The white-water rafting industry depends on reliable flows from the Colorado River through Canyonlands National Park. (Patrick Cone, National Parks Traveler)
By Kurt Repanshek, National Parks Traveler
Water Desk Grantee Publication
This story was supported by the Water Desk’s grants program.
From the high country in Rocky Mountain National Park a muddy flush of water rushes downstream, through western Colorado. It turns left, going south through Utah, and then takes a hard right as it enters Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona.
Along the way, the Colorado River brings promise and excitement; the promise of water for irrigation and the thrill of rapids that tantalize white-water cowboys, as it plunges deep into the earth.
The river flows past Moab, Utah, and Page, Arizona, providing an economic pulse that lures recreationists to those two towns. It fills their tourist economy coffers, similar to other towns which are gateways to national parks. And as the river goes, so go the local economies.
“On average, communities that have national parks nearby tend to get a lot of benefits from those national parks from visitors coming through there. From staying in hotels, from hiring guide services, and sort of the traditional tourism model of economic development,” said Megan Lawson, an economist with Headwaters Economics, a Bozeman, Montana, firm that specializes in rural economics.
“But then what we’re also seeing is that people might visit national parks and their gateway communities as tourists fall in love with the area, and figure out a way to move there,” she adds. “So we’re also seeing that particularly since the last recession, places with those outdoor recreation economies, like national park gateway towns, have grown faster than places without those kinds of natural amenities.”
While new residents come to Moab, they don’t always generate the same economic benefits other gateway towns enjoy, according to research conducted by Headwaters. That very likely is due to the jobs those new residents are coming to fill.
“In Grand County, the folks moving in do not have higher income than people who are already living there. In most recreation counties we’re seeing faster growth in earnings per job. But we’re also not seeing that in Grand County,” Lawson said.
“It’s not entirely clear exactly why that is happening. I think part of it might be related to the types of folks who are moving in. We know that over that similar time period, the main growth in population for Grand County has been in retirees. But also kind of a younger working age folks, kind of in that 18 to mid-30s range.”
This series on the health of the Colorado River and its impacts on Canyonlands and Glen Canyonhas 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.
National Parks Traveler, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit media organization, depends on reader and listener support to produce stories such as this one and other coverage of national parks and protected areas. Please donate today to ensure this coverage continues.
As climate warming shrinks the Colorado River Basin’s snowpack, runoff into the river will decrease by 9.5% per 1 degree C (Patrick Cone, National Parks Traveler)
By Kurt Repanshek, National Parks Traveler
Water Desk Grantee Publication
This story was supported by the Water Desk’s grants program.
By mid-century, annual runoff into the Colorado River could be reduced by nearly a third as declining snowpack leads to greater evaporation of snowmelt, according to a new U.S. Geological Survey study.
That’s because as snowpack in the 100,000-square-mile river basin shrinks, it increasingly loses the ability to reflect solar radiation back into space, said Christopher Milly.
“We estimated that the warming effect alone (ignoring changes in precipitation) would, by the year 2050, reduce the flow by something in the range 14-31 percent, relative to historical 1913-2017 flows,” said Milly, who works in USGS’s Integrated Modeling and Prediction Division. “The loss would tend toward the higher end of this range for higher levels of greenhouse gases and toward the lower end for lower levels.”
The National Park Service is doing what it can but control is out of their hands. Rob Billerbeck is the NPS Colorado River Coordinator, and says their job is to “prevent unacceptable impacts to natural and cultural resources, and maintain natural processes. It’s really tough to answer questions of ecosystem health, and the condition of the park resources.”
But it now seems certain that there will be major deficits in Colorado River flows in the future, with unintended consequences to downstream users, hydroelectric power, recreation, fish, wildlife, water quality, flood control and all water-dependent ecological systems along the entire river. It all depends on whether the weather and the climate continue to change as predicted. And that’s a problem for everyone.
This series on the health of the Colorado River and its impacts on Canyonlands and Glen Canyonhas 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.
National Parks Traveler, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit media organization, depends on reader and listener support to produce stories such as this one and other coverage of national parks and protected areas. Please donate today to ensure this coverage continues.
Water is big business, bigger in the Southwest than perhaps anywhere else in the United States, and so where the Colorado River flows, economics and politics closely follow. More than 40 million people downstream depend upon its waters for agriculture, cities and businesses. At Glen Canyon National Recreation Area in southern Utah and northern Arizona, that reality rises in the 710-foot tall Glen Canyon Dam and shimmers in the reservoir that it has formed, Lake Powell.
But years of drought, upstream diversions and impoundments, and an overly optimistic forecast of Colorado River flows, have sapped the river once literally called Grand. Invasions of non-native species, and growing crowds of visitors, are contributing to the insults the river has struggled to bear, insults that only figure to worsen as climate change continues to squeeze the river from its headwaters in Rocky Mountain National Park down to the Gulf of California.
Lake Powell today holds barely half of what it was designed for, and downstream, Lake Mead is less than 40 percent full. Glen Canyon National Recreation Area’s future as storehouse for water, and a summer place to play, are threatened. It’s a conundrum for the two federal agencies — the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (BOR) and National Park Service (NPS) — that manage these two lakes with two decidedly differing missions.
“Recreation is an important benefit, but it’s a side-benefit,” says Marlon Duke, a spokesman for the Bureau of Reclamation that operates the dams on Lake Powell and Lake Mead. But the primary purpose of the dam, part of the Colorado River Storage Project (CRSP), is not recreation or even hydroelectric power. “The primary purpose of the dam,” he says, “is to store water and hold it.”
The National Park Service, however, is responsible for preserving and protecting the natural and cultural resources, unimpaired, for future generations, but has no authority on the management of the dam, or water levels in the lake and river. With few tools to battle climate change, the NPS is studying the changes that have already occurred, while planning for a different climate and future.
Video: long-time residents and scientists agree that the climate is changing at Lake Powell
Video by Patrick Cone, National Parks Traveler
The data is in, the science has been done, and the results of global climate change are very evident along the Colorado River, and specifically at Lake Powell. Dozens of studies by hundreds of scientists and many published reports attest to the fact that the climate is definitely becoming warmer, and drier, at Lake Powell. Less water and higher temperatures are threatening the animals, plants, and, in fact, the entire ecosystem. And, it’s going to get a lot worse, researchers say.
The numbers don’t lie. Climate scientist Brad Udall writes of the Colorado River, “Between 2000 and 2014 annual river flows averaged 19% below the 1906-1999 average. It’s the worst 15-year drought on record. One-third of flow loss is due to high temperatures.” By his calculations, river flows will be reduced by 20 percent mid-century, and 35 percent less at the end of the century. Meanwhile, temperatures have risen nearly one degree Celsius from 2000 through 2014. That’s a big change in a short amount of time.
But what can be done to mitigate this diminishing resource, which provides water to so many people? What sort of climatic conditions will we see in the future on the Colorado Plateau? How can we predict these changes and react to them? How will this warmer and drier climate affect the entire environment and ecosystem, the animals and plants that live there?
The Southwest has been locked in a long-term drought/NOAA via EcoWest
Glen Canyon Dam was put into service in 1964, creating Lake Powell and changing the river ecosystem forever, both above and below the dam. Lake Powell is the second-largest reservoir in the United States, next to Lake Mead downstream. The concrete, double-arch dam is sandwiched between the narrow canyon walls of Navajo sandstone, and the lake took 18 years to fill. It covers more than 1.25 million acres when at full pool. The Colorado River feeds the lake from its headwaters in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, and takes in what the Green (which flows out of the Wind River Range in Wyoming), San Juan, Dirty Devil, and Escalante rivers will give it.
Contributing to the stress on the Colorado River are 15 large dams on the river’s main stem; all are part of the massive CRSP, created in the 20th Century. The river water supports a $5 billion agricultural industry along its 1,450 miles, with 80 percent of the water dedicated to crops. Just 10 percent goes to downstream cities.
In 1922, 15 million acre-feet of Colorado River water was divided equally by the Colorado River Compact into a Lower Basin and Upper Basin, whose border is 15 miles downstream of the Glen Canyon Dam at Lees Ferry. But that was 1.2 million acre-feet over the apportionment.
When Colorado River flows were calculated during the 1950s, it was based on just 18 years of streamflow measurements. But now scientists realize how optimistic these numbers were. During planning for the Glen Canyon Dam, Raymond Hill, a hydrologic engineer for the BOR, said that there was 6 million acre-feet less water.
“The discharge of the Colorado River at Lees Ferry has averaged only 11.7 million acre-feet since 1930,” he said.
Randy Riter with the BOR concurred in 1965, when he said, “There is not enough water in the Colorado River to permit the Upper Basin to fully use its apportionment of 7.5 million acre-feet and still meet compact obligations to deliver water at Lees Ferry.”
So, there is less water to go around, and a changing climate means even drier conditions. That’s what managers are up against now.
“We operate Glen Canyon and Hoover Dam at Lake Mead, and operate those two reservoirs together,” says BuRec’s Duke. “We balance the contents of the reservoirs. We operate based upon the hydrology we see, and then we use those models to determine how to operate in a given year.”
But right now, that means trouble. “We’re 19 years into the one of the worst droughts in recorded history,” adds Duke. “We’ve gotten 19 years into this drought, but we can’t just continue the status quo. We have to take major steps to protect the water supply.”
There has not been a big shortage declaration either for the 40 million users downstream, but that could change. And that is why the Compact and is now being renegotiated.
