 square-feet of commercial space, plus some water for livestock.
In order for these water users to keep taking water during a downstream call by an irrigator, they would have to replace about 113 acre-feet of water in the Crystal River per year. The amount of extra flow that would need to be added to the river is small — just .58 cubic feet per second during July, the peak replacement month.
Some commissioners asked if simply using less water — instead of creating a new supply of water — especially by irrigators on the lower Crystal, could solve the problem.
“I’d love to see an analysis of the conservation opportunities,” said Commissioner Kelly McNicholas Kury. “What can we do that’s not taking the water out, but preserving it in the stream?”
River District General Manager Andy Mueller acknowledged there may be more “aggressive” irrigators on the Crystal, but that in addition, climate change is decreasing the amount of water available. He said he wants the River District to work more closely with Pitkin County to find conservation opportunities.
“I think those types of opportunities require identifying the potential for them but then developing relationships with the water users,” Mueller said.
Tuesday’s meeting was a chance for board members from both organizations, which have not historically seen eye to eye on water issues, to work together and ask questions. Next steps include public outreach and education, coordinating with water managers and eventually developing a basin-wide augmentation strategy.
“We are going to continue to evaluate alternatives and try to get some additional expertise in the realm of natural infrastructure or aquifer recharge,” Kessler said. “We are going to do our best to make sure that this effort aligns with the Wild & Scenic values that the community supports.”
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) The Hite Marina boat ramp sits idle hundreds of yards from the river’s edge where the Colorado River flows into Lake Powell on Thursday, Feb. 4, 2021. Utah plans to fill the Lake Powell pipeline with water promised to the Ute Indian Tribe. The Utes say it continues decades of racially based maneuvers.
By Emma Penrod
The following story was supported by funding from The Water Desk and was reported by The Utah Investigative Journalism Project in partnership with The Salt Lake Tribune.
Utah politicians and water officials have for years insisted that there is ample water in the Colorado River to fill its planned 140-mile Lake Powell pipeline to St. George in the southwestern corner of the state.
Utah’s consistent argument that it has nearly 400,000 acre-feet (roughly 130 billion gallons) of undeveloped water in the river is disputed by hydrologists who say it’s using all its allotted share under the 1922 Colorado River Compact. Even so, legal experts and engineers point out that there could be room for additional development — if the state is willing to buy or take the water from someone else.
“If there is going to be a new pipeline,” Eric Kuhn, former general manager of the Colorado River District, said in an interview, “let’s not pretend that it’s going to be using new water. If they build a new pipeline, they’re going to get that from irrigation water.”
There’s one problem: The water the state plans to tap for the Lake Powell pipeline was previously promised to the Ute Indian Tribe, which is now suing to get back its water and asserting that the misappropriation is one of a decades-long string of racially motivated schemes to deprive it of its rights and property.
Pulling the plug on the Central Utah Project
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) The Colorado River flows into Lake Powell near Hite Marina on Thursday, Feb. 4, 2021. Utah plans to fill the Lake Powell pipeline with water promised to the Ute Indian Tribe. The Utes say it continues decades of racially based maneuvers.
The dispute dates to the 1950s and the origins of the Central Utah Project (CUP), a series of pipelines and reservoirs that channels Colorado River water over the Wasatch Mountains to Utah’s population centers in Salt Lake and Utah counties.
Utah water managers at the time leveraged Ute tribal water rights to cut a deal for construction of the CUP. In exchange for the destruction of lands and fisheries essential to the Ute way of life, state and federal governments agreed to extend the project to tribal lands.
But once the first phases of the project were complete, Utah and its federal partners abandoned plans to build dams and pipelines for the Utes, citing excessive costs and underwhelming benefits.
“It is unclear why the costs and benefits varied so significantly,” the tribe’s 2020 federal lawsuit said, referring to the completed CUP phases delivering water to the Wasatch Front compared to the originally proposed tribal phases. “However, it is clear that as an exclusively tribal project — that is, as a project for the delivery of the Tribe’s Reserved Water Rights — [the Bureau of Reclamation] found poor economics, but when non-Indians were included as part of the project, the economics drastically improved.”
These decisions significantly curtailed the tribe’s expected economic benefits from the project, guaranteeing it would not grow as quickly as other communities that received CUP water, the complaint said. It cited, for example, a 2018 attempt by the tribe to enter into a contract with an oil and gas development company, which ultimately fell through because the tribe lacked access to sufficient water to make the project happen.
Moreover, in what the tribe sees as an illegal betrayal and violation of its rights, the state has reassigned the promised water to a variety of other projects, including the Lake Powell pipeline.
Starting in 1996, the Utah Board of Water Resources divvied up the unused CUP water, awarding tens of thousands of acre-feet to the Uintah Water Conservancy District, the Duchesne County Water Conservancy District, and other public and private water developers. Two final divisions plan to split the remainder. Roughly 86,000 acre-feet will be assigned to the 140-mile Lake Powell pipeline — a $1 billion-plus project that still awaits federal approval — and the last 72,641 acre-feet of water has been allotted to a conservation and storage project called the Green River Block.
In a statement to The Utah Investigative Journalism Project, the tribe called the approval of the Green River Block a “sham contract” that lacks “any legal authority.”
According to the tribe’s 2020 federal lawsuit, which names the Green River Block specifically but does not include the as-yet unfinalized Lake Powell pipeline transfer, Utah appears to derive its claimed authority to execute these transfers from the Central Utah Project Completion Act of 1992.
The congressionally approved compact, which required ratification of the state and Ute Tribe, has never won approval of the Utes, rendering it null and void in their eyes. The state Legislature only recently endorsed it.
The act, while promising protection for the tribe’s water rights and future financial compensation for economic losses associated with the incomplete portion of the CUP, said the Bureau of Reclamation no longer would fund the construction of pipelines and dams needed to store and access the water — a provision unacceptable to the tribe.
State moves forward despite tribe’s objections
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Luke Duncan, chairman of Ute Tribal Business Committee.
In 1996, even as the Utes were still trying to negotiate a deal to help pay for the needed infrastructure, the bureau determined that the pledged water had not been put to beneficial use and deeded it to the Utah Board of Water Resources. This transfer took place, the tribe told The Utah Investigative Journalism Project, “without any prior notice to, or consultation with, the Tribe.”
Representatives from the Utah Division of Water Resources declined to answer questions about their stance on the Central Utah Project Completion Act and related water transfers, citing the tribe’s lawsuit against the state and a hearing scheduled for later this month.
When Utah lawmakers in 2018 finally decided to officially ratify and put into statute the congressional compact, state leaders were aware that the tribe objected to it but chose to move forward with SB98 regardless, records show. A month before the final legislative passage, the tribe sent a letter to then-Sen. Kevin Van Tassell, the bill’s sponsor, to express its view that the terms of the compact were “unacceptable to the Ute Indian Tribe in that it was substantially amended without any input from the Tribe.” The only saving grace of the congressional action that created it, the letter said, was that Congress “made the compact contingent upon ratification by the Ute Tribal members before it became a valid document.”
“We therefore request that your bill be withdrawn until such time as the Ute Tribe and the state of Utah have come to a compromise on the water compact that can be approved by both the state of Utah and the Ute Tribe and its members,” Ute Tribal Business Committee Chairman Luke Duncan wrote to Van Tassell.
Van Tassell responded in a letter dated Feb. 27, 2018, saying he had asked the tribe for proposed amendments to the compact that would address its concerns and expressed disappointment that it had not done so. He said he intended to move ahead with his bill.
“Please know I’m happy to continue to work with you and the rest of the Ute Tribal Business Committee throughout this year to improve the statute and address your concerns,” he wrote the same day the bill cleared its first Senate vote.
The bill passed the Legislature without a dissenting vote — and with no testimony from any member of the tribe.
‘Beneficial use’ water doctrine has religious underpinnings
(Leah Hogsten | The Salt Lake Tribune) Members of the Ute tribe dance during halftime of a University of Utah basketball game in 2014. Utah plans to fill the Lake Powell pipeline with water promised to the Ute Indian Tribe. The Utes say it continues decades of racially based maneuvers.
The notion that water should be assigned not according to wealth or power but according to a community’s ability to put water to socially beneficial use dates back to Brigham Young and his oversight of Mormon settlement in Utah in the 1800s.
This principle ostensibly prevented any one party from exercising monopoly control over natural resources. But Young’s assertions also provided a convenient way for white settlers to ignore Native American claims to land and water, according to W. Paul Reeve, the head of Mormon studies at the University of Utah.
“It’s not just a conflict over resources; it’s values,” Reeve said. “Young said he didn’t believe the land belonged to anyone, it belonged to the Lord, and therefore it was there for anyone to use. It was a theological way of sidestepping Native Americans’ claims to the land and Native American cosmologies in which their creation stories suggest that their gods gave them the land.”
White settlers went on to use this theology to settle the best-watered valleys and to assign themselves ever-larger portions of the state’s water and farmland, even though Utah’s native populations also practiced agriculture and irrigation long before white settlement. State leaders did not believe native communities were as efficient or productive in their use of natural resources, according to Reeve, because their systems were not based in the Americanized ideal of homestead-based agriculture that Thomas Jefferson envisioned as key to self-sufficiency and true individual freedom.
This practice of assigning natural resources to the user who achieved the greatest “benefit” gradually eroded native control of the state’s natural resources. In a matter of years, Native Americans went from controlling 100% of the lands now considered Utah, to controlling just 4%, said Reeve, author of the book “Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness.”
“The narrative Latter-day Saints would tell is we came West and we conquered an inhospitable environment. We took land that was inhospitable and made it blossom,” Reeve said. “So when you see all the green lawns in this semiarid environment, it’s 21st-century Latter-day Saint attitudes of continuing that conquest of a desert environment.”
The fact that southern Utah, the most inhospitable of all Utah environments, is now experiencing a housing boom that prompts the construction of a Lake Powell pipeline is a remarkable testament to that pioneer legacy, Reeve said. But framing that legacy as solely a conquest of a landscape “completely ignores the fact that the development and the settlement came at the expense of native peoples.”
“All those things factor into how this unfolds,” Reeve said. “It’s part of how we’re going to solidify the conquest of our ancestors, by building this pipeline.”
Utes seek a seat at the table
After the Ute Tribe watched the Utah Legislature act unilaterally to try to solidify and codify the never-ratified compact of 1992, it decided to pursue another avenue for defending its rights on the Colorado River. A few months after SB98 passed and was signed by then-Gov. Gary Herbert, Chairman Duncan sent a letter to the Upper Colorado River Basin Commission seeking appointment of a tribal representative to the body.
“We have studied the law of the Colorado River and its management, and we conclude that there will never be effective management of the river unless the Commission establishes a relationship with the Ute Tribe,” Duncan wrote in the July 24, 2018, missive. “This relationship must recognize that the Tribe has a sovereign, governmental interest in its apportionment of water in the Colorado River Basin with senior, reserved water rights that are held in trust by the United States for the Tribe, as the beneficial owner of these water rights.”