Dr. Jack Schmidt is professor of Watershed Sciences at Utah State University, and heads the Center for Colorado River Studies. Politics, he says, are making negotiations over the Compact difficult.
“The political agreement is about how to share the pain of drought. The renegotiation of that pain is supposed to begin sometime in 2020, and has to be concluded by 2025. The game that is played is that we have a hierarchy of treaties, laws, compacts, and rules, collectively called the Law of the River,” he explains. “The treaty we work off of is the 1944 treaty. We have changed the treaty 300 plus times. It’s called the Interim Shortage Guidelines negotiated in 2007. Those pending negotiations will carry the fate of Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, and reservoir recreation is going to be the furthest thing from anyone’s mind… It’s pretty much an irrelevancy.”
There are plenty of climate models being developed to predict water supplies in the future. The Colorado River Simulation System (CRSS) looks at 12 reservoirs and 29 headwater tributaries, and is used by the BOR and other stakeholders. There’s the aforementioned 2007 Colorado River Interim Guidelines for Lower Basin Shortages and coordinated operations for Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the 2012 Colorado River Basin Water Supply and Demand Study and the 2015 Glen Canyon Dam Long-Term Experimental and Management Plan.
Models developed by James Prairie, a hydrologic engineer for the Bureau of Reclamation, look out in the near term, from 1-2 years, the mid-term, from 1-5 years, and long term, from 1 to 50 years in the future, utilizing historic data and paleo information going back thousands of years. “But,” he says, “none of us know what dataset is right for the future.”
Figuring out how to operate two large dams under these conditions, BuRec’s Duke says, is a monumental challenge, just as building the Glen Canyon Dam was.
“Modelers are looking at historic hydrology, looking at future forecasts, at likelihoods of how the climate is going to change. (This data) is plugged into the models and kicks out a likelihood of certain river flows. It’s a 24-month study, and that’s kind of short, but it’s really difficult to forecast accurately next week, let alone two years or five years down the road. It tells us what the model thinks is going to happen as far as inflows into the reservoirs, but we update that every month.”
Dr. Schmidt is not very optimistic.
Video: “there is a strong correlation between a warming climate and decreased runoff” – Dr. Jack Schmidt, Utah State University
Video by Patrick Cone, National Parks Traveler
“The thing that we know is that the climate is warming. There is a strong correlation between a warming climate and decreased runoff in the Colorado River,” he said. “What we know is that there will be an ever-decreasing amount of water flowing into Lake Powell from the Colorado River, the Green River and from the San Juan River. We also know it will be highly variable, there will be more drought years than big water years. Every once in a while, it’ll be a big winter. They will be fewer, but they will still come.
“The most important point is that the fate of the reservoir is contingent partly on climate change, and partly to society’s response to climate change,” he went on. “The thing we are trying to understand with Powell and climate change, if it is the case that there is not enough runoff to sustain both reservoirs, and it’s inevitable that Powell will get really warm, then are we are on a fool’s errand to be trying to manage Grand Canyon to be a cold place, when it fact it’s impossible to maintain forever.
“Perhaps we are better off to robustly anticipate the future but when Powell gets really low, it’ll get really different. So, we better develop a new ecosystem plan. But what happens to Lake Powell is not only about decreasing runoff, it’s about how society makes decisions about what to do with that water.”
Schmidt has proposed letting Lake Mead fill first, with Lake Powell as a backup pool.
“So, what do you do when you have less runoff in the system? You could preferentially store your water, though less water, in Lake Powell. Therefore, Lake Powell would be full,” he explained. “Or you could store it in Lake Mead and Lake Powell would be empty most of the time. Now we keep the contents of Powell and Mead approximately equal, and they both go up and down. You have the two of the largest reservoirs in the United States, and operate them as one. The political decision is that we keep them both half full.”
But what comes next, and what impact will it have on the river, the canyons, the environment and the species that live there?
Scott Vanderkooi is the chief of the Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center for the USGS in Flagstaff, Arizona, and is seeing rising water temperatures.
“Changes have been really rapid. We’ve had a long-term drought in the Southwest, since 2000. There’s a lot less water coming into the reservoirs, particularly Lake Powell, and that’s affected water quality released from the dam,” he said. “Previously when the reservoir was full the temperatures would peak at 10 to 11 degrees Celsius (around 50 degrees Fahrenheit). This year dam releases peaked at 16 degrees Celsius. Water temperatures control all biological processes in rivers. It’s the new abnormal, not just a 20-year drought. It has huge consequence on ecosystem and the creatures that depend upon them.”
Long-time Page, Arizona, resident Ada Hatch has certainly seen the change in climate during her 51 years teaching school there. “Of course, the climate is definitely getting warmer. When I first got here, we had snow in the winter. Now if we get snow it only lasts three or four hours and it’s gone. For sure it’s drier, and definitely the climate is warming up.”
And summer monsoons during the summer of 2019 were nearly nonexistent. “That moisture is very important to Arizona, New Mexico, the Grand Canyon and Utah,” observes John Weisheit, the Colorado River Keeper, one of 300 in the Living Rivers network globally. “It’s important to our highlands and high deserts. And that’s going away. They’re not as frequent, and when they do come it’s not as much volume.”
Video: “We’re using more than the river provides” – Taylor Hawes, The Nature Conservancy
Video by Patrick Cone, National Parks Traveler
Ken Hyde is the chief of Science and Resource Management at Glen Canyon National Recreation Area for the National Park Service, and says, “Our temperature patterns are beginning to accelerate; 2018 was the second driest ever. We’re going in completely uncharted territory, faster than scientists thought 20 years ago. We’re watching some of our plant communities fading into the sunset. Our climate (at Lake Powell) will be about like Lees Ferry, which is 1,200 feet lower, in about 30 years, and more like Las Vegas by the end of the century.”
Hyde, and Assistant Chief John Spence, are seeing impacts of the changing climate on many different species.
“This monsoon period there was no recharge of the waterpockets, so desert bighorns are coming down to lake level. But there’s no water up in the high country,” says Spence. “Our biggest concern is leopard frogs They require wetlands, and clean and clear water. We are the only place in southern Utah that they exist. They are rare, and probably declining. The numbers of canyon wrens have dropped off. We can tie some other species moving north due to climate change. We’ve had several species becoming more common in the last 20 years.”
Some species are being stressed by the drought and heat, and are already in trouble. Across the Colorado Plateau the Pinyon trees are dying off, possibly due to the drought. Without these trees, the biological soil crusts and grass cover beneath them are threatened. They hold moisture, and secure the soil and without them, we could be in trouble. “We need something to stabilize the soil or we’ll end up being a big sand dune,” says Hyde. “And, what do we do when we start seeing natives of the Sonoran and Mojave Desert? Do we consider creosote bush a weed?”
Lake Powell is already stressed and in crisis due to one invasive species: Quagga mussels. Since 2012 they have spread throughout the lake, clogged boat motors and impeded operations at Glen Canyon Dam, according to Clem Wasicek, a technician with the Utah Division of Wildlife. Decontamination stations last year cleaned and inspected about 120,000 water craft leaving the lake. “We are on the lookout for other invasive plants,” he says. “Eurasian watermilfoil and water hyacinth haven’t taken over our lake yet, and possibly New Zealand mud snails and crayfish, another invasive. It’s a very big mosh pit of things going on.”
Dr. Schmidt believes climate change will make way for other invasive species. “The most obvious invasives, that are a direct function of climate change and water supply management, are nonnative fish. There are two kinds: cold water, mainly trout, and warm water, mainly small mouth bass, gizzard chad (Dorosoma). As things get warmer nonnative reservoir fish might come up and swamp the system.”
The National Park Service is doing what it can but control is out of their hands. Rob Billerbeck is the NPS Colorado River Coordinator, and says their job is to “prevent unacceptable impacts to natural and cultural resources, and maintain natural processes. It’s really tough to answer questions of ecosystem health, and the condition of the park resources.”
But it now seems certain that there will be major deficits in Colorado River flows in the future, with unintended consequences to downstream users, hydroelectric power, recreation, fish, wildlife, water quality, flood control and all water-dependent ecological systems along the entire river. It all depends on whether the weather and the climate continue to change as predicted. And that’s a problem for everyone.
This series on the health of the Colorado River and its impacts on Canyonlands and Glen Canyonhas 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.
National Parks Traveler, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit media organization, depends on reader and listener support to produce stories such as this one and other coverage of national parks and protected areas. Please donate today to ensure this coverage continues.
You can’t say “At first glance” at Canyonlands National Park. It’s just too big and complex to really take it all in. On the macro scale, it covers nearly 350,000 acres. It’s carved by two major Western waterways: 47 miles of the Green River, and 50 miles of the mighty Colorado River. But it’s much more than just a river canyon. It’s a land of mesas and grasslands, slot canyons and water pockets, roaring rapids and clear streams. There are deer and bighorn sheep, native fish and frogs, cottonwoods and cacti, who all call this rugged landscape home.
Over millions of years the sediments were laid down, then revealed by erosion, in layers of colorful sandstone. The vanilla, caramel, chocolate, and strawberry cliffs look like a giant cake of stone layers, but one that was left it out in the rain. It might be 100 degrees on the Colorado River at 3,730 feet, but snowing high up on Cathedral Point at 7,120 feet.
It’s a huge playground too, attracting hikers, rafters, mountain bikers, and campers, nearly 750,000 visitors in 2018. Low water in Lake Powell downstream in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area has even revealed long drowned rapids. Canyonlands and nearby Arches national parks feed the gateway tourist town of Moab, Utah’s economy.
But the entire region is changing before our eyes, locked into an extended drought, and the climate forecast is grim: warmer and drier. With atmospheric carbon dioxide at its highest level (around 407 parts per million) for at least the past 800,000 years, ecosystems are threatened, rainfall is unpredictable and, a hot and dry desert is going to get even hotter.
What Will The Future Bring?
What can we expect to happen in the next 5, 10 or 50 years? Terry Fisk is the chief of resource stewardship and science for the National Park Service at Canyonlands, and he’s not exactly sure.
“The part where climate change plays in, we can’t really depend on the past as a guide to what to expect in the future,” he said as we sat in his Moab office. “The global situation in the Four Corners area, and particularly San Juan and Grand County (Utah), we are already above 2 degrees Celsius (warmer). And, the Four Corners area, on the U.S. Drought monitor is back in a drought. … We’re in an unexplored environment for CO2 in the atmosphere. We don’t have any experience in that.”
The Colorado River flows are also forecast to diminish, according to Fisk.
“We want to prevent long-term reduction in flow that has a negative effect on ecosystem functions,” he said. “I don’t know if we can say that it’s because of the flows or changes we have seen, since 1963 when Flaming Gorge dam gates closed, but that’s been the biggest impact on the river.”
“In 2012, the Bureau of Reclamation said that the Upper Colorado Basin had flows that declined by 300,000 acre-feet per year. The next couple of decades will be critical for us, but not in a satisfactory way, but more than likely we’ll see declining flows,” said Fisk.
One result of reduced river flows is the reduction in the amount of sediments transported by the rivers. This suspended sediment is extremely important to how the river functions.
But the National Park Service really has no authority on the how much water is in the rivers; that’s determined by nature and the Bureau of Reclamation and other water managers.
“There’s not much we can do. When I think of the river, we have local and regional climate impacts. We are not a headwater area,” said Fisk. “They can have a great snow year and we can be in drought down here. A big storm locally won’t have a big ecological impact, and sediment input.”
While the Bureau of Reclamation has modeled river flows for the last decade or two, Fisk said the trends are not good on any of the models.
“How have things changed along the river corridor over the past 70 years, in the context with the pre-dam situation? What we may expect going forward?” he said. “The pace of what’s changing, that’s amazing. There are no real solutions. We just have to make the best choices we can with the flows we get.”
And it seems that weather patterns too are being disrupted. Last year the summer monsoons, annual events that typically recharge aquifers and fill waterpockets and streams, were nearly nonexistent.
Video: Resource management in an era of climate change
River guide and former Park Service ranger Herm Hoops has seen impacts on wildlife: “Bighorn sheep, especially rams, have increased along the river corridors along with ewes and lambs. Normally one would expect the rams to be at higher elevations in a sort of ‘fraternity’ until the rut. I believe that warmer temperatures higher up, and lack of moisture have moved them down to the river for feed and water.”
Bird populations are being impacted as well by changing conditions. “Until 2013, black crown night herons, blue herons, egrets and bitterns were very common upriver from Sand Wash,” said Hoops. “By 2015 the blue heron sightings were greatly reduced, and at that time no black-crowned night herons, only one egret, and no bitterns were sighted. It appears that something is causing lesser use and nesting of these wading birds.Something going on with Canyonlands. If that’s climate, I don’t know. I don’t know what could be bigger.”
Fisk agrees that “(T)he summer monsoons are one indicator of change.”
Also alarming is that as the climate warms, snow levels in the high mountain headwaters are moving upwards. Above 10,000 feet. Below that level, precipitation is more in the form of rain, which is a big change.
Not only are the river flows decreasing, but the channels are narrowing, as well.
“In the last 20 years we have seen in Canyonlands, and other reaches on both the Green and Colorado, channel narrowing and simplification, because we don’t get the massive 50-60,000 cfs flows anymore that would tend to take out riparian vegetation and increase the width of the river,” noted Fisk. “As flows diminish, it provides a foothold for vegetation on both banks, especially tamarisk. My fear is that as flows diminish that we will worsen narrowing, and channel simplification because we won’t be getting the volumes of water to move a lot of sediment.”
Dr. Jack Schmidt is the director of the Center for Colorado River Studies at Utah State University, and has spent decades studying this same issue. He has seen the changes coming to the rivers.
“The Green and Colorado rivers are getting narrower, they are shrinking, they are becoming less complex physical habitat,” he said. “Since 1940, the Green River is about 12 percent narrower by new flood plain formation and the sandbars are becoming overgrown by vegetation. The hydrology is that we have a more cyclic pattern. Now we have a couple of wet years, longer periods of drought.
“During the dry years, riparian vegetation invades the sandbars, gets established, tap roots get in and lock themselves in. The bad news is that in this narrowing, the culprit is sandbar willow, which is a native,” said Schmidt. “It would be nice to blame it on an invasive, but it’s not that simple. It’s both native and nonnative vegetation.”
So, while rangers and scientists are studying the current conditions, the real question is what to expect the impacts will be on river flows, flora and fauna, and vegetation.
Scientists are now looking to the past to predict the future. When John Wesley Powell explored the Green and Colorado in 1869, the river flowed at around 45,000 cfs, according to his journals. John Weisheit is the Colorado River Keeper, part of the Living Rivers network, and said, “In Cataract Canyon they saw fresh driftwood 50 feet above the river, and took a picture of a cottonwood tree with a stack of driftwood against it. We found that tree, and it’s fallen over, and it’s really far away from the river.”
The paleo record has also recorded some huge flows. “I would say the last one of 700,000 cfs was around the year 1580 BCE,” said Weisheit. “We’ve had max flows on the Colorado River of 350,000 cfs through Moab, twice in the past 2,000 years.”
Today, that amount of water would more than likely flood the town itself.
Fisk is probably most concerned about the impact of climate change on the vegetation.
“What grasses or shrubs will be favored, and under what conditions?” he wonders. He is concerned about some die-off of pinyon juniper forests in the region. “It seems to be widespread in small locations. We see it here on Cedar Mesa in the Abajo area, and somewhat in our parks, and in northern and central New Mexico,” said Fisk.
Weisheit is seeing the same thing. “The desert plants are changing, especially juniper and pinyon pine. They aren’t regenerating, and a lot of pinyon pines are dying,” he said. “If it’s dry, junipers will abandon a limb, but now I’m seeing whole juniper trees dying. That’s actually alarming to me. It’s a plant adapted to dry conditions, but can’t adapt to these particular conditions.”
Video: USGS Scientists model a warmer and drier future in the desert Southwest
While we might not know exactly what the climate will be in the future, just south of Moab, in a sandy half-acre plot of land, set against some sandstone walls, USGS scientists Jayne Belnap and Sasha Reed have created a test plot to determine how vegetation might react to a warmer and drier climate. Key to ecosystem health are the biological soil crust communities, which hold moisture and secure the soil. These crusts are symbiotic partnerships between green algae, mosses, fungi, liverworts and lichens with cyanobacteria acting as a glue. To the eye they appear as crunchy soil, but are a critical component of the desert environment.
The plot, started in 2007, is the longest running desert experiment in the world. The soil is warmed by infrared lamps.
“There are sensors in the soil constantly monitoring the temperature at different depths,” explained Dr. Reed. “The computer is comparing the temperature of the warm spots to the average of the spots without warming, and maintaining it above that average temperature by 4 degrees Celsius. It’s incredibly effective.”
A few test plots are partially covered to mimic drier conditions too.
“One thing we’ve learned the last few years,” she continued, “is that the biological soil crusts love the winter. They’re really taking up a lot of carbon and photosynthesizing. The warming in winter could have a disproportionately large effect compared to summer warming. These plots are teaching us new things every year. We’re trying to do our best to create conditions to understand how these ecosystems change in hopes that we can help management understand options.”
One unintended aspect of a warming climate is an increasing recreational tourism season. Rob Billerbeck of the National Park Service has been studying the relationship between increasing temperatures and visitation.
“In about 95 percent of the parks we looked at, temperature changes and visitation showed a correlation. There’s just more time for recreation.”
Emerging Rapids
But there’s a flip side to river rafting, too; lower flows mean rockier rapids, with some at low levels being impassable. Hoops has seen this along the Green River.
“In the extended drought, river levels (flows) are generally lower,” he said. “Rapids are formed from rockfall or debris washed into the river because of steeper side channels. Over time, normal spring and fall flushes of the main river current make some form of passage for recreational activities like river running. The near closure of boat passage has already occurred on the San Juan River at Government Rapid.”
Holiday River Expedition’s Lauren Wood has seen changes in as well.
“Last year (2019), raft companies had to reduce their season and cut back the number of trips on the river because of diminished flows. In Cataract Canyon inside Canyonlands National Park we are seeing the over-use of the Colorado River system equating to a significant draw-down in “Lake” Powell,” she said. “This means each year we wait to see what new zombie rapids may come back to life as the Colorado River cuts a new path through the former high-water lake bed sediments.”
Mike DeHoff has been a boatman in Cataract Canyon for years. As Lake Powell water receded, he and others had more rapids to run at the bottom of the canyon.