The letter requested a meeting at Ute Indian tribal headquarters in Fort Duchesne. Amy Haas, executive director of the commission, subsequently forwarded the letter to other members, saying she was suggesting some alternative locales. She signed off with a sarcastic quip: “Good thing we have nothing else going on!”
“The Upper Basin states — Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah — believe that any tribe within any of the states’ boundaries are already and best served by their state representative on the Colorado River,” Millis wrote to his colleagues. “For the Ute Tribe, that is Eric Millis, Utah’s Upper Colorado River Commissioner. This has been expressed to the Tribe.”
(Gene Shawcroft, who was appointed in January by Gov. Spencer Cox to replace Millis as Utah’s Upper Colorado River commissioner, did not respond to questions regarding his position on the tribe’s request.)
Not surprisingly, the tribe had a different view:
“State representatives are not in a position to represent tribal interests, which is largely why we continue to face issues related to Indian water rights recognition, development, and water management today. … Time and time again, we are made aware of situations and decisions where the Tribe is not involved in discussions which have direct implications for our most valuable tribal trust resource — water.”
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
A kayaker surfs the Hawaii Five-0 wave on the Roaring Fork River. The wave is an example of the type of naturally occurring river feature that conservation groups want included in the state statute that allows water rights for recreation. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Three conservation groups aiming to keep more water in rivers for recreation are working on a revision to a state law.
American Whitewater, Conservation Colorado and Western Resource Advocates are proposing an amendment to legislation that would allow natural river features such as waves and rapids to get a water right. Under the state’s current statute, in order to get what is known as a recreational in-channel diversion water right, it must be tied to a man-made structure in the river, such as a design feature that creates the waves in many kayak parks.
Pitkin County Healthy Rivers is supportive of amending the existing statute to include natural river features and said so in an April letter to legislators.
“I think it’s kind of ironic that you have to make a man-made engineered structure in a river to make it somehow be of value to have a water right,” said Healthy Rivers board member and boater Andre Wille. “It would be nice to not have to put a structure in the river.”
According to numbers provided by the Department of Water Resources, there are currently 21 recreational in-channel diversion, or RICD, water rights in the state, all of them tied to an artificial structure. In the Colorado River basin, that includes features in Vail, Silverthorne, Aspen and Avon. Glenwood Springs has an approved RICD for a series of waves. Durango, Steamboat Springs, Salida, Buena Vista and Golden also have whitewater features with RICDs.
This type of water right ties an amount of water necessary for a reasonable recreational experience to the man-made river features.
Hattie Johnson, southern Rockies stewardship director of American Whitewater, likens making the acquisition of water rights dependent on the creation of an artificial feature to protecting backcountry skiing by building a ski jump.
“Right now, we can only protect water in the river for recreation if we build a ski jump,” she said. “So, we are looking for a change that protects the resource to provide all the wide-ranging recreational activities that happen on the river.”
This wave, known as Hawaii Five-0, on the Slaughterhouse section of the Roaring Fork River is popular with kayakers. Conservation groups want to amend a state statute to allow naturally occurring river features to get a water right for recreation. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Hawaii Five-0 wave
Proponents aim to tie a water right to a specific naturally occurring river feature, instead of a stretch of river — for example, the wave known as Hawaii Five-0 in the lower reaches of the run that begins with Slaughterhouse Falls on the Roaring Fork, instead of the entire 4.5-mile section of rapids. Slaughterhouse is a whitewater reach that begins at Henry Stein Park in Aspen and ends at Wilton Jaffee Park downstream in Woody Creek. It is a popular after-work run with kayakers and commercial rafting companies. Its many fishing holes also attract anglers.
A water right at Hawaii Five-0 could help keep water in the river for most of this section, since it’s located about a half-mile upstream of the take-out at Jaffee Park.
Scotty Gibsone has been running this section of river for 26 years and is on it nearly every day in the summer. His rafting company, Kiwi Adventure Ko, takes paddlers down the Class IV rapids of Slaughterhouse and the Class III Toothache section on the Roaring Fork in Snowmass Canyon. He said the Slaughterhouse season is short; it’s not usually runnable in boats after July 4. He can sometimes eke out a few more weeks using tubes in low water, but he would like to see higher flows overall.
“More water is always going to help, especially for us in the tourism sector,” he said.
A kayaker runs the 6-foot drop of Slaughterhouse Falls on the Roaring Fork River. In recognition of the contribution river recreation makes to Colorado’s economy, conservation groups want to amend a state statute to allow naturally occurring river features to get a water right for recreation. Proponents have discussed the Hawaii Five-0 wave, a few miles downstream from here, as an ideal place for a recreational in-channel diversion, or RICD, water right. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Early opposition
Most RICD water rights are held by municipalities — cities, towns and counties — and many have encountered opposition in water court. When Pitkin County began the process of securing an RICD for the two waves in the Basalt park on the Roaring Fork, Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District and Twin Lakes Reservoir and Canal Company, two entities that take water from the basin’s headwaters over to the Front Range, opposed the water right.
There will probably be opposition from Front Range water providers to any amended state legislation. That is because an RICD could limit their ability to develop more water from the Western Slope in the future.
American Whitewater has met with representatives from Denver Water, Northern Water and Aurora Water to discuss the legislation.
“We did inform them that we believe there will be significant opposition to the proposal, but Aurora Water would need a draft and go through our process to determine our position,” Greg Baker, manager of public relations for the city of Aurora, said in an email. “There is great potential for unintended consequences from even a modest proposal.”
To appease its opposers, Pitkin County agreed to a “carve out” provision that allowed up to 3,000 acre-feet of new water rights to be developed upstream of the kayak park, without being subject to the county’s new water right. (An acre-foot equals about 326,000 gallons, or enough water to cover an acre 1 foot deep.)
A kayaker runs the 6-foot drop of Slaughterhouse Falls on the Roaring Fork River. Conservation groups want to amend a state statute to allow naturally occurring river features to get a water right for recreation. Proponents have discussed the Hawaii Five-0 wave, located a few miles downstream from here, as an ideal place for recreational in-channel diversion, or RICD, water right. CREDIT: BRENT GARDNER-SMITH/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Growing recreation sector
A growing recognition of the importance of the outdoor recreation economy to the Western Slope is driving proponents’ push for updating the RICD legislation. And as climate change continues to rob western Colorado of streamflows, there is an increasing sense of urgency to protect and maintain water for recreation into the future.
“What we are trying to do is say that recreation is part of this complex system and we need to take that type of use into consideration,” said Josh Kuhn, water advocate for Conservation Colorado. “When we think about the transitioning economy, especially on the Western Slope, we need to have the security that this economic driver is going to be there in the future.”
Proponents say an amended law would also open up the possibility of RICD water rights to river runners in less-wealthy areas. Rearranging a streambed to create an artificial wave can be problematic: It is expensive, it requires disturbing the river ecosystem with heavy equipment, and engineers don’t always get it right the first time. For example, Pitkin County has spent nearly $3.5 million on the Basalt waves. The county had to reengineer the structures twice after complaints from the public that the waves were dangerous and flipped boats.
Supporters plan to meet with stakeholders throughout the summer and fall to further refine their proposed modifications to the legislation. They hope lawmakers will introduce a bill during the 2022 legislative session.
Water rights for natural river features would represent a shift in a state where putting water to “beneficial use” has traditionally meant taking water out of the river for use in agriculture or cities. It could mean that the often-overlooked river-recreation economy gets a bigger seat at the water-policy table.
“Recreation is a huge part of Colorado’s economy, it’s a huge part of our future, and yet it’s barely recognized in Colorado water law — and to the extent it is, it’s limited to a real-small class of recreation that only some towns and places can afford,” said John Cyran, senior staff attorney with Western Resource Advocates. “I think it’s time for Colorado water law to catch up with what’s actually happening on the rivers.”
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
The Lefevre family prepares to put their rafts in at Pebble Beach for a float down the Yampa River to Loudy Simpson Park on Wednesday. From left, Marcie Lefevre, Nathan Lefevre, Travis Lefevre and Sue Eschen. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
CRAIG — With the impending closure of coal mines and power plants in northwest Colorado, Craig officials and river enthusiasts are hoping a long-overlooked natural resource just south of town can help create economic resilience.
The city has applied for a $1.8 million grant from the federal Economic Development Agency for the Yampa River Corridor Project, which will refurbish boat ramps, add parking areas and a whitewater park, in an effort to develop the Yampa River as a source of outdoor recreation and local pride. The project is part of a multi-pronged approach to help rural Moffat County transition from an extraction-based economy to one that includes outdoor and river recreation as one of its main pillars.
“(River use) has definitely grown in the last couple of years,” said Jennifer Holloway, executive director of the Craig Chamber of Commerce. “Awareness that the river could be part of our future has grown. It had just not been on our radar as a town. We had the coal mines, we had the power plants. People tubed the river and fished in it sometimes, but it was not looked at as an economic asset until the last few years.”
An August 2020 preliminary engineering report by Glenwood Springs-based consultant SGM laid out the project components. The first phase of the proposed project would include improvements to Loudy Simpson Park on the west end of town, including a boat ramp, parking, a picnic area and vault toilet. The park is often a take-out point for tubers and boaters who float from Pebble Beach, just a few miles upstream. The project would also create better waves, pool drops with a fish passage, two access points and a portage trail at what’s known as the Diversion Park, as well as improve the city’s diversion structure.
The total project cost is roughly $2.7 million. A second project phase, which is still conceptual, would include bank stabilization and a trail connecting the river to downtown Craig.
Project proponents see the river as one of the town’s most under-utilized amenities and say it can add to the quality of life in the town of about 9,000.
Josh Veenstra is the owner of Good Vibes River Gear in Craig. The company rents paddle boards, rafts and tubes, runs shuttles on the Little Yampa Canyon and sells hand-sewn, mesh bags and drying racks, which are popular among the boating community. This is the fourth season for his company and Veenstra said the momentum is unbelievable.
“What it’s going to do is give Craig a sense of identity,” he said.
This boat ramp at Loudy Simpson Park will be replaced by a new one about a quarter-mile downstream as part of the Yampa River Corridor Project. The park is a popular place to take out after a day float from Pebble Beach. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Transitioning from coal
Two of the region’s biggest employers and energy providers, Tri State Generation and Transmission and Xcel Energy, announced in 2020 that they would be closing their coal-fired plants and mines. Tri-State, whose plant is supplied by two local mines, Trapper and Colowyo, plans to close all three of Craig’s units by 2030. Xcel, whose plant is located in nearby Hayden, plans to close both its units by the end of 2028.
According to Holloway, the closures represent about 800 lost jobs.