“When the lake was full, it would inundate 65 percent of the canyon,” he said. “When you would run the Big Drops, the biggest rapids in the canyon, while scouting you’d see jet skis and house boats. But that all changed around 2000 when the reservoir (Lake Powell) receded 100-150 feet very rapidly. The river was flowing across its own sediments. We thought it would be a short-term thing and the lake would come back up to its level, but that didn’t happen. Over the last 15 years, the river has slowly been carving back more rapids in that area.
Video: Boatmen in Cataract Canyon document changes in Lake Powell
Gypsum Canyon rapid has the potential to be a major rapid again, as John Wesley Powell noted in his own journals. DeHoff, along with boatmen Bego Gerhardt and Peter LeFabrve, have been comparing historic photographs with current images to understand its true nature, but 50 years of sand, silt, and sediments still line the river’s banks.
“It’s like mini geologic time, it’s erosion,” said DeHoff. “It’s eroding at our time frame. You see banks collapsing, and see how silt is being flushed out of the side canyons. It’s trying to restore itself down there.”
Changes are here, and more are coming, some caused by human manipulation of the river’s headwaters, others by a climate changing before our eyes.
“In 2018, the Yampa River was closed to (water) withdrawal for the first time ever,” recalled Hoops. “It’s either poor math or understanding. It’s certainly obvious.”
Dr. Jack Schmidt agreed.
“Flaming Gorge Dam affects half of the flow coming, but the future of the river in Canyonlands will mostly be affected by decisions in how to manage the Yampa River,” he said. “The Park Service is largely powerless to affect to the primary drivers, which is the flows in the river, amount of water in the reservoir, the temperature of the water, or how much sediment the river has available to move. The large interregional rivers are not the responsibility of the parks, though it probably should be that way.”
With an entire ecosystem in the balance, a changing climate could lead to a water emergency for 40 million users downstream, and an environmental disaster.
“We just need to adapt to climate, we’ve never done it in our history,” pointed out Weisheit. “It’s about time. One thing is for sure, there’s just not enough water. The party’s over.”
The first flyer arrived at each house in early fall. Another came in November. The message they delivered was alarming: the residents of Pleasanton, California had been relying on contaminated water sources.
What they didn’t say was where the contamination had come from. Or how exactly the city planned on handling the contamination in the long term.
Pleasanton, located in the East Bay about 25 miles east of Oakland and six miles west of Livermore, is home to an estimated 80,000 residents, nearly a quarter of them under 18. It is one of many towns around the country facing a newly recognized problem: PFAS.
PFAS (polyfluoroalkyl substances) are a class of thousands of synthetic chemicals found in many ordinary items, from non-stick pans to dental floss to microwave popcorn bags. These chemicals have been in use since the 1940s, but much about them remains unknown. They have strong carbon bonds, making them persistent in the environment and in the human body—they are also known as “forever chemicals.”
A New “Forever Chemical” Known to Be Bad. But How Bad?
These substances are the latest entry into the directory of toxic industrial chemicals that have made their way into people’s bodies over the last several decades. Their predecessors include lead, asbestos, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and chromium 6, the focus of the 2000 “Erin Brockovich” movie. But PFAS pose an unusual challenge the predecessors did not.
PFAS (polyfluoroalkyl substances) are a class of thousands of synthetic chemicals found in many ordinary items, from non-stick pans to dental floss to microwave popcorn bags.
“Other kinds of contaminants that have come along were known problems well before they were discovered in areas where they presented a threat to public health,” said Philip Angell, who spent much of his career working at top levels at the Environmental Protection Agency. When asbestos was found in schools in the 1980s, Congress acted quickly because the risks were clear.
But newer chemicals pose a different problem. Many of the PFAS contaminating wells like Pleasanton’s were created in the mid-20th century, when chemical marvels were hailed as signs of progress. From 1935 to 1982, the advertising tagline of DuPont, the giant chemical company, was “Better Things For Better Living… Through Chemistry.” PFAS-containing Teflon, invented by a DuPont chemist, was heavily marketed as a nonstick surface for cooking pots.
Even as more information on PFAS is available every day, basic questions remain unanswered. In Pleasanton, the source of contamination is unclear. Nor are all effects of PFAS known, though some are shown in the 2019 film “Dark Water.” And associated cleanup costs are anyone’s guess. One European study estimates the price tag — including environmental screening, contamination monitoring, and water treatment — to be anywhere between 821 million and 170.8 billion Euros ($927 million to $193 billion).
Lawsuits produced evidence that DuPont knew in 1979 that small doses of one kind of PFAS, known as perfluoroctanoic acid, or PFOA, could harm lab animals; the company had reason to suspect potential dangers from PFAS long before the public did. So did 3M, another big firm. “The chemical industry had [studies] showing health effects long before they were shared with the EPA or the scientific communities,” explained Anna Reade, a staff scientist for the Natural Resources Defense Council. Now we’re playing catch up. “That gap comes from not being told by industry that they were seeing these health effects. Or even just that they were finding PFAS in every blood sample they looked at way, way back in the day.”
So these chemicals have been in the environment for decades with little publicly known about the associated risks. Even now their precise health impact on humans remains unclear. Because scientists can’t directly test humans, they have to turn to animals. Some animal studies have linked PFAS to health effects including changes in liver function and altered hormone levels. However troubling, the studies do not conclusively show the impact of PFAS on people.
But there is little argument that PFAS are harmful, even if the specifics of why and how remain a mystery. Definitively proving causation can take a long time. “For some people, that’s not acceptable. We find a chemical, it looks like it can have an impact on health, why are we waiting?” said Angell.
The overall weight of evidence is clear and, according to Reade, “provides enough for [agencies] to say they have a list of different health effects they’re pretty confident are associated with exposure to PFAS chemicals. So that’s about as good as we can get.”
While Questions Remain, Evidence Suggests Limiting Human Exposure
Even with uncertainty, there are ways forward. A community member recently told Reade that their doctor suggested they act like they’re immunocompromised during COVID-19. Though not diagnosed as immunocompromised, Reade’s acquaintance has high levels of PFAS, which are associated with immunosuppression. “Knowing somebody’s exposed isn’t necessarily going to give you a perfect answer on what to do next,” said Reade, “but it gives you more information on how to be proactive with your health.”
After finding the contamination, Pleasanton sent flyers by mail, emailed customers directly, included information on utility bills, and discussed it at a city council meeting.
Pleasanton has a similar philosophy. “We’ve actually taken a real proactive approach,” said Kathleen Yurchak, the Director of Operations and Water Utilities for Pleasanton. After finding the contamination, Pleasanton sent flyers by mail, emailed customers directly, included information on utility bills, and discussed it at a city council meeting in November.
The two most contaminated wells both contained PFOA and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS)—two of the most widely studied PFAS. With combined PFOA and PFOS levels of over 100 parts per trillion, both wells were quickly designated last priority: they will only be operated when necessary. The town hired a consultant to identify treatment options and their cost.
CITY OF PLEASANTON
The discovery in Pleasanton highlights one of the major challenges of these chemicals: they are everywhere, even more so than asbestos or lead ever were. As PFAS testing improves and becomes standard, more towns are finding that their water is contaminated. “If you look for PFAS—and you look for more of them at lower levels that are still toxic to people and to the environment—you’re going to find them. That’s the sad part about these chemicals,” said Andria Ventura, the Toxics Program Manager for the California chapter of Clean Water Action, an environmental advocacy group.
“If you look for PFAS—and you look for more of them at lower levels that are still toxic to people and to the environment—you’re going to find them”
Andria Ventura, California chapter of Clean Water Action
That’s what happened in Pleasanton. In March 2019, the California State Water Board initiated Phase 1 of its PFAS investigation. The State Water Board sent investigation orders to airports, landfills, and military bases—all common PFAS sources—and sampled over 600 water systems. As of March 2020, these chemicals have been detected in roughly 50 percent of sampled wells. Eleven such wells supply drinking water to Pleasanton; contamination in three exceeds California’s response level.
The State Water Board announced stricter response levels for PFAS in February 2020. Now just 10 parts per trillion (ppt) of PFOA and 40 ppt of PFOS are enough to spark action. One part per trillion is a miniscule amount—the equivalent of one drop of water in 20 Olympic sized pools. ”When you’re talking about a substance that’s being measured in parts per trillion, that doesn’t say to me, ‘Oh, this isn’t much of a problem.’ That says to me it’s much more toxic than even something we know, like lead,” said Jill Buck, an environmental activist and Pleasanton resident.
If concentrations of PFAS in a water system exceed these levels, it must take the water source out of service, provide treatment, or notify customers in writing. The water system must also communicate the test results to the public. Pleasanton did just that—even before the new law was passed. “To preempt that [legislation] the city has actually done communication in advance of the requirement,” said Yurchak.
Combatting a chemical like PFAS can be expensive and disruptive, according to Angell. “We don’t know at what level it’s a problem, and we don’t know what it takes to eliminate that risk.” The costs of dealing with PFAS are largely unknown, but likely to be beyond what a municipality like Pleasanton can afford. “We are looking to our state and federal officials to help us solve this problem and also look for funding,” said Yurchak. “Having to deal with this is going to be a costly endeavor.”
Pleasanton residents are worried about cost as well. “I don’t think it’s fair that taxpayers have to pay to clean up somebody else’s mess,” said Buck. “We can spend millions of taxpayer dollars to treat the water, but if we don’t cut off the source, we will continue to clean up somebody else’s mess and we will pay for it.”
Arroyo Mocho in Pleasanton, near one of the Zone 7 groundwater wells. (STEVEN MILLER VIA FLICKR)
But what is the source? That’s still unclear. More questions than answers seem to come out of studying PFAS in Pleasanton, including what to do when the source is impossible to trace. “We are not finding much of a pattern,” said Valerie Pryor, the General Manager for Zone 7 Water Agency, a utility service from which Pleasanton receives some of its water.
Some are speculating that the contamination might originate at Camp Parks military facility, or at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, both nearby. But Pryor is less sure. “Maybe some from a landfill, maybe some from the airport, maybe some from people doing laundry of their water repellent clothes… I doubt that we’re going to find one or two organizations to go after.”
No single agency seems to be able to address these challenges alone. In Pleasanton, the city itself is focused on immediate management and future planning. By shutting down highly contaminated wells and hiring water consultants, city officials are doing what they can, but they do not have the capacity to search for the source. Zone 7 is working with the state to follow sampling plans and regulations.
State Water Board maps show testing sites across California, many of which have revealed PFAS contamination. Across the country, PFAS have become a national problem — enough so that Congress is taking action.
A Nationwide Catalog of PFAS Contamination
The Environmental Working Group, a non-profit research organization, maintains a map of PFAS contamination sites in the United States. It documents pollution in public water systems and military bases, airports, industrial plants, landfills, and firefighter training sites. The data comes from public sources and is updated regularly. Click the image to view the interactive map at EWG.org.
Congress Works to Add Superfund Coverage for PFAS Cleanup
One bill in Congress, H.R. 535 or the PFAS Action Act of 2019, passed the House of Representatives in January and has been sent to the Senate. “This legislation is a response to try to make sure that we are helping communities not only limit their exposure to PFAS, but also help them to clean up the contamination that they’re seeing in their communities,” according to a statement from the office of Representative John Sarbanes, a Maryland Democrat.
There has never been a class of chemicals about which so little is known.
This bill would require that PFAS be covered by Superfund, a law that empowers the Environmental Protection Agency to respond to pollutants endangering public health or the environment. The Superfund law can ensure the cleanup of sites where no one is identifiably responsible. This could be crucial when dealing with PFAS—though there have been PFAS found at existing Superfund sites, how the EPA will deal with those cleanups is not entirely clear The measure would also require the EPA to inform communities of public health risks and of contaminant sources, if known.
There has never been a class of chemicals about which so little is known, according to Angell. Since the creation of the EPA in 1970 and the passing of the Toxic Substances Control Act in 1976, chemical regulation has improved slightly, though existing chemicals—including PFAS—were grandfathered in. “We know more before a new chemical is introduced into commerce… but don’t know everything,” said Angell.
How do we find out the rest? “It’s up to regulators and scientists and academia to play catch up and figure it out,” said Reade.
This bill would require that PFAS be covered by Superfund, a law that empowers the Environmental Protection Agency to respond to pollutants endangering public health or the environment. The Superfund law can ensure the cleanup of sites where no one is identifiably responsible. This could be crucial when dealing with PFAS—though there have been PFAS found at existing Superfund sites, how the EPA will deal with those cleanups is not entirely clear The measure would also require the EPA to inform communities of public health risks and of contaminant sources, if known.
Etched into the face of a red sandstone cliff in the arid highlands of northwestern New Mexico is an unlikely image: a delicately outlined fish. Dozens of petroglyphs surround it, carved centuries ago by the ancestors of the pueblo tribes who still live in the region. They depict antelopes, humans, supernatural beings, spirals and other figures. The antelope and human forms don’t seem out of place, but a fish, here on a dry scrabbly plateau incised with ravines?
“What this tells me is there was once a helluva lot more water here,” says Jim Enote, a 63-year-old Zuni farmer and tribal historian whose forebears were cultivating this land long before the first Europeans arrived on the continent. “Some of these petroglyphs are 1,500 years old. They’re a testament to how long we’ve been here.”
Tribal lore and the archaeological record indicate a very long presence of a people who developed unique agricultural methods and bred crops exquisitely adapted to a land perpetually threatened by drought. The ancient civilization from which the Zuni and other pueblo tribes of the Southwest descend left behind multistory dwellings, networks of roads, astronomical markers, tools for grinding corn and bins for storing it.
Jim Enote studies petroglyphs on a sandstone cliff in northwest New Mexico produced by a culture that vanished after a likely half-century drought.
Aside from enigmatic petroglyphs, the ancestral puebloans left no written record of what must have been an epic history. Many of the most spectacular sites—like the 600 cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde in southern Colorado, or the enormous pueblo complex of Chaco Canyon in northern New Mexico—were abruptly abandoned about 900 years ago. Tree-rings and other data suggest that a prolonged drought, which may have dragged on for 50 lethal years, caused widespread societal collapse.
That history has become disturbingly relevant. For the last 20 years an extreme drought has gripped much of the Southwest. Maps generated by the National Drought Information System invariably show the Zuni homeland to be one of the most parched sections of the country. The tribe has already declared three drought emergencies in the last 15 years, prompting the construction of new water hauling sites and restrictions on the community’s water use. The drought’s impact on wildlife has cost the tribe lost revenue from the sale of hunting and fishing permits. Meanwhile, farmers and ranchers face increased predation on livestock and more crops lost to elk and other wild herbivores desperately seeking forage.
As climate change takes hold, it’s likely that states of emergency will become the new norm, with droughts even more devastating than those that toppled the Southwest’s pre-Columbian cultures. One climate scientist has warned that “the 21st-century projections make the megadroughts [of the past] seem like quaint walks through the Garden of Eden.”
What impact will a changing climate and perpetual drought have on the 11,000 residents of the Zuni reservation? The tribe has weathered a litany of existential challenges over the centuries, from the intrusion of the first conquistadors in 1540 to the arrival of Anglo settlers in the 19th century. And still older tribulations are hinted at in the petroglyphs. Kneeling by the sandstone rock face, Enote points to an engraved spiral, a symbol, he says, of the migrations the Zuni made across the Southwest before settling in their present home here on a 720-square-mile reservation. Some of those ancient odysseys must have been driven by the catastrophic droughts of the past, with entire peoples on the move in search of land that could sustain them. Now the same threat, horribly amplified, looms over their descendants—indeed, over all of us. “The big question for me,” says Enote, “depending on how extreme climate change will be, is can we adapt?”
Five years ago a team of scientists from Cornell, Columbia, and NASA published a paper with an unsettling conclusion: if greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase at the current rate, the risk of a “megadrought” hitting the Southwest—one that lasts for 35 years or more—will exceed 80 percent by the end of the century. Since global carbon emissions hit an all-time high last year, the odds continue to mount in favor of a megadrought worse than the civilization-killer of a thousand years ago. Last week, scientists from NOAA, NASA, and four universities reported that the megadrought may already be underway. It’s a sobering prospect, given that that the ancient megadrought outstripped anything in the historical record.
The Zuni River basin near the New Mexico and Arizona state line.
“Things like the Dust Bowl or the recent California droughts or the 1950s drought in Texas, as big and as bad as they were, they don’t compare with some of the worst events that we see going back a thousand years,” says Ben Cook, a climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and the lead author of the 2016 study. “We know there were big droughts in the past that eclipse any of our contemporary experiences. There are very few places that have experienced megadroughts. I can’t think of any other region, at least in recent Earth history, that has ever experienced 20- to 50-year droughts [like the ones] that we have documented in the Southwest.”
As global temperatures continue to rise in the decades ahead, evaporation in the world’s arid areas will climb in lockstep, and precipitation will decrease, trends now underway. “When we’re looking at climate change impacts, they scale with the warming,” says Cook. “The more warming that happens, the worse these events—like droughts, floods and extreme precipitation—are likely to be. It’s going to be a combination of lack of water and these hot temperatures that are really going to make these events different from those of the past. None of this is inevitable. But the science is clear: these are the sort of events that are likely to get more severe and intense in a warmer world.”
From the top of Black Rock Dam on the Zuni reservation that drier world isn’t hard to imagine—it’s already here. Built in 1908, as part of an effort to modernize traditional Zuni agriculture, the 80-foot-high dam was designed to hold 15,000 acre-feet of water—enough to cover 15,000 acres to a depth of one foot. But apart from a small shallow pool from some rare recent rain, there’s no water in sight. Stands of juniper, cottonwood, and sage grow on land that should be under water.
The reservoir of the multimillion-dollar Black Rock Dam has not held water in decades.
“I can’t remember the last time water was released from Black Rock Dam,” says Kirk Bemis, the Zuni tribe’s hydrologist, as he looks out at the waterless expanse. “At least 15 years ago. This is the safest, most up-to-date dam we have and it’s in our most populated farming district. You just need to add water!”
Bemis, who is half Zuni on his mother’s side, once dreamed of being an astronaut. He got close, working as an engineer at NASA before returning to the reservation 25 years ago. Two of his uncles are priests in one of the tribe’s six ancient religious orders, each with its own elaborate rites and restricted membership. He seems comfortable in two worlds, one technical, one traditional. His efforts to bridge them can be challenging at times, especially when he raises the issue of climate change as something the tribe should prepare for.
“We have a cultural taboo about predicting bad things,” says Bemis. “Our religion is all about bringing precipitation here. Everything is about asking for the blessing of moisture from the ancestors and deities. If you tell the Zuni it will snow and rain less, you’re telling them that their prayers will be less effective.”