“All of our restaurants survive off the power plant workers, all of our retail, all the rest of our businesses,” she said. “Most of our small businesses downtown are run by women whose husbands work in the mine. So I think we are going to see a mass changeover of people leaving.”
Holloway is focusing on ag-tourism, the arts and outdoor recreation as industries that can help replace lost jobs. Although she recognizes that tourism jobs generally don’t pay the high wages of extraction industries, outdoor recreation has been identified as an industry with a large potential for growth and is identified as a priority in Moffat County’s Vision 2025 Transition Plan.
In addition, the pandemic has shown that many white-collar workers can work remotely from anywhere that has internet. It has also increased interest in outdoor recreation. Project supporters say improving the river corridor could help attract a new demographic interested in the outdoors but who don’t want to pay the premiums of a resort community, like nearby Steamboat Springs.
“Entrepreneurs in the rec industry would be a great fit,” Holloway said. “A warehouse here would be so much cheaper than Steamboat. If we could get some of those entrepreneurs, that would attract those that have a remote job or business elsewhere but that want the rural outdoor lifestyle.”
This small section of rapids known as the diversion wave will get upgraded into a whitewater park as part of the Yampa River Corridor Project. The city of Craig is betting on river recreation to help fill the economic void as local coal-fired power plants shut down in the coming years. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Recreation water right
Although city officials are moving forward with plans to build the whitewater park, they are — for now at least — forgoing a step that could help protect their newly built asset and keep water in the river.
Many communities in Colorado with whitewater parks, including Glenwood Springs, Basalt, Durango, Silverthorne and Vail, have a water right associated with the man-made waves, known as a recreational in-channel diversion or RICD. This type of water right ties an amount of water necessary for a reasonable recreational experience to the river features.
A RICD can help make sure there is enough water in the river for boating, but it also has the potential to limit future upstream water development. Under Colorado water law, known as the prior appropriation system, older water rights have first use of the river and therefore, a RICD does not affect existing senior water rights.
“It’s something that we have had some discussion about and we are looking closely at; it can be kind of political,” said Craig City Manager Peter Brixius. “I have not personally heard from folks, but I know people are opposed to it.”
Brixius said the conversation about a RICD is on hiatus at least until the fall.
Without a water right, which would secure the whitewater park’s place in line, future upstream water development could jeopardize having enough water for the park.
Peter Fleming, general counsel for the Colorado River Water Conservation District, said that while he can’t speak specifically for Craig, it makes sense for a municipality to protect its place in the prior appropriation system with a water right.
“If there may be some risk in the future that somebody is going to develop some water upstream that would either reduce or eliminate entirely the benefit of this expenditure, then yeah, you go to water court and try to protect this investment you have made,” he said. “Even if you don’t see anything on the horizon that is going to impact you, who knows what’s going to happen in 20 years.”
The city has applied for a $1.8 million grant from the federal Economic Development Agency for the Yampa River Corridor Project, which will refurbish boat ramps, add parking areas and a whitewater park, in an effort to develop the Yampa River as a source of outdoor recreation and local pride.
Looking to the future
The city expects to find out if it got the EDA grant in early fall. The project has also received funding from Moffat County, Friends of the Yampa, Trapper Mine, Northwest Colorado Parrotheads, the Yampa/White/Green Basin Roundtable, Resources Legacy Fund and the Yampa River Fund.
City officials are hoping the Yampa River Corridor Project will attract visitors, contribute to marketing efforts to rebrand northwest Colorado and build morale around the area’s economic future. For river gear shop owner Veenstra, that future can’t come fast enough. He hopes to hold swift water rescue courses and do environmental education using the new river corridor area.
“Craig is one of the coolest little towns,” he said. “The closure of the power plant, everybody says it’s going to be the downfall of Craig. It’s the best thing that could ever happen to us because it made people snap out of it and go, ‘oh, we need to do something different.’ That’s why the whitewater park is getting built. It was a blessing in disguise.”
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
The sun sets on the Grand Canyon, sending the inner gorge into shadow as the buttes catch the red light. Tourists on Mather Point watch the spectacle, content with absorbing nature’s most awesome show. Deep in the canyon, the Colorado River roars, fed by mountain snowmelt. In the side canyons the springs, seeps, and streams nurture birds and trees and wildlife in this arid landscape. A mile up, elk shedding their winter coats graze the dry Ponderosa pine forest for green shoots.
But after sunset the visitors disperse for the night, headed off for their campgrounds, dinner, and lodging. While some stay within the park, many head just outside of the South Rim gate to the town of Tusayan, Arizona, with its rows of restaurants, hotels, shops, theatres, and museum.
But Tusayan’s character could potentially boom, with thousands of new homes, employee housing, and millions of square feet of commercial space if Italian developer Stilo gets approvals. Rezoned in 2011 from open space to commercial, their two large inholdings (195 and 160 acres) within the Kaibab National Forest are accessed by two unimproved forest roads, and for Stilo to build they need an easement from the U.S. Forest Service to use these gravel roads for power, sewer lines, natural gas, and communication infrastructure. For some it’s an opportunity, and for others it could change the town forever.
Opponents say the project would threaten roads, wildlife, and even the night sky itself, not to mention the lifeblood of the South Rim: water. Proponents point to economic development to serve an ever-increasing number of visitors.
Development Seems Inevitable
There’s no doubt that visitation to the Grand Canyon is booming, with nearly 6 million visitors in 2019. Despite a partial park closure in 2020 due to Covid-19, nearly half that many came to see this wonder of the world. As things return to a near normal in 2021, numbers are once again expected to peak, stressing what are already limited services in Grand Canyon National Park and nearby Tusayan.
Tusayan was homesteaded in 1918 (the year before Grand Canyon became a national park) and there was very little development until the late 1940s; in fact, Tusayan was only incorporated as a town within the last decade. Today there are about 600 year-round residents, working primarily in the service industry at the lodges, hotels, restaurants, and shops.
In the summer, the airport’s a busy spot too. A half-dozen, orange jet helicopters buzz back and forth, and come and go, like a nest of hornets. A $37 million airport expansion will bring in even more visitors by plane as well. Today, summer traffic backs up for miles at the park gates, parking lots are full, shuttle buses are packed.
Locator map of the proposed Stilo development near Grand Canyon National Park/Grand Canyon Trust
Stilo’s initial request for a permit from the Kaibab National Forest for a road easement was refused in 2016, even before any environmental review, because “it fails to meet minimum requirements for not interfering with the use of adjacent federal lands.” The Forest Service reviewers were concerned of the impact not only to Grand Canyon National Park, but to tribal lands as well. The developer’s second proposal, filed last year, however, is not well-defined and will likely undergo a complete Environmental Impact Statement.
Clarinda Vail is the mayor of Tusayan, and a third-generation owner of the Red Feather Lodge, and she too has questions. She’s been involved with the town forever, and exudes energy as she gives us a tour of the area.
Tusayan Mayor Clarinda Vail is anxious about how the project could impact her town/Patrick Cone
“Depending upon the entity that you talk to in the proposal, it’s anywhere from about 3 million square foot of retail,” she said, “and anywhere from one to 5,000 hotel rooms. And I just say that because they’ve talked about phasing. And so, it really is unknown as to what could be built up to. Those are kind of the maximums that it could be built up to … There have not really been specifics proposed.”
But on everyone’s mind is water. Where will it come from? Tusayan itself has an extensive reclaimed water system, and in this desert every drop counts.
Tusayan Mayor Clarinda Vail is anxious about how the project could impact her town/Patrick Cone
Groundwater wells are thousands of feet down, and even the national park relies on an antiquated, failing pipeline that brings water from a thundering spring pouring out of the North Rim to the South Rim to slake the tourists, employees, and year-round residents. Replacing that line, according to Grand Canyon Superintendent Ed Keable, will cost “around $100 million.”
Stilo has offered some preliminary thoughts on their water sources, including trucking in water for the commercial spaces and drilling new wells for the residential areas. But no specific sources have been proposed.
“I think water is always the biggest topic of any discussion in our region,” said Mayor Vail. “How do we all know we’re going to provide our communities water for hundreds of years to come? Not for 10 years down the road, but for long term. And where we are here, we have to be really environmentally sensitive, with regards to our water, because of what it does to the seeps and springs, and for the Havasupai people, and for our neighbor (the park). It’s an incredibly important topic to be discussing. And we’re in a 1,200-year drought. You know, water has always been the gold of the West. And it’s only going to get more so as we go on here with more population.”
Roger Clark is the past director of the Grand Canyon program for the Grand Canyon Trust, and has similar questions: “Where are they going to get the water, which has direct implications to springs in the Grand Canyon? There is water down 3,000 feet, and hydrologists in the park have information that the water Tusayan is using is directly affecting the springs in the canyon. For the Havasupai Tribe, their sole source of water might be threatened by the existing wells. If they (Stilo) put up thousands of new residences, and those residences are dependent on groundwater, it really could be a death sentence for Grand Canyon springs.”
More “straws” into the groundwater aquifers of the South Rim could adversely impact seeps, springs, and hanging gardens in Grand Canyon National Park/Patrick Cone
The Havasupai Tribal Council went on record in 2019 opposing the project, writing Forest Service officials that it is a threat to “the Tribe’s primary and near-exclusive water source — the Redwall-Muav Aquifer — and the Tribe’s sacred places on the Coconino Plateau.”
“The Town of Tusayan currently draws on the Redwall-Muav Aquifer for its water supply, and its existing demands for water are already jeopardizing flows into Havasu Creek and, by extension, the Tribe’s livelihood,” the letter went on. “The Stilo proposal threatens to further strain the limited supply of groundwater from the Redwall-Muav Aquifer that the Tribe depends upon for its cultural identity and continued existence.”
Groundwater Nourishes Grand Canyon
While not visible from the rim, there are plenty of springs, streams, and creeks within the canyon, and wildlife and vegetation rely on these water sources for survival. Some of the springs gush like a firehose from the cliff, such as Vasey’s Paradise in Marble Canyon and Thunder River, while hanging gardens and small creeks abound. They all water the ferns, columbines, and monkeyflowers, as well as the deer, big horn sheep and birdlife.
David Kreamer has spent three decades studying these water sources in the canyon. He’s a professor of hydrology at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, and he’s concerned about development, and water, on the South Rim.
“When I started back 30 years ago there was only one deep well….and now there are several in Tusayan that draw water,” said Kreamer. “There are more and more wells going in. In my opinion, it’s not a question of if spring flow is going to be diminished. It’s a question of when. And so, I think that there’s evidence that there is a connection between where people would develop and impacts on the Grand Canyon springs.”
Grand Canyon Superintendent Ed Keable wants to know how the project would impact groundwater flowing into the national park/Patrick Cone
Superintendent Keable is watching the process carefully.
“That development project has been in some fashion in the works since 1992,” he said. “The Forest Service is doing what it needs to do. It’s reviewing that proposal under the (National Environmental Policy Act) process, and the Forest Service has reached out to the park. We are working with the Forest Service to provide what input we will provide. It’s still early in the process. Frankly, we need more information. And one of the pieces of information that I’m going to be interested in is what are the impacts on water to the area? So that’s going to be a key source of information for me as I work with my science staff to determine the impacts of that proposal on the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River Basin.
Andy Jacobs, of the Policy Development Group, is a spokesman for Stilo. He said the company has downsized the development in the latest proposal by 33 percent and pledged not to use groundwater for its commercial components. They’ve also donated 20 acres within the project to construct affordable long-term housing. Currently, people working in or near the park face few options for housing, and much of it is either employer-owned trailers or modular homes. But there’s no assurance about how affordable the new housing will actually be.
“The town council and planning and zoning board have both approved the broadly planned community district zoning several years back,” Jacobs said. “Stilo technically has the zoning approval, but the inholdings are within the forest. There are a lot of uncertainties for a path forward. It’s been a holding pattern lately, though they’ve owned these (parcels) for almost 30 years now. We’re interested in working with people.”
How Much Development Is Needed?
There’s no doubt that with six million visitors annually, and growing, that the area is ripe for some sort of new development. And, according to Stilo, people are looking for things to do on and next to the South Rim when they’re there.
The scale of the proposed development is still overwhelming to some, even with the proposed reduction in their new application. Alicyn Gitlin, the program manager for the Sierra Club, Grand Canyon Chapter, is frank in saying the project is just too big.
“It’s a massive development,” she said.
Problematic, Gitlin went on, is that while Stilo claims its latest proposal reflects a 33 percent reduction in development, “they never really told us what they were planning.”
Grand Canyon Superintendent Ed Keable wants to know how the project would impact groundwater flowing into the national park/Patrick Cone
“So, you know, a 33 percent reduction of ginormous is still ginormous. So we’re pretty much concerned with everything. We’re concerned with the light, the noise, the litter, the wildlife impacts, the traffic, bringing more multi-day visitors to Grand Canyon where they’re going to be putting stress on already aging infrastructure,” she said.
“We’re worried about the cultural impacts of more people being in the forest there. We’re worried about the loss of campsites that people are using (in the Kaibab Forest) when they’re visiting the park. You have to remember that this community relies on others for all of its resources. It doesn’t have a clinic, it doesn’t have a cemetery, it doesn’t have a trash dump. It doesn’t have its own law enforcement,” Gitlin pointed out. “We recognize that there is a need for housing that is not employer-owned in Tusayan, and that’s not what we’re trying to stop. The scale of this development is completely out of step with what is needed. It’s going to create a bigger workforce housing issue because they’re going to need to have workforce to run all these things. And where are those people gonna live?”
As the summer season begins, and the crowds descend on the town and park, the project has divided the town.
“Yes, absolutely. It’s been very controversial,” Mayor Vail said while looking over the TenX Ranch acreage. “I’m always proud of our community, like our school project, our sports complex. And so, I do love that we can disagree on certain subjects. We all come together on the things that are important and move together wonderfully. So yes, it has divided. But we still know when to come together on things. It’s just the right thing to do.”
Yet, Tusayan depends on tourism for its existence, and there are opportunities for economic development and there will be growth. The Grand Canyon is a special place, whether seen by a rowboat on the Colorado River, hiking down the trails, on aerial tours or just watching the light change on this magnificent landscape.
Mayor Vail understands that change is coming.
“Every community wants economic development,” she noted. “And you get to the point where you have to ask yourself, is this type of economic development worth the character and the soul of our community?”
This coverage was made possible through grants from the Society of Environmental Journalists – Fund For Environmental Journalism and the Water Desk at the University of Colorado.
The waning health of the Colorado River is impacting Grand Canyon National Park/Patrick Cone
By Kurt Repanshek
Standing in the morning sun on the right bank of the Colorado River at Lees Ferry, the gin-clear river jumps, leaps, and swirls through the rock gardens close to shore, belying its dwindling health. Most raft trips pushing off from the launch ramp just upstream pay me no concern, anxious to buck the rapids that make the Colorado River through Grand Canyon National Park renowned world-wide.
When the national park was established by Congress in 1919, there was no dam to slow the Colorado River as it poured out of the Rocky Mountains, sliced its way across the Colorado Plateau, and squeezed into a canyon with soaring ramparts of igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary layers. Its ebb and flow were constrained only by the amount of snowmelt that came out of the high country each spring, and records show that the early 1900s, 1940s, and 1980s were particularly wet. But the past 60 years have brought development and climate change that have greatly changed the once-wild Colorado.
Today the river’s ill health starts nearly 700 miles away, at its headwaters on the western fringe of Rocky Mountain National Park. Metamoprhicallty, it goes from a nagging cough there to walking pneumonia in languid Lake Powell behind the Glen Canyon Dam. Then, figuratively and quite literally, it’s all downhill.
“The Colorado River is the lifeblood of a lot of things,” Jan Balsom, the chief of external communications and community affairs tells me the next day as we sit in the sun behind park headquarters not far from the lip of Grand Canyon’s South Rim. “It’s an economic lifeblood, but it’s also the lifeblood of the canyon. Some of the tribes refer to it as the backbone of their lives.”
All those aspects tied to the Colorado River are in jeopardy due to climate change and invasive species, a one-two gut punch conspiring to strangle the river in its own ecology. Death won’t come from drowning, but rather from choking on sand and vegetation, both native and invasive, that are a tightening noose around the Colorado’s neck.
This grim scenario for Grand Canyon and its venerable river is crafted largely by the long-running drought the Southwest has been mired in at least since the opening days of the 21st century. Particularly dry stretches from 2002 to 2005 and again from 2012 to 2020 have taken a dire toll on the watershed. Declining snowfall in the river’s headwaters has greatly diminished runoff into the river and Lake Powell, which is predicted to stand at less than 30 percent of full pool by September.
While the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which operates the hydroelectric facility in the dam, has allowed roughly 8.23-million-acre feet of the Colorado River, on average, to flow through the dam and into the national park annually, that amount is expected to drop over the next two years by almost a million acre-feet due to reduced spring snowmelt. Look back over the past four decades and the river’s life has been staggered by drought.
“In ‘83, (the downstream release) peaked at around 93,000 cubic feet per second,” Balsom said. “Today’s peak flow is going to be around 22,000 to 25,000. Maybe we’ve had a couple high flows from Glen Canyon Dam that reached 45,000 (cfs). But it’s almost impossible now, with the lowered lake level, to even get to that level of flow.”
Those raging waters, along with giving the Colorado through the canyon its raucous personality, would carry sands and sediments along the way, materials necessary for building, and rebuilding, sandbars and beaches. But the recent years of diminished flows have greatly reduced the influx of sands and allowed vegetation to gain a foothold and then some. Most of the sediments that normally would be pushed downstream by the river are trapped behind the dam.
A Muted River
Today’s river is much different than the one Major John Wesley Powell and his crews battled in 1869 and 1871 on their historic river trips. Frederick S. Dellenbaugh, who was with Powell on the 1871 expedition, noted the raging river in a passage of his book, The Romance of the Colorado River.
“Down, and down, and ever down, roaring and leaping and throwing its spiteful spray against the hampering rocks the terrible river ran, carrying our boats along with it like little wisps of straw in the midst of a Niagara, the terraced walls around us sometimes fantastically eroded into galleries, balconies, alcoves, and Gothic caves that lent to them an additional weird and wonderful aspect, while the reverberating turmoil of the ever-descending flood was like some extravagant musical accompaniment to the extraordinary panorama flitting past of rock sculpture and bounding cliffs.” – Frederick S. Dellenbaugh, The Romance of the Colorado River, An Account of the Second Powell Expedition Down the Grand Canyon in 1871.
The day before I met with Balsom, I met Matt Kaplinski, a senior research associate at Northern Arizona University who has been running river trips through Grand Canyon since 1987. He was about to shove off from Lees Ferry on a two-week science trip through the Grand Canyon. Standing by the river as crews worked to ready the rafts, he explained that reduced flows through the dam had deprived the canyon of massive floods of churning water that would scour the river channel, pushing sandbars back and forth and downstream, and ripping out vegetation just starting to root in the sands.
“Why those sandbars are about the same size or bigger than they were (in the 1990s) is because once the flows were restricted, vegetation has migrated and established down to lower elevations on the sandbars,” said Kaplinski. “And those big sandbars are covered in pretty dense riparian vegetation right now, which essentially locks in that part of the sandbar from being eroded by flows from the dam.”
Keith Kohl, a U.S. Geological Survey geodesist – someone who measures and monitors the Earth’s size and shape to exacting calculations — who was leading the trip, was blunt in his summation.
“It was only 20 years ago where the lake was full, where now we’re at 37 percent, or something like that at Lake Powell. That’s tremendous that you could lose that much volume of water in just two decades,” said Kohl against the whine of pumps inflating rafts. “It’s really surprising that all of this infrastructure could get to a point where it’s worthless.”
The ongoing drought has left most reservoirs in the Colorado Basin states below normal/USDA
When the 710-foot Glen Canyon Dam choked the Colorado River at Page, Arizona, in 1963, it was called both an “engineering marvel” and the cause of “some of the most extensive and persistent scars of large-scale environmental modification.”
Designed to create a massive reservoir holding 26.2 million acre-feet of water that for decades would slake the thirst of Arizona, Nevada, and California, the dam muted the river’s seasonal raging.
Prior to the raising of the dam, the river’s flow through the sinuous, nearly 280-mile-long canyon would average just under 8,000 cubic feet per second most of the year, according to data compiled by Kaplinski. But it would jump to more than 50,000 cubic feet per second for half the time in June when spring runoff peaked, and at least once every eight years there would be a deluge flowing at 125,000 cubic feet per second, the scientist’s research determined.
Historically, the greatest flood to roar through Grand Canyon came in July 1884. It was the result of the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, which cooled the planet and led to a substantial snowpack in the Rocky Mountains. When runoff arrived in 1884, a flow estimated somewhere between 199,000 cfs and 228,000 cfs raced through the canyon.
That flood was documented by “an older timer living at Lees Ferry, who remembered that his cat had to climb a cottonwood tree, a certain branch in the cottonwood tree, and he was able to point that branch out to USGS water staff in 1921, I think,” said Dr. Larry Stevens, senior ecologist for Grand Canyon Wildlands Council and a conservation representative for the adaptive management of Glen Canyon Dam and the Colorado River through Grand Canyon. “They established that flow based on the elevation of that fork in the cottonwood tree at Lees Ferry.”
But even that flow was dwarfed by prehistoric floods approaching 500,000 cfs, said Stevens. “We did a paper in 1994, a paleo-flood analysis showing a flow of a half-million cfs there in the past, about 1,400 years ago,” he said. “And there were probably bigger flows than that as the glaciers melted off.”