In any case, says Bemis, drought is nothing new here. “For us, climate change means more of the same.” After all, what lessons can the Zuni learn from a dominant culture with a dubious record of environmental stewardship? The construction of Black Rock Dam, for example, accelerated the decline of Zuni farming, and permanently changed the landscape.
For centuries, the Zuni, Hopi, and other pueblo tribes of the Southwest practiced a type of agriculture that enabled them to produce bumper crops of corn, beans, and vegetables in a region that receives about 12 inches of rain annually in good years—less than a quarter of the precipitation of a corn belt state like Ohio. Rather than planting and irrigating the same plots year after year, the Zuni rotated their fields, locating them near the bases of mesas to capture ephemeral runoff from seasonal storms. Remnants of small dams that channeled runoff water have been found at Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde, Casas Grandes, and other sites.
Jim Enote with heirloom blue corn from his farm.
With runoff agriculture the Zuni thrived for centuries. When the gold-seeking Spanish explorer Francisco Vazquez de Coronado encountered them in the summer of 1540 he noted in a letter to his superiors that the Zuni “…are well-nurtured and conditioned…they eat the best cakes that ever I saw…” Runoff farming spread nutrients from the mesa tops out across the lowlands, and the channeling and slowing of storm flows reduced erosion. The numberless arroyos that now seem to be endemic, natural features of the Southwestern landscape may be a consequence of the abandonment of traditional farming practices.
“Traditionally corn farming was at the edge of a valley, close to mesas,” says Bemis. “Those fields couldn’t be used with modern irrigation because of the slope. So places in the valley that hadn’t ever been irrigated were [irrigated].”
Black Rock Dam, which had been a showcase irrigation project of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, started to fill with silt soon after its completion. Silt deposits from the intermittent flows of the Zuni River and its tributaries eventually cut the dam’s capacity from 15,000 acre-feet to 2,500. “In the late 1990s there was a $20 million project to fix Black Rock Dam,” says Bemis. “But since then there hasn’t been enough water to test these improvements. There hasn’t been water here for so long that some community leaders have proposed building a baseball field here. It shows you how soon people forget with drought conditions.”
Zuni agriculture had already been under pressure from the federal government even before the dam’s construction. With the Allotment Act of 1887, the United States attempted to integrate tribes into the mainstream by transferring what had been tribal commons to individual farmers.By allowing families to sell their plots, the act fragmented Indian lands. Within 20 years tribes all across the country lost nearly half their territory. “It was a way to break up the tribes by assigning plots to individuals,” says Bemis. “Traditionally farms were communally operated, not fenced off into land regarded as ‘mine.’ Here on Zuni there were only a few allotments, so we were lucky. But that started the decline of Zuni agriculture.”
Today the reservation comprises five agricultural districts, but only a handful of people in those districts are actually growing anything, says Bemis. The combination of drought, misguided federal policies, and economic pressures have decimated Zuni farming. In a community with a 70 percent unemployment rate, the risks and effort far outweigh the rewards.
“Most farming here is not commercial,’ says Bemis. “It’s for a little extra income or for personal use. If your field is far from your home, elk can come by and consume your entire summer’s work. In the old days farming was about survival. You didn’t have a choice. Now you can go to the store to buy corn. One of our dilemmas is how to revitalize farming.”
Daniel Bowannie directs the Zuni Sustainable Agriculture Program.
Some of the most sacred treasures of the Zuni people—precious links to their past and future—aren’t sequestered in religious shrines, or locked away in museums. They’re kept in a small one-story building that houses the Zuni Sustainable Agriculture Program, carefully tended by Daniel Bowannie, the 37-year-old technician and sole staff member of the project. The door of the boxy white refrigerator in Bowannie’s office is covered with his children’s doodles, so visitors might not immediately notice the piece of paper taped to the top of the fridge, which identifies it as the Zuni Community Seed Bank.
The refrigerator contains dozens of heirloom seed varieties—corn, melon, beans, and more—which have been collected since the program started in 1992. “Probably about 40 different families of seeds,” says Bowannie. “All seeds are sacred to us.” For the Zuni, agriculture itself is a religious practice, and locally grown seeds remain essential for many rituals. “There are two things we pray for: seeds and water,” says Darren Sanchez, who works for the tribe’s conservation program in an office next to Bowannie’s. “We can’t survive without them.”
The seeds in Bowannie’s refrigerator are unique, the product of countless generations of breeding drought-tolerant varieties by pueblo farmers. The corn, for example, can send roots 20 feet into the soil in search of water, and though the plants may grow only 3 or 4 feet high, they produce many ears. Bowannie started adding to the collection shortly after he was hired in 2003 to run the program. “I wanted to be a smoke jumper,” he says, “but my grandparents pulled me back to traditional life.”
The Zuni Seed Bank freezer holds Zuni yellow beans, blue and red Hopi corn, melon and Zuni sweet corn seeds.
He managed to get a few seeds from elderly Zuni farmers, but his most valuable source turned out to be another ancient community. “For heirloom seeds I reached out to my relatives, the Hopi.” The Hopi, whose reservation lies in northeastern Arizona, also see agriculture as a spiritual practice, and runoff farming is still a living tradition there. In 2008, Bowannie described his plans to provide heirloom seeds for the Zuni community to about 20 elders gathered at the Hopi Department of Natural Resources building. “The elders told me, ‘We don’t care about money,’” Bowannie recalls. “’These aren’t Hopi seeds—they’re Zuni seeds. A long time ago you gave us seeds.” At some point it in the past, it seems, the Zuni had helped the Hopi during a time of need. Now, perhaps centuries later, the Hopi were returning the favor. Though they did ask for one thing in return: salt from a sacred lake.
Zuni Salt Lake, home of the Salt Mother Deity, lies about 60 miles south of the reservation. During the dry season, most of the shallow lake evaporates, and the salt left on the dry lake bed has been gathered by pilgrims since before the collapse of the ancient pueblo civilizations. The Zuni control access to the lake, and even among the Zuni only the men are allowed to harvest salt. Since Bowannie himself had never gone before, he asked a coworker to collect salt that he could exchange for the Hopi seeds. So one day in 2008 in a parking lot in the city of Gallup 40 miles north of the reservation, Bowannie traded 22 sandbags full of salt for some Hopi seeds.
A prehistoric Zuni farming plot on a mesa near Zuni Pueblo, New Mexico.
If the Zuni ever manage to revitalize their agricultural traditions, the trove in Bowannie’s refrigerator will enable them to plant the seeds of their ancestors. For now, those seeds are used to grow corn for religious ceremonies, and to teach Zuni schoolchildren the rudiments of traditional gardening methods; they are also distributed to a few committed farmers. Bowannie recalls how he learned to plant his first waffle garden, a quintessential Zuni horticultural technique where vegetables are grown on a bed of soil divided into a grid of small squares with raised earthen sides a few inches high. The plants within each square would be carefully hand-watered, ladle by ladle.
“I asked an elder, ‘What is the secret of waffle gardens?’” says Bowannie. “She said, ‘You’re not ready to listen to my stories. Why am I going to give this to you? You haven’t earned it. It won’t be appreciated in your heart in the same way it is for me. Go and plant a garden. Then come back and talk to me.’ She wanted me to take the initiative. Then she would step in and help. I started a garden and that opened up a conversation.’”
All that accumulated agricultural wisdom expresses something much more fundamental about Zuni culture. Driving back from Black Rock Dam, Bemis mentions that scientists occasionally visit the reservation, seeking indigenous knowledge about dry-land farming. “When they come here and ask about our traditional practices, I really have to think,” says Bemis. “What practices do we really still do? No one uses digging sticks (for digging out tubers and roots) anymore! The one tool that has survived is the belief system: the prayers, the ceremonies, everything that goes with that. That is the number one thing that has survived, and it developed, I’m sure, as a response to climate and extremes. That was the foundation for everything, and that is what has allowed us to live here and survive for all these years in a harsh environment. Technologies come and go, but a belief system, that becomes a way of life. It stays and grows. That’s the most important thing that has survived.”
Not all Zuni have relinquished the old farming ways. Late on a bright November day Jim Enote shows a pair of visitors a cornfield he has tended for as long as he can remember. It’s fallow now; the harvest of multicolored ears of corn is safely stored in bins at his home, along with beans, chiles, squash and more. On the horizon to the west of his field, bathed in golden light, stand the ruins of Hawikku, the pueblo where the Zuni were living when the first conquistadors arrived, vainly searching for mythical cities of gold. Maybe they too saw sunlight one late afternoon, gleaming on whitewashed pueblo walls.
“I’ve been planting for 62 years,” says Enote. “When I was in a cradleboard, my aunties and grandmother would put seeds in my hand.” Enote, tall and silver-haired, has been planting seeds ever since, and shares his knowledge on many fronts. Most recently he has started a non-profit organization, the Colorado Plateau Foundation, which aims to promote sustainable agriculture and protect native lands and languages.
“Our culture was built around growing food,” he says. “Planting food connects you to all these things: the soil, the weather, the creatures that share this world with us, and the moon and the sun. When you put your hands in the soil, you feel how cold or how warm or how dry or how wet it is. It connects you to all these things we pray for. We’re at a tipping point. People will either make the decision to grow traditional crops in the traditional manner or they won’t. I think that would be a tragedy. I always tell the kids, just plant something in the ground and take care of it.”
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This article was first published by The Weather Channel. It may not be reproduced without express permission from FERN. If you are interested in republishing or reposting this article, please contact info@thefern.org.