But present-day, things changed drastically with the 1963 arrival of the dam, which corralled the huge outpourings that came with heavy snow years. While the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which operates the dam and its hydroelectric facility with eight electric generators, has in recent years tried to mimic those natural floods through “high flow experiments,” they haven’t come close to replicating the pre-Glen Canyon Dam floods down the Colorado River. Indeed, in a brochure the bureau touched on the impacts the dam brought to the river:
“As a result of the construction and operation of Glen Canyon Dam, the Colorado River ecosystem below the dam changed significantly from its pre-dam natural character. Before the dam was built, the Colorado River was a sediment-laden river that fluctuated in flow according to the seasons, rainfall, and inflows from side canyons. Now, the water released from the dam runs clear and cold without the springtime floods that once transported sediment, built beaches, and provided habitat for native species. Downstream from the dam, a new ecosystem emerged consisting of a mixture of native and non-native plant and animal communities.”
Another result of the dam is that any pounding thunderstorm that crosses the region and flushes sand, rock, and water down tributaries, such as the Paria River that flows into the Colorado at Lees Ferry, and into the canyon might lead to navigational hurdles for rafters by thinning the depth of the river with rocks and sediments pushed in from side canyons.
In short, the approach BuRec takes to operating the dam’s hydro station for power generation appears to conflict with the mandate of the Grand Canyon Protection Act of 1992 to operate the dam in such a way “to protect, mitigate adverse impacts, to and improve the values for which Grand Canyon National Park and Glen Canyon National Recreation Area were established.”
It’s debatable how closely BuRec has hewed to the act’s directive.
“You don’t get the large flows from the dam anymore. We can’t even get 40,000 cfs; we might be getting 33,000 cfs, which is really only a meter or two meters of height,” Kohl pointed out. “I really see a point in the future where some of these boats have a hard time getting through. … My point is that one of these side tributaries may spill in, but there’s not enough flow coming from the side tributary to flush the main stem, so you’re gonna keep getting large boulders into the river and there’s no ability to flush them out with a dam.
“When the lake was full, they used the bypass tubes in the dam, you could get it up to well, 90,000 (cfs),” he said. “Right now, we can’t get 33,000. And 33,000 isn’t going to move a meter-size boulder. So everything that’s coming in can’t be moved under the current powers.”
High flow releases through Glen Canyon Dam aren’t high enough to reflect historic flows through Grand Canyon/BuRec
But, Stevens told me, politics and the “law of the river,” which tries to balance the needs and demands of the Upper Basin and Lower Basin states that rely on the Colorado drainage, also factor into what BuRec can accomplish.
“I’ve been very impressed with their attention to that full phrase,” he said, referring to the act and BuRec’s efforts to live up to its directive. “The bureau is at least outwardly trying to coordinate discussion to facilitate, as much as possible, that mandate. But that mandate also includes the law of the river, which in many ways doesn’t much care about the environmental side of things.”
The multitude of interests linked to the water that flows down the Colorado has led to a 45,000 cfs cap on the high flows BuRec occasionally releases from Glen Canyon Dam, the ecologist said.
“The coupling of love of the river with Grand Canyon Protection Act means that the decision has been made not to throw too much water downstream that’s not being used to produce hydroelectric energy,” Stevens said.
Unfortunately, as Kaplinski noted, these lesser flows aren’t tearing out vegetation from the river’s sandbars and beaches. And while some of that vegetation is native, some isn’t. That growth also is affecting the look of the river corridor through Grand Canyon.
“The vegetation has been a pretty big change,” the Northern Arizona University scientist said. “People are very surprised when we report our results that the sandbars are as big as they were in 1990 or bigger, because the perception is that there’s not big open sandbars down here anymore as there were pre-dam. And that’s because they’re covered in vegetation, and it doesn’t look like a sandbar.”
Invasive tamarisk, a native to Eurasia and Africa that can push out native species and even alter wildlife habitat, according to the USGS, can be found in the canyon as well as native willows and Arrowweed. Mesquites also are descending lower into the canyon, in part because the disappearance of the massive seasonal floods allows them to take root, said Kaplinski.
Crews are brought down to the floor of Grand Canyon National Park to remove invasive vegetation by hand/NPS file
The overall impact of this vegetation is that it basically “armors” the sandbars, he explained, and that is narrowing, or choking, the Colorado’s channel in some places. It’s not unique with the Colorado through the Grand Canyon, said Kaplinski. “The Green River, Upper Colorado, Rio Grande, you’ll see that in a lot of places,” he said.
Under normal scenarios and high runoff, the rivers would rip out much of the vegetation and prevent vegetation-heavy sandbars from slowly constricting the channels. In Grand Canyon, that vegetative encroachment is being battled by park crews through the use of “tamarisk beetles” that weaken the trees by eating its leaves and physically removing invasive species.
“The tamarisk beetle has pretty well taken care of many of those, which leaves us with stands of dead tamarisk, which then also have to be addressed,” said Balsom. “And then Arrowweed, which is a native, but it is taking over huge swaths of beaches. Pretty much our crews are going in and you have to repeatedly remove it. So, we’re working with our own vegetation crews, we’ve worked with some Native American youth crews and ancestral land corps crews, working with our tribal communities to target areas that they’re really concerned about, too.
“But we’ve got 277 miles worth of Colorado River in Grand Canyon, there’s a lot of beach. It’s hard to keep up with it,” she said. “So we’re targeting areas that have multiple resource values, recreational camping beaches being one, but also areas where we know that there are sensitive archaeological sites that require sand to be blown back up. And those of us who live in the West know that it’s windy a lot of the time, especially in the spring months, so that if you can actually open up those sandbars that wind will blow up and rebury those archaeological sites.”
A Dry Forecast
The Southwest’s ongoing drought doesn’t hold much promise for high flows through the canyon. Lake Powell is predicted to be less than a third full come this fall, a result of the fact that “(M)ountain snowpack, which is an essential source of water for Western rivers and reservoirs has declined by an average of 15-30 percent across the West since 1955,” according to Climate Central, a group of scientists and journalists that tracks the impacts of climate change.
Without an increase in snowpack and its seasonal runoff, or a massive release of water from upstream reservoirs Flaming Gorge and Fontenelle in Wyoming, Lake Powell will shrink to a “dead pool” elevation at which there’s not enough water to adequately power the hydroelectric facility, thus making the dam obsolete for generating power.
Seven states and Mexico comprise the Upper and Lower basins of the Colorado watershed/BuRec
“There’s still much discussion going on, and this is a very dire time for water in the Southwest,” said Stevens. “We’re down to less than two years of backup supply for 40 million people. The Colorado River provides that much support for that many people. And it’s not unexpected. The Bureau of Reclamation in 2012 published a report saying that there was almost a 20 percent chance of system failure at Hoover Dam (at Lake Mead National Recreation Area), not enough water to be able to deliver either water or power downstream.”
Looking upstream for a solution is not likely to be productive. While the Flaming Gorge and Fontenelle dams trap Green River water that could be passed on down to Lake Powell, the addition from a massive release would be trifling.
“Those are trivial reservoirs,” said Stevens. “There’s not enough water stored in those. Lake Powell stores, I think, 85 percent of the Upper Basin’s water.”
Back atop the South Rim, Grand Canyon Superintendent Ed Keable shared his thoughts about the river’s health as we sat in a small amphitheater used for ranger talks.
“Our chief concerns are managing the resource in a way that protects endangered fish,” said Keable. “We have two endangered fish in the Colorado River within the Grand Canyon, the humpback chub and the razor back sucker. Our scientists work with US Geological scientists and Fish and Wildlife Service scientists and others to understand the impacts of the flow of water in the Colorado River on those species.
“But we also have other interests,” he continued, pointing to recreation and tribal concerns. “Our tribal partners refer to the Colorado River as the lifeblood of the canyon. They have perspective, which I find really interesting and helpful as superintendent to, to think about, which is that the canyon and the river are living entities and that we have a responsibility to them to protect and preserve them as living entities. And so that’s a concept that I’m still learning about, but very cognizant of as superintendent, that they’re vital to the to the success of this park.”
How much water the various stakeholders, including tribes, have to work with remains to be seen. Currently, a 1922 compact guides how much Colorado River water goes to Upper Basin states (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming) and Lower Basin states (Arizona, California, and Nevada) plus Mexico. Tribal rights call for 20 percent of the river’s flow to be diverted to those tribes in the Upper and Lower basin states with “quantified water rights.” But population growth and the ongoing drought have started talks about reassessing water distributions in and between those basins.
“Right now, there’s still a guaranteed amount of water from the Upper Basin to the Lower Basin, which is this 8.23-million-acre feet a year,” explained Balsom. “The Bureau of Reclamation is starting to evaluate the amount of water that’s going to come from the whole series of dams from the headwaters all the way down.
“Glen Canyon marks the dividing point between the Upper Basin in the Lower Basin. There was a compact written in 1922 that divided all of this stuff, the waters between the Upper and Lower basins. Of course, they used the highest water years on record to estimate because they didn’t know anything else. And somehow they thought, ‘If we build it, it will come and we’ll always have water.’ And we know now that we won’t.”
During the first two decades of the 21st century, inflows into Lake Powell were below average for 15 years between 2000 and 2019. The outlook for a return to the early 1980s, when spring runoff filled the lake to the brim, is not promising. Through mid-June, 88 percent of the West was mired in drought, and extreme to exceptional drought conditions were noted in parts or most of Utah, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and California.
Talks underway in an effort to navigate the Upper and Lower basin states through the drought demonstrate the corner those who crafted the law of the river have painted themselves into.
“This has been expected through long-term tree ring analysis and looking at drought frequency in the Southwest,” Stevens said. “Now, faced with the reality of an actual crisis, this is where the rubber hits the road because decisions actually have to be made. The whole fallacy of appropriated water rights is coming to bear its full fruition of conflict, which is really the only product of appropriated water rights, conflict. It supports lawyers, but nobody else.”
At Grand Canyon National Park, Balsom said part of a possible solution is for society to know when to say no, and to stand by that.
“I think we have to take the long view on some of this stuff, and I think we have to be smart about it, too,” she told me. “And we’ve got to be smart with our infrastructure developments. We’ve got to be smart with minimizing our impacts to the land. We’ve got to be smart by not over-promising and under-producing.
“And we have to realize that you just can’t keep building, that at some point, you’ve got to say, you know, I think we’re good.”
This story on the health of the Colorado River and its impacts on Grand Canyon National Park has been supported by a grant from The Water Desk, an independent journalism initiative based at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.
A pregnant cow named Cherry Pie stands in the dry grass at Megan Brown’s Oroville ranch in late April. Brown sold off much of her herd last spring after the dry 2020 winter. Photo by Anne Wernikoff, CalMatters
When James Brumder and his wife Louise Gonzalez moved into their home tucked up against the mountains northeast of Los Angeles, he applied all his know-how to the task of undoing the thirsty garden they inherited.
Brumder, who worked for a commercial landscaping company, pulled up their weedy, unkempt lawn in Altadena and replaced it with native grasses, filled in garden beds with species that could make a living off the region’s fickle rainfall, installed drip irrigation, set up rain barrels and banked soil to collect any errant drops of water. Whenever the backyard duck pond – a blue plastic kiddie pool – was cleaned, the water was fed to drought-adapted fruit trees.
It was 2013, a year before a statewide drought emergency was declared, but even then the water crisis was apparent to Brumder and most everyone in California: A great dry cycle had come again. Four years later, it receded when a torrent of winter rains came. The drought, finally, was declared over.
Generals know that you always fight the last war. So California — already in the clutches of another drought emergency — is looking over its shoulder at what happened last time, anticipating the worst and evaluating the strategies that worked and those that failed.
So is California in a better position to weather this drought?Some things are worse, some better: Groundwater is still being pumped with no statewide limits, siphoning up drinking water that rural communities rely on. In northern counties, residents are reliving the last disaster as water restrictions kick in again, but in the south, enough water is stored to avoid them for now.
The good news is that in urban areas, most Californians haven’t lapsed back into their old water-wasting patterns. But, while some farmers have adopted water-saving technology, others are drilling deeper wells to suck out more water to plant new orchards.
The upshot is California isn’t ready — again.
“We are in worse shape than we were before the last drought, and we are going to be in even worse shape after this one,” said Jay Lund, co-director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at University of California at Davis.
Trucks are parked along the waters edge in the dry lakebed at Lake Folsom, a state reservoir. The water level is currently at about 48% of historical average. Photo by Anne Wernikoff, CalMatters
The most acute problem, experts say, is the lack of controls on groundwater pumping.
“Despite increasingly occurring droughts, we could be doing much better than we are doing,” added Peter Gleick, co-founder of the Pacific Institute, a global water think tank. “We manage finally to get some statewide rules about groundwater, but they are not going to be implemented for years.” As a result, he said, aquifers are still being over-pumped and land is sinking.
And an overarching question lingers: How will Californians cope as the world continues to warm and the dry spells become ever more common and more severe?
Then and now: How does it compare?
Three-fourths of California is already experiencing extreme drought, a designation that only hints at the trickle down of impacts on people, the environment and the economy. Nature’s orderly seasons are upended: As the winter so-called “wet season” ended, Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a drought emergency in 41 counties.
This year’s drought is steadily approaching the peak severity of the last one, climate experts say. It’s a dangerous benchmark: 2012 through 2015 was the state’s driest consecutive four-year stretch since record-keeping began in 1896.
Drought is characterized by deficit — of rainfall, snow, runoff into rivers, storage in reservoirs and more. And all of these factors are in dire shape this year. Some are even worse than they were during the last drought.
Much of the state has received less than half of average rain and snowfall since October, with some areas seeing as little as a quarter. For most of Northern California, the past two years have been the second driest on record.
The Sierra Nevada snowpack, which provides about a third of California’s water, dwindled to 5% of average this month, equaling April 2015’s record-low percentage. That signals trouble for California’s reservoirs — even before the long, dry summer begins.
2021 is shaping up to be a really dry year.
Last month was the fifth-driest April and 2020 was the third-driest year on record with a total precipitation of 10 inches.
“We’ve had dry springs before, but that is just astonishing,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles and The Nature Conservancy. “And we’re still a few months out from seeing the worst of things.”
Megan Brown, a sixth-generation cattle rancher in Oroville, worries that climate change might finally make her the last of her family to run cattle in California. Dry pastures can force ranchers to sell livestock or buy expensive feed.
Usually, she said, the hills on her ranch are as green as Ireland in the spring. But by the end of April, dry golden grass had already started to claim the slopes. The blackberry-lined creek on Brown’s ranch is so parched that her dogs kick up clouds of dust as they nose through the rocks.
“It’s turning,” she said, looking up at her browning hills dotted with so many fewer cows than usual. “I don’t like it. It’s scary.”
Prolonged dry periods, some more than a hundred years in the state, can be traced to the Middle Ages, via tree rings from stumps preserved in lakes. But while droughts are part of California’s natural cycles, climate change is exacerbating them, increasing drought frequency and making them more extreme, climate experts say.
In his 1952 novel, East of Eden, John Steinbeck depicted the yin and yang of California’s water cycle in the Salinas Valley where he grew up, how the bounty of the wet years drove out memories of the dry, until, predictably, the water wheel came back around. “And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.”
But droughts and water shortages are more of a persistent way of life now in California than a mere cycle. The rare has become the routine.
Pastures were turning yellow in April, long before summer, on Megan Brown’s ranch in Oroville. Brown wonders what climate change will mean for the future of ranching in California. Photo by Anne Wernikoff, CalMatters
Drought’s terrible price
The last drought posed a palpable, day-to-day crisis. The signs were clearly visible: withered crops and gardens, bathtub rings around shrinking reservoirs, dried-out salmon streams. People drove filthy cars and thought twice about flushing their toilets. Ski runs reverted to gravel and mountain resorts shut down months early.
All Californians were ordered to conserve, and state officials in 2015 mandated a 25% statewide cut in the water used by urban residents. Homeowners used smartphone apps to turn in neighbors for over-sprinkling their lawns, and cities hired water cops to enforce the rules. Hotels notified guests of reduced laundry service. In restaurants, glasses of water that used to automatically appear were served only after patrons requested them.
The astonishing aridity also killed more than 100 million trees and weakened millions more, setting off a catastrophic cascade: The carpet of dead trees added fuel to California’s wildfire epidemic. Fire season stretched year-round and into normally damp parts of the state.
A decal on a dusty truck near the Orange County Water District’s recharge facility in Anaheim on May 6, 2015 reminds local residents to conserve water. Photo by Chris Carlson, AP Photo
As rivers heated up, their flows dwindled and about 95% of endangered winter-run Chinook salmon were lost below Shasta Dam in two consecutive years. A record number of commercial and recreational fisheries were shut down, and countless ducks and other waterbirds died as wetlands vanished.
“California was unprepared for this environmental drought emergency and is now struggling to implement stopgap measures,” the Public Policy Institute of California concluded in 2015.
Today, despite the warnings, in many ways the state finds itself in the same situation: Forewarned but still not ready.
“The universal truism is that by the time you react to a drought it’s too late to react to a drought,” said Jeffrey Mount, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute. “The majority of things you have to do to mitigate impacts have to be done before the drought.”
Droughts are expensive for taxpayers. The legislature appropriated $3.3 billion toward drought response from 2013 to 2017, including $2.3 billion in voter-approved bonds. About $68 million was spent on emergency drinking water for communities where wells went dry, but the biggest chunk funded projects to begin augmenting supply, such as more water recycling and groundwater management.
Now, to address the current drought, the Newsom administration has proposed spending another $5.1 billion, for a start. But the “start” may be already too late.
“I can think of a lot of places to spend money, “ Mount said. “But it’s too late for this drought.”
Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot said California is better prepared than before the last drought, but climate change is quickly moving the finish line.
“We are in a race against time and the changing climate. And so all that we’ve done is important, but we need to do more,” Crowfoot said.
Felicia Marcus, the top water official who shepherded the state’s response to the record-breaking drought under former Gov. Jerry Brown, said California “made real progress in some areas during the last drought” but needs to conserve and recycle more water, capture more in aquifers and better protect ecosystems.
Learning to live with less
The experience of the last drought left behind lasting effects across California, in the way that trauma can afford painful lessons.
But it’s one thing to repeat the mantra that “water is precious” and quite another to learn to live with less of it. State officials are relieved that some behaviors mandated in the last drought have become habits with lasting benefits for conservation.
Between 2013 and 2016, Californians on average reduced their residential use by 30%. Since then, per capita water use has ticked up, but Californians used 16% less water in recent months than they did in 2013.
The ubiquity of drought has forced many Californians to change their fundamental relationship with water.
Their responses to the pleas to conserve have varied, reflecting the state’s diversity of climates, populations, property sizes and lifestyles. For instance, urban residents of the San Francisco Bay Area, the Central Coast and North Coast used the least amount of water in 2020 — an average of 71 to 73 gallons a day per person — compared to 86 in Southern California, 125 in the Sacramento Valley and 136 in the southern San Joaquin Valley. Every region’s use edged up slightly last year — perhaps due to COVID-19 sheltering at home — but every region is considerably lower than the early years of the last drought.
Some Southern Californians endorsed conservation with a vengeance, ripping out more than 160 million square feet of lawnsduring the last drought. Golf courses followed suit; they tore out turf on non-playing areas in favor of drought-tolerant plants, while watering greens and fairways with recycled water.
Still, households using 400 gallons per day aren’t uncommon in Southern California, said Los Angeles County Public Works Director Mark Pestrella. And, despite permanent conservation gains leftover from the last drought, some massive residential water users — called water buffalos — use 4,000 gallons a day.
The disconnect? “Water is cheap,” Pestrella said.
Despite permanent conservation gains leftover from the last drought, some massive residential water users — called water buffalos — use 4,000 gallons a day.
When conservation alone wasn’t enough, an executive order by then-Gov. Brown gave officials the authority to send help to well owners and struggling small water systems.
Some policies, however, have not yet been fully realized.
Lawmakers tasked state agencies with developing efficiency standards for residential, commercial, industrial and institutional water use, but these are still in the works. Also, statewide rules that banned wasteful practices like hosing off driveways expired in 2017. The water board’s 2018 effort to revive them was dropped after local agencies complained that mandates should be left up to them.
A major law enacted during the last drought is supposed to stop groundwater depletion over the next 20 years. But the law is still in its very early stages; the state has not limited groundwater pumping anywhere yet.
“We do an absolutely terrible job at some things, and groundwater is one,” said UC Davis’s Lund. “It takes 30 years to implement (the new groundwater act) from zero to something sustainable. It’s going to take a long time and it’s going to be ragged around the edges.”
Lawmakers were warned by state analysts last week to prepare for wells to go dry again, largely in Central Valley rural towns, and line up emergency supplies of drinking water.
“I suspect we’re going to see similar issues with wells running dry and damage to infrastructure that we saw during the last drought,” said Heather Cooley, director of research at the Oakland-based Pacific Institute. “We’re going to see a lot of that this year and in the coming years.”
The mighty agriculture industry, which uses the bulk of California’s water, plowed up some crops such as rice and alfalfa to save water. A state program awarded growers more than $80 million in grants to install low-pressure irrigation systems and make other conservation measures.
But growers also continued to plant new fruit and nut crops, despite the recurring water shortages. Some farmers offset their financial losses by fallowing fields and selling their water to other growers.