Tim Folger writes about science and environmental issues for a number of national publications. He lives in northwestern New Mexico, not far from Zuni pueblo.
Photojournalist Bill Hatcherhas photographed exploration, science and conservation around the world for over 30 years. Working for a variety of clients including National Geographic, Smithsonian, Outside Magazine and Outdoor Photographer, Bill’s images have received several awards, including those from Communication Arts, ARCHIVE and the Emmy Awards. Bill currently lives in Tucson, Arizona, and Dolores, Colorado. His most recent projects have been focused on the Borderlands of Arizona and Mexico and the Four Corners regions of the American Southwest.
Irrigated agriculture in California. Source: Adobe Stock
The Water Desk is excited to announce the recipients of new grants to support water-related journalism in California.
Grantees will be exploring and investigating a variety of water issues in the state: pollution, groundwater, public health, conservation, agriculture, wastewater and more.
The grants, up to $10,000 each, are being funded thanks to the generous support of the S. D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation.
Based at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism, The Water Desk is dedicated to increasing the volume, depth and impact of journalism connected to Western water issues.
The recipients of the California Media Project grants (in alphabetical order):
CalMatters, a nonprofit journalism venture focused on California politics and policy, will produce a story or series on the growing public health risks to clean water for one million Californians.
Food and Environment Reporting Network (FERN), a nonprofit news organization, will produce an article exploring a conflict over groundwater use by agriculture in an arid region of California.
Fresno Bee and its Fresnoland will publish a series of stories on the economic ramifications of a new groundwater-management plan in the Central San Joaquin Valley.
High Country News will produce and publish a package of articles focusing on California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), as well as several articles in a broader series on California water as it intersects with social justice, public health, economies and communities of the Western United States.
Voice of San Diego, a nonprofit news organization, will produce a series of stories on the long-simmering sewage crisis afflicting San Diego by following the money to understand why the border’s broken sewer system has remained unaddressed for decades.
Ted Wood and Jim Robbins, independent journalists, will report on how extreme water-conservation efforts in San Diego, Los Angeles and other California cities are playing out, and what their experience holds for other drought-afflicted regions with rapidly growing populations.
The Water Education Foundation will produce and publish an article in its Western Water online magazine explaining how the farm-rich San Joaquin Valley, whose crops form the centerpiece of the nation’s produce aisles, is striving to bring its critically overdrawn groundwater basins into balance, using approaches such as water trading, captured flood flows, fallowing and land-use changes, as it attempts to meet SGMA’s requirements.
For the eight grants, The Water Desk has approved a total of $75,000 for journalists and media outlets.
The Water Desk is preparing to accept applications for a new round of grantmaking similar to our 2019 standard grants program. This new grantmaking will cover the seven states of the Colorado River Basin and the borderlands of Northwest Mexico. We will soon announce more information on that program through our Twitter account and email newsletter.
We are grateful for the funding from the S. D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation, which has augmented our founding grant from the Walton Family Foundation. The Water Desk maintains strict editorial independence from its funders and the University of Colorado. Funders of The Water Desk have no right to review or to otherwise influence stories or other journalistic content that is produced with the support of these grants. For more about our editorial independence, please see our funding page.
Seeking additional support for our grant programs
Because the S. D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation is sunsetting and spending down its assets this year, The Water Desk will not be receiving additional funding from the foundation to support water journalism. However, we continue to seek new funders to support our work in California and beyond.
Elk gather in irrigated hay fields below Dry Park Road on the Crystal River Ranch, which is seeking to maintain conditional water storage rights tied to two potential 55-foot-tall dams. One of the dams would be located at the edge of the hayfields, to the left in the photo, and another would be located in the Four Mile Creek valley. Photo by Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
CARBONDALE — Sue Anschutz-Rodgers, the owner of Crystal River Ranch above Carbondale, has told the state she is making progress toward building two 55-foot-tall dams that would form two 500-acre-foot reservoirs on land she owns in the Four Mile Creek basin and along Dry Park Road.
The cattle and hay operation has been owned by the Anschutz family since 1966. Water attorneys for Anschutz-Rodgers and the ranch are in state water court seeking to maintain conditional water-storage rights tied to the two potential reservoirs: Sue’s Four Mile Reservoir No. 1 and Sue’s Four Mile Reservoir No. 2.
They would be located on ranch-owned land in the Four Mile Creek drainage and along Dry Park Road, respectively.
The dam that would form Reservoir No. 1 would be 55 feet tall and 950 feet long, and the resulting reservoir would inundate 22 acres with water. The dam for Reservoir No. 2 would be 55 feet tall and 800 feet long, and the reservoir would inundate 30 acres. Each reservoir would hold as much as 500 acre-feet of water. By comparison, Grizzly Reservoir on Lincoln Creek above Aspen holds 590 acre-feet of water and is formed by a 56-foot-tall dam that floods 44 acres of land.
Anschutz-Rodgers is a philanthropist and environmentalist whose brother Phil Anschutz is worth $12 billion, according to Forbes. She has served locally on the boards of the Aspen Valley Land Trust and the Thompson Divide Coalition, and Anschutz-Rodgers is listed on the application as general partner of Crystal River Ranch Co., LLC.
On March 13, her water attorney, Glenn Porzak of Boulder-based Porzak Browning & Bushong, told the court in a proposed ruling that Crystal River Ranch “has exercised reasonable diligence in the development” of the two dams and reservoirs. He also noted that “the measure of diligence is the steady application of effort to complete the appropriation in a reasonably expedient and efficient manner.”
As such, the ranch is requesting that the conditional water-storage rights tied to the two potential dams — rights first decreed in 2006 — be extended for another six-year period.
“I believe we have shown the necessary amount of work to show diligence and extend these conditional rights,” Porzak said.
Any start of the dams’ construction, Porzak said, “is still at a preliminary stage.”
Water from Four Mile Creek irrigates land on Crystal River Ranch off of Dry Park Road above Carbondale. Ranch owner Sue Anschutz-Rodgers has told the state she is making progress toward building two dams and reservoirs on the property. Photo by Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism
Irrigating more than 600 acres
The water from the potential reservoirs could be used to irrigate 535 acres of land along Dry Park Road, which drains into the Roaring Fork River, and another 93 acres of land in the Four Mile Creek basin. Four Mile Creek flows into the Roaring Fork downstream of the Ironbridge golf course.
The Crystal River Ranch house and the main part of the sprawling 7,600-acre site is located just off Garfield County Road 108, which leads from Carbondale up to the popular Spring Gulch cross-country ski area. The section of the ranch visible from CR 108 is irrigated with water diverted from the Crystal River via the Sweet Jessup Canal.
Another section of the ranch where elk are often seen roaming the irrigated hay meadows is off Dry Park Road, which runs between CR 108 and 4 Mile Road. The land in Dry Park is currently irrigated with water diverted from Four Mile Creek via the McKown Ditch, which crosses the ridge that separates Dry Park from the Four Mile Creek valley.
The headgate for the McKown ditch on Four Mile Creek is about 1½ miles downstream from the Sunlight ski area.
According to its application, the 1,000 acre-feet of water that the ranch hopes to store would be used for four purposes: stock watering, piscatorial, wildlife and irrigation. (Piscatorial pertains to fish.)
A herd of elk could be seen roaming amid the irrigation sprinklers of Crystal River Ranch on Thursday. Ranch owner Sue Anschutz-Rodgers has told the state she is making progress toward building two dams and reservoirs on the property. Photo by Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism
Diligence application
Crystal River Ranch filed its initial water-rights application for the two potential dams in Division 5 Water Court in Glenwood Springs in 2006. After working through some issues with five other water-rights holders in the case, a conditional water-rights decree for the two dams and reservoirs was issued by Judge James Boyd in 2013.
The 2013 decree required Crystal River Ranch to submit a due-diligence application in 2019 in order to maintain the conditional water rights.
In the diligence application, Porzak said since 2013 the ranch has spent $70,000 to “survey the reservoir sites; prepare layouts of the dams and reservoirs; (and) design work on the spillways, inlets, and outlet infrastructures of the reservoirs.”
A portion of the $70,000 also went to “design irrigation improvements and conduct layout of the pumps and sprinklers for the lands to be irrigated by the reservoirs; conduct a hydrology analysis for each reservoir site; drill boreholes at each reservoir site; test soil samples and perform a geotechnical analysis of each reservoir site; and prepare cost estimates for each reservoir site and all of the associated infrastructure.”
In reviewing a diligence application, the division engineer and the water court’s referee, who functions as an administrative judge, apply a standard of diligence. The standard is often met by the applicant listing the work they’ve done on the potential facilities that are tied to the water rights and are necessary to put the water to use.
“You have to show you are moving forward in a reasonable manner,” said Alan Martellaro, the Division 5 engineer.
No entities filed a statement of opposition to the application.
Martellaro reviewed the diligence application along with Susan Ryan, the water court’s referee, and then filed a memo — called “a summary of consultation” — with the court Feb. 28.
The summary said Crystal River Ranch “should provide reports and other documents, which support the diligence activities performed within the relevant diligence period as claimed in the application.”
A stony irrigation channel runs past rolled hay on the Crystal River Ranch, just below Dry Park Road, with Basalt Mountain in the background. The pond in the lower field, to the right of the white trailer, drains to the Roaring Fork River and is the approximate location for a potential 55-foot-tall dam that would hold 500 acre-feet of water. Photo by Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
Next steps
To date, however, none of these documents have been filed with the court, and only a hard-to-read map of the general area where the reservoirs would be located has been made public.