Some orchard growers intensified groundwater pumping by digging deeper wells and using “new water” to plant more trees. The number of acres of almond trees — a water-intensive, high-value crop — doubled in the last decade, although the industry has significantly improved its water efficiency in recent years. “High returns on orchard crops have made it profitable for farmers to invest in deeper wells, aggravating groundwater depletion,” according to a Public Policy Institute of California analysis.
Ranchers face difficult decisions
Katie Roberti of the California Cattlemen’s Association told CalMatters that ranchers are facing the most severe conditions in decades. “Without precipitation many California cattle producers are going to be forced to make the difficult decision to reduce the size of their herds, some more drastically than others,” she said.
Megan Brown, the Oroville rancher, already sold a third of her cattle — including all of her replacement breeders that replenish her herd — after the dry 2020 winter, when the grasslands they forage on dried up.
“I always felt like I might be the last one in the family to run cattle. I’ve just had a bad feeling. And this (drought) kind of makes it real, like my bad feeling was justified,” said rancher Megan Brown Photo by Anne Wernikoff, CalMatters
“We were ahead of the game because we saw the writing on the wall,” she said. “If you don’t have the grass, you’re not going to make the money.”
She sold “anything that looked at me funny, or had an attitude, or I thought would fail or wouldn’t make me money,” she said. “It was hard, some of these cows I’ve had for ten years.”
The US Department of Agriculture declared a drought disaster that allows growers and ranchers to seek low-interest loans.
But Brown refuses to accept a loan. “Our family history has a saying that if you can’t buy it in cash, you can’t really afford it.”
Brown has seen back-to-back calamities hit her land: drought, torrential rains and then fires that destroyed wooden flumes that ferry water from the west branch of the Feather River to Oroville and landowners like her along the way.
“It’s all these things, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam — every year. It’s not supposed to be like that. We’re supposed to have these once in a generation,” Brown said. “It’s more. It’s worse.”
She’s already weighing how to adapt her ranch to a changing California, such as raising heritage hogs and turkeys instead of cattle, and wondering whether there’s a future in emus.
“It hurts, man, it hurts your soul,” Brown said. “I always felt like I might be the last one in the family to run cattle. I’ve just had a bad feeling. And this kind of makes it real, like my bad feeling was justified.”
North and south: One dries up while one stored for a rainy day
When you take into account the path that water moves from source to tap, it’s a daily miracle that any of it arrives at its destination. Every day 20% of the electricity used in California and 30% of the natural gas is used to pump water.
All that energy is necessitated by geography: Much of the state’s water is in the north and much of its population is in the south. This shift requires the State Water Project’s massive pumping plants to push water uphill 2,000 feet from the floor of the San Joaquin Valley and over the Tehachapi Mountains, where it flows down to the great southern basin and its 24 million people.
This year, the state expects to deliver only 5% of water requested from the State Water Project. And there’s an indefinite hold on federal allocations for some agricultural users both north and south of the Delta.
Nevertheless, the Metropolitan Water District, which supplies imported water for 19 million people in six Southern California counties, says it has managed to sock away record levels of water despite back-to-back dry years.
“We’ve gone into this year with the highest storage levels in our history, actually,” said Deven Upadhyay, assistant general manager and chief operating officer for the Metropolitan Water District. “Storage-wise, we go into this year — the second year of a drought, and now a really critical year — pretty well positioned.”
About 3.2 million acre-feet of water are tucked away in storage, with another 750,000 reserved in case of a disaster like an earthquake. That’s enough to meet the demands of 12 million households in the Los Angeles area.
As a result, Southern California agencies are unlikely to mandate rationing this year, although Upadhyay encourages residents to be careful with their water use.
A creek that once ran through Megan Brown’s property is already dry before the summer comes on April 22, 2021. Photo by Anne Wernikoff, CalMatters
But in the north, the situation is more dire. Some local agencies and counties are already limiting water use long before the drier summer months arrive.
The town of Mendocino, which depends heavily on rain-fed aquifers, declared a stage 4 water shortage emergency requiring residents to use 40% less water than allotted. Many residents are already there, said community service district superintendent Ryan Rhoades.
In Redwood Valley, which has roughly 1,100 municipal and 200 agricultural customers just north of Ukiah, the water district has already turned off the tap to agricultural customers.
Bree Klotter, a wine grape grower and member of the district’s board, said it’s one more challenge for residents who are just emerging from devastating wildfires on the heels of the last drought.
The district earlier this month set a 55-gallon-per-person-per-day limit on residential water use, and expected pushback. But it never came.
“We had set a meeting for two hours and literally nobody showed up,” Klotter said. “I don’t know whether it’s because they have adapted their behaviors to accommodate the drought, or whether they’re just like, this is just something else — one more thing.”
Boo the ranch dog sips from a livestock tank at Brown’s ranch. When fires burned the wooden flumes that ferried water to her land, her family sunk thousands of dollars in installing solar-powered wells. Photo by Anne Wernikoff, CalMatters
Her well is ‘more valuable than gold’
Novelist Joan Didion wrote that growing up in Sacramento, she knew it was summer when “coughing in the pipes meant the well was dry.”
Some well owners are already struggling with coughing pipes this year.
Jasna Hendershott, 66, has lived in the same house in the mountain town of Oakhurst outside of Yosemite National Park for nearly three decades. She has always been careful how she uses her well water.
During hot summers, Hendershott uses paper plates to avoid washing dishes. She takes short showers, only washes full loads of laundry and she doesn’t have sprinklers for her yard.
“It’s more valuable than gold, and you really need to worry about it,” Hendershott said. “If you don’t save water, then you’re putting everybody into danger.”
Even so, during the last drought, her well occasionally ran dry during summer months. And about a year-and-a-half ago, it dried up completely. While she waits to find out whether she needs to drill a deeper well, Hendershott has been relying on water deliveries to fill her well’s storage tank — first from Madera County and now from the non-profit Self-Help Enterprises.
She isn’t the only one; the non-profit coordinates water deliveries for more than 320 other households.
Monthly water deliveries can run the nonprofit $1,500 a month for a household, on top of about $5,000 to buy and install a storage tank — totaling close to $23,000 for the first year. The money comes from state grants.
Of all the lessons the state should learn, this might be the most valuable: “There’s never enough water in California,” the Pacific Institute’s Gleick said. “We have to assume that we are always water-short and we have to act like it.”
Firefighters clear debris around a water diversion structure in the White River National Forest as part of an effort to protect it from the Grizzly Creek Fire in 2020. Courtesy, City of Glenwood Springs
Liz Roberts is digging into snow-soaked dirt just above the banks of Grizzly Creek in western Colorado. With bare fingers she sifts through the dark soil, looking for life amid the ruins of last summer’s devastating Grizzly Creek fire.
When she finds tiny dormant roots, she smiles and exposes more soil to show visitors that this ground, just two or three inches down, is filled with plant matter that will grow and bloom in the summer when the snow melts.
But farther along this same trail, in the White River National Forest just east of Glenwood Springs, there is thick ash beneath the snow, and few dormant roots. This means the soil was so injured by the fire, which burned for more than four months, that it has become disconnected from the mountainside, and the ash lying unrooted above it will be carried into the creek this spring as the water melts.
In unburned forests, the spring snowmelt is a glorious, annual event.
But not this year.
Roberts and other forest experts know that the spring runoff will carry an array of frightening heavy metals and ash-laden sediment generated in the burned soils, posing danger to the people of Glenwood Springs, who rely on Grizzly Creek and its neighbor just to the west, No Name Creek, for drinking water.
Unseen toxins
Raging wildfires, like the massive burn that almost consumed Glenwood Springs last year, are easy to see. But what is rarely seen is the devastation to the natural mountain collection systems, where water starts as snow before melting in the spring and flowing down into creeks and eventually into water systems for towns and agricultural lands.
As soils burn, naturally occurring substances that would normally be locked in place are released.
“Sometimes we see lead, mercury, cadmium, possibly arsenic,” said Justin Anderson, Roberts’ colleague and a U.S. Forest Service hydrologist. “They can be dangerous, especially in high concentrations.”
Like other Western states, Colorado is in red alert mode this year, in part because these new megafires, triggered by drought and climate change, ravaged not just Glenwood Springs’ water system, but other major systems as well. Northern Water, for example, manages the Colorado Big-Thompson Project, which serves more than 1 million people and hundreds of farms on the northern Front Range and Eastern Plains. Burning at the same time as the Grizzly Creek fire, the Cameron Peak and East Troublesome fires rampaged through the project’s mountain collection system, affecting water supplies for Fort Collins, Greeley, Boulder, Broomfield and Loveland, among others.
Data Source: Rocky Mountain Area Coordination Center, Graphic by Chas Chamberlin
Even as communities across the state keep their eyes on a 2021 fire season expected to be as bad as that of 2020, when the state saw the largest fires in its history explode, they are racing to create high-tech water treatment programs capable of filtering out the toxins now present in their once-pristine water, and replacing the pipes, intake flumes and grates damaged beyond repair last year.
Esther Vincent, Northern Water’s director of environmental services, expects the agency to spend more than $100 million over the next three to five years, restoring hundreds of thousands of acres of forest in Rocky Mountain National Park, Grand County and along the Front Range in Boulder and Larimer counties. That is nearly triple the agency’s $40 million reserve fund.
Ravaged pipes, reservoirs
“Over half of our major watersheds were affected,” Vincent said. “In some of them 90 percent is burned. Because there is no option to bypass the runoff that is going to come into our system, it will enter our reservoirs and affect all of our infrastructure on the West Slope.”
Restoring forests is an undertaking that requires decades of work and whole new industries to execute effectively.
Mike Lester is Colorado State Forester. Thanks to Colorado’s rapid recovery from the Covid-19 budget crisis and federal relief funds expected later this year, his agency has more money than it’s ever had to help restore forests.
”We’re going to be pretty well supported this year,” Lester said. The state added $6 million this past year for restoration work and it is expecting another $8 million July 1, when the new fiscal year begins.
Colorado has some 24 million acres of forest, most of which is owned by the federal government, and to a lesser extent, private landowners. Roughly 10 percent of those acres are in need of immediate attention to protect towns and homes in the wildland urban interface, Lester said. Colorado’s wildland urban interface, also known as the WUI, has become increasingly populated, creating greater risk to lives and infrastructure and complicating forest management.
Loggers wanted
Repairing the forests, thinning trees so the fires don’t burn with such intensity, and stabilizing hundreds of thousands of scarred mountain slopes requires skilled personnel and methods for utilizing the downed timber.
“We’re way short of resources,” Lester said. “We don’t have a huge amount of logging and professional forestry in Colorado. There is only so much money you can spend well before you run into capacity issues.”
In the short-term communities are focused on doing what they can now to keep their water systems safe.
Matt Langhorst is Glenwood Springs’ director of public works. When the Grizzly Creek fire ignited last August, he could tell almost immediately that the flames were going to engulf the water system’s intake structures in the White River National Forest high above the town at the top of Grizzly and No Name creeks.
“The second I saw the smoke coming over the hill, I knew it was right around our two watersheds. I picked up the phone and called the fire department and said, ’We’re going to have a problem.’”
A massive loss
Nine months later, Langhorst and his crews have reworked the high mountain intake structures and they’ve finished a complete rebuild of the town’s small water treatment plant so that it can remove the pollutants expected to contaminate its once-clear waters, and filter out massive sediment loads that are already beginning to come down into the creeks as they enter the Colorado River just east of town along I-70.
“We are expecting it to change the water quality for three to seven years, but it could be longer than that,” Langhorst said. “It is a massive loss.”
And costly. Glenwood Springs Mayor Jonathan Godes said the work needed to repair and rebuild its water system, and create a safe evacuation route if Glenwood Canyon is shut down again as it was last summer, will likely cost three times its annual operating budget of $19 million.
“It’s something we can’t afford,” Godes said. “But we can’t afford not to do it.”
In response, state agencies are rethinking how they provide emergency funds as natural disasters such as these megafires happen more frequently.
Help, please
The Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB), last fall, was able to offer Glenwood Springs $8 million in a matter of days so that Langhorst and his crews could get into the high country to do critical construction work before winter snows arrived.
Kirk Russell oversees the CWCB’s loan funds. He said the agency was able to move quickly because it had seen the damage done and the loan delays that occurred after the state’s catastrophic floods of 2013. Back then, federal emergency funds took months to reach devastated Front Range communities and farm irrigation systems that were blown out by powerful flood waters.
“Fast forward to the wildfires that we saw last year and we foresaw there was going to be a need to respond quickly,” Russell said.
Now the agency has new emergency rules that provide for quick approvals on three-year, no-interest loans when water systems are harmed by wildfires.
“Do we need more money and more flexibility? Absolutely,” Russell said.
Crossing boundaries
The state also needs a more cohesive response to managing and restoring forests and the water systems embedded in them. Key to that effort is a two-year-old initiative called the Colorado Forest and Water Alliance, an advocacy group that includes federal and state forest officials, water utilities, logging industries and environmental groups.
Ellen Roberts, a former state lawmaker from Durango, has helped spearhead the fledgling effort and is working on other local initiatives designed to work effectively across city and county boundaries, as well as private, public and federal lands.
Colorado’s lawmakers and the federal government have pledged more than $20 million this year to quickly jumpstart the work.
“I am very encouraged by that,” Roberts said. “A good chunk of the money will need to go to immediate post-fire work, but we need to shift gears soon to put the money in at the front end [to thin the over-grown forests]. Hopefully we will be seeing both with the money that has been set aside. This is not a one-and-done investment. It has to be viewed as being chapter one of a very, very long book.”
Water comes down
Back out in the White River National Forest, the annual snowmelt above Grizzly and No Name creeks has begun.
Liz Roberts, an ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service, examining burned soils in the White River National Forest near Glenwood Springs. March 25, 2021. Credit: Dave Timko, This American Land
And Matt Langhorst is waiting, hoping that the residents of Glenwood Springs, who have enjoyed more than 115 years of clear mountain water, won’t notice any difference in how their water tastes.
He got hundreds of calls last August when the town was forced to shut off its fire-engulfed water system and use an emergency source temporarily.
Each call was roughly the same, he said.
“Everyone wanted to know, ‘What happened to my water?’”
Jerd Smith is editor of Fresh Water News. She can be reached at 720-398-6474, via email at jerd@wateredco.org or @jerd_smith.
Fresh Water News is an independent, nonpartisan news initiative of Water Education Colorado. WEco is funded by multiple donors. Our editorial policy and donor list can be viewed at wateredco.org.
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
Major funding shortfalls and bureaucratic barriers between state, federal and private entities are hobbling efforts to clean up watersheds and protect drinking water for more than 1 million Coloradans this summer.
Berthoud-based Northern Water is Colorado’s second-largest water provider, behind Denver Water. It operates the federally owned Colorado-Big Thompson Project, which serves a number of Front Range cities as well as hundreds of farms, and its collection systems were devastated last summer by the massive East Troublesome and Cameron Peak fires. It estimates that it will cost more than $100 million over the next three to five years to clean up some 400,000 acres of its mountain system, which spans the Continental Divide in Grand County and Rocky Mountain National Park.
Federal funds that have been used in the past have been depleted as states across the American West have turned to the U.S. Forest Service and the Natural Resources Conservation Service for help restoring burned forest lands.
Colorado lawmakers this week stepped in to help, approving SB21-258, which creates two new grant funds totaling nearly $30 million designed to help utilities and local governments do more to address forest restoration and wildfire risk mitigation.
And while agencies like Northern say the cash is critical, it’s only a down payment on what is going to be needed to restore mountain water collection systems embedded in national forests.
“We’re very worried,” said Esther Vincent, Northern Water’s manager of environmental services. “The runoff season is upon us and we’re starting to see the black water.” She’s referring to the water laden with sediment and toxins entering streams from burn areas.
Colorado’s 10 largest fires on record have occurred since 2000, with seven of them happening in the last 10 years. The red circles indicate the number of acres burned in proportion to one another. Locations are approximate. Credit: Chas Chamberlin
Vincent said working through Congress to get emergency funds and to address federal agency rules that limit how funds can be used on private and federal lands will take months and, more likely, years.
“There is a reasonable chance that the U.S. Forest Service may not see funding for this until 2022. But it’s really urgent that we do some of this work now,” Vincent said.
To address the crisis, Northern, as well as a number of cities and agencies across the state, have turned to Colorado’s congressional delegations for help. But so far, little progress has been made.
U.S. Senator Michael Bennet and his staff are working on finding small pools of cash across a variety of federal agencies in various states to help fund work this summer. And there is some hope, staffers said, that emergency cash might be set aside by Congress later this summer through a special disaster appropriation or through a national infrastructure bill.
But longer-term fixes are needed, said Troy Timmons, director of federal relations for the Western Governors Association.
“There is no one thing that is broken. There are statutory issues, like how the [NRCS] Emergency Watershed Protection Program operates, and the limitations on what the forest service can do. There are cultural issues with how all of these agencies interact with one another,” Timmons said. “There are a lot of threads here that need to be worked on.”
But for this summer, Northern and other water utilities across the state are focused on restoring their watersheds and finding the cash needed to fix them.
“It’s a vast landscape,” said Northern General Manager Brad Wind. “How do we fix a burn and at the same time keep looking forward and investing in our watersheds for the future?”
Jerd Smith is editor of Fresh Water News. She can be reached at 720-398-6474, via email at jerd@wateredco.org or @jerd_smith.
Fresh Water News is an independent, nonpartisan news initiative of Water Education Colorado. WEco is funded by multiple donors. Our editorial policy and donor list can be viewed at wateredco.org.
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
The eight major river basins, plus the Denver metro area, are shown on this map from the South Platte River Basin Roundtable. Each basin has its own roundtable, made up of volunteers, to address local water issues. CREDIT: SOUTH PLATTE BASIN ROUNDTABLE
The state water board is encouraging all nine basin roundtables to adopt a code of conduct requiring members to communicate in a professional, respectful, truthful and courteous way. But some Western Slope roundtables are pushing back.
Over roughly the last month, Colorado Water Conservation Board Director Rebecca Mitchell has been visiting the remote roundtable meetings on Zoom, answering questions about the code of conduct and urging the roundtables to adopt it. The goal of the document is to make sure everyone feels comfortable speaking up in meetings.
Mitchell said that with important and potentially contentious discussions on the horizon for water-short Colorado, it’s important to have a set of conduct standards in place to guide those discussions.
Gunnison River Basin Roundtable member Bill Nesbitt said at the May meeting it was a “third-grade sandbox question.” Mitchell agreed.
“I think it is similar to a third-grade sandbox, but not every sandbox is fair and some kids throw sand in other kids’ eyes,” Mitchell said. “We need to make the message clear about the expectations as we move forward to some of those really difficult discussions.”
Some members of the Southwest Basin Roundtable welcomed the code of conduct.
“I support adopting a policy,” said Mely Whiting, environmental representative and legal counsel for Trout Unlimited. “I think that things do get more and more controversial as we move forward. In my experience on this roundtable, in recent times things have gotten a little bit out of hand and quite a bit more aggressive. I’ve been, myself, uncomfortable quite often.”
The Colorado legislature created the nine basin roundtables — South Platte, Metro, Arkansas, Rio Grande, San Juan/Dolores (collectively known as Southwest), Gunnison, Colorado, Yampa/White/Green and North Platte — in 2005 to encourage locally driven collaborative solutions on water issues. They represent each of the state’s eight major river basins, plus the Denver metro area, and are made up of volunteers from different water sectors like agriculture, environment, recreation and municipal.
In addition to asking members to promote an inclusive environment that treats everyone fairly, the code also lays out best practices for conducting business. According to the code, the roundtables have the responsibility for noticing meetings, adhering to federal and state laws and public health orders and performing job tasks promptly and effectively.
Members at both the Southwest and Gunnison roundtables had issues with the best practices section. Montezuma County representative Ed Millard said the best practices section seemed more relevant to employees of the Division of Water Resources, not a volunteer board.
“I just think it’s going to have to be tuned to a volunteer organization before we adopt it,” he said at the April Southwest Roundtable meeting. “We certainly do need to resolve the tension and friction, but I don’t think adoption of (an) employee code is the way to do that.”
Southwest adopted the rest of the code of conduct, minus this best practices part at its May meeting. In the Gunnison basin, a motion to adopt the code of conduct failed; the discussion has been tabled until the July meeting.
Roundtable member Michael Murphy, who represents Hinsdale County, said the group already holds their meetings with respect and that the code was unnecessary.
“We are western Colorado. We don’t like being told what to do,” he said at the May Gunnison Basin Roundtable meeting.
The Colorado Water Conservation Board is hoping the nine basin roundtables adopt their code of conduct. From left, back row: Steve Anderson, Dan Gibbs, Kevin Rein, Jim Yahn, Heather Dutton, Russell George, Curran Trick, Greg Felt; front row: Jessica Brody, Gail Schwartz, Celene Hawkins, Jaclyn Brown, Becky Mitchell. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
While the code of conduct will be the policy of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, Mitchell admitted there was little the CWCB could do to enforce it on the roundtables, and the roundtables don’t have to adopt it.
“Being perfectly honest and transparent, enforcing a code of conduct on a volunteer roundtable is difficult,” she told the Southwest Roundtable. “(Enforcement) is as much a responsibility of me as a self-policing in the way we treat each other.”
Arkansas and Yampa/White/Green roundtables are aware of the code of conduct, but have not adopted it. The Rio Grande, South Platte and Metro basin roundtables have formally adopted it. The Colorado and North Platte basin roundtables have not discussed it yet.
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