Porzak said the work done on the two potential reservoirs has not yet been reduced to final written reports.
He also said that the activities in the diligence application were verified under oath by Craig Ullmann, the engineer who oversaw the work. Ullmann is president of Applegate Group Inc., a water-engineering firm with offices in Glenwood Springs.
Martellaro said the word “should” in the court’s summary of consultation means “should,” not “must,” so it is not clear whether the design documents for the two dams will be made public through the court process. He also said the documents cited in the application would be helpful for the state to have on file for the next diligence filing.
Porzak said all the relevant information was contained in the application.
Should the dams ever be built, the associated water rights would hold a priority date of 2006, a junior right under Colorado’s system of prior appropriation. As such, Crystal River Ranch couldn’t count on the water being there to store in dry years, Martellaro said.
“It’s a really junior water right on a stream that’s over-appropriated,” he said. “This is one of those creeks that just doesn’t have surplus. They are pretty much limited to snowmelt runoff to fill these ponds.”
Aspen Journalism is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization supported by its donors and funders and partners with The Aspen Times and other Swift communications publications on water coverage. This story ran in the May 4 edition of The Aspen Times and the May 4 edition of Aspen Journalism.
Erick Gamas, executive chef at Urban Farmer Denver, is training staff to wear masks, gloves and do temperature checks as they prepare to reopen. June 1, 2020. Credit: Jerd Smith
Inside Denver’s high-end boutique steakhouse, Urban Farmer, the lights are off, the booths are empty, and it is quiet, the silence a result of the COVID-19 shutdown.
But toward the back in the gleaming LoDo kitchen, a low-level whisper rises from a small device that is circulating water in a plastic pan on the stainless steel prep counter, washing a frozen beef tenderloin continuously and allowing it to quickly defrost, using less than one-tenth of the water that the eatery once used to do the same work.
The Boss Defrost, as the device is known, is the work of former Urban Farmer executive chef Chris Starkus and engineer Mac Marsh, who developed the earth-friendly technology to help restaurants cut their water use, reduce their operating costs, and shrink their carbon footprint.
Just two years old, the “boss” is a welcome grace note in a restaurant scene that has been bludgeoned with weeks of closures and this week a rash of rioting in Denver over George Floyd’s brutal death at the hands of Minneapolis police.
When Urban Farmer was forced to close March 13, there was a dash to take its signature organic, locally sourced, high-end meat and place it in freezers in an attempt to save some of what was being lost, according to current executive chef Erick Gamas.
Now, as the eatery prepares for a limited opening this week, the small device is running almost full-time, bringing choice cuts of meat back to life.
“It feels good to be able to do this,” Gamas said. “We talk a lot about taking care of Mother Earth in this restaurant. With this, we are not wasting water. “
Boss Defrost co-founder Marsh said he was inspired to create the thawing device after working as a hotel engineer and noticing, over and over again, how much fresh water was wasted every day.
Designing and manufacturing this ultra-green commercial kitchen tool was almost a no-brainer.
In the kitchen of Urban Farmer Denver, a Boss Defrost thaws a petite beef tenderloin, recirculating water in a process that uses less than one-tenth the normal amount of water. June 1, 2020. Credit: Jerd Smith
“A single restaurant uses 1,000 gallons of water a day. It’s an unaddressed waste stream. But a lot of people don’t know this unless you’re working behind the scenes,” he said.
A normal defrosting process, where water from a tap is run over frozen food, uses 150 gallons an hour to thaw a pound of meat, Marsh said. The Boss Defrost reduces that to between 5 to 10 gallons per hour.
The Boss Defrost team believes the unit’s $300 price tag will encourage thousands of restaurants to see the benefits of the modest device. “That’s a drop in the bucket compared to most other costs restaurants see,” said Marsh.
Since its launch in 2019, the company has sold hundreds of units across Colorado and in more than 14 states.
Denver-based Potager chef Nick Brand bought one almost the minute he saw it work.
“Everybody in our back-of-the-house team loves it,” Brand said. “They are on board.”
Diana Starkus, chief marketing officer at the startup, said the full impact of the technology won’t be seen until it has found a place in every school cafeteria, hamburger joint, and pizza parlor.
“I would drop a Boss Defrost in every one of those places today,” she said.
Back at Urban Farmer the staff is gearing up for re-opening, training on the use of masks, temperature checks and gloves, and hoping that Denver’s love affair with restaurants will re-emerge strong this week.
“These past couple of days we have been judging the market to see what people want, and I am really excited,” Gamas said.
But plenty of uncertainty lies ahead, so much so that it’s almost the norm. But that’s okay, Gamas said. “We’ll be figuring it out as we go.”
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
On the drought-stressed Colorado River, a rare piece of good news is emerging from an unlikely source: coal-fired power plants.
Over the next decade, many coal-fired power plants now operating in the Colorado River Basin—from Colorado to Arizona to New Mexico—will be retired and replaced with solar energy, wind energy or natural gas.
The water once used to cool their turbines could soon be available for other uses, from water for homes and food production, to water for fish and streams, and even water to help fill a new drought-protection pool in Lake Powell.
The shift is happening quickly as many facilities reach the end of their operational lives, renewable energy grows price-competitive with fossil fuels, and states strive to reduce their contribution to climate change by cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
That raises the prospect that a significant amount of water — around 160,000 acre-feet per year — could be available for other uses in the Upper Colorado River Basin over the next decade, according to estimates derived from Bureau of Reclamation data by former Colorado River District general manager Eric Kuhn.
“160,000 acre-feet of consumptive use per year is actually a lot of water,” wrote Kuhn in a March 10 blog post about the “water dividend” that could result from coal plant closures. “Water-efficient cities such as Las Vegas or Phoenix could serve more than 1.5 million people with this amount of water.”
Xcel Energy, one of Colorado’s two investor-owned electric utilities, plans to close two units of its Comanche Generating Station near Pueblo in 2023 and 2025, respectively, replacing 725 megawatts of coal-fired generation with a mix of wind, solar, natural gas and battery storage.
In January, Tri-State Generation and Transmission, an electric cooperative serving large swaths of rural Colorado, announced that it will retire all of its coal-fired power plants and coal mines in Colorado and New Mexico by 2030. That includes the 1,285-megawatt Craig Station, a coal-fired power plant in Moffat County.
The phenomenon is not limited to Colorado: In Arizona, the Navajo Generating Station operated by the Salt River Project closed in 2019. In northwestern New Mexico, the San Juan Power Plant began to retire units in 2017 and will completely shut down by 2022, while the Four Corners Power Plant nearby will fully retire in 2031.
For decades, the water used to cool many of these coal plants has come from the Colorado River or its tributaries. The Boulder-based environmental group Western Resource Advocates (WRA) estimated in a 2012 paper that Xcel’s Comanche facility uses roughly 8,600 acre-feet of water per year for cooling. (One acre-foot is enough to supply two average Colorado households for a year or to irrigate approximately two-thirds of an acre of farmland.)
WRA estimates that the Craig Station uses about 16,400 acre-feet of water annually. The Navajo, San Juan and Four Corners facilities in Arizona and New Mexico use a combined 67,000 acre-feet of water each year, according to WRA senior climate policy analyst Stacy Tellinghuisen.
There are examples of Colorado coal plants closing and relinquishing their water supplies. In 2014, Black Hills Energy closed its W.N. Clark power plant in Cañon City. The utility now plans to sell the water used to cool the plant back to the local ditch company for agricultural uses, and to gift the proceeds to Cañon City to help offset the economic impact of the plant closure. The transaction was approved by the Colorado Utilities Commission March 20.
Yet in Colorado and around the West, the debate about how water from shuttered coal plants should be used is just beginning. In Pueblo, the Arkansas River water now being used to cool the Comanche Generating Station is leased from the Pueblo Board of Water Works, and thus will be returned to the utility when two units of the station close, according to Xcel Energy spokesperson Michelle Aguayo.
In Craig, where the coal plant will continue to operate for another decade, the local community is primarily focused on replacing the 250 jobs that the plant now provides, along with the 219 jobs provided by the nearby Colowyo Mine, which is also slated for closure and whose coal fuels the Craig Station.
Mark Stutz, a spokesperson for Tri-State, said in an emailed statement, “Tri-State has not made any decisions on the future use of its water from its retiring generating stations and related facilities…Tri-State will listen to the input of interested stakeholders as we consider our options.”
Talks between Yampa Valley locals and Tri-State about the plant’s water rights are in their early stages, and some residents say they are glad to be at the table discussing how that water could shape the region’s economic future.
“We are going to be impacted, and maybe there is nothing we can do, but we want to make sure that we are a part of the conversation,” said Will Myers, a Craig-based civil engineer who hails from a fourth-generation ranching family and serves as the agricultural representative to the Yampa-White-Green Basin Roundtable. “We want to try to help our community as much as we can.”
Other Yampa Valley residents say they hope the plant’s water stays in their river basin for the benefit of locals, rather than being piped over the Continental Divide to cities on the Front Range.
“It is my hope that these water rights are not purchased by an outside entity that would move the water out of the basin and over the divide(s) somewhere else,” said Kent Vertrees, president of the environmental group Friends of the Yampa, in an email. “Moving the water downstream and keeping it in the river would help with the environment and recreational flows that have little to no protection in the Yampa River at this point in time.”
Kuhn, the former River District head, says that converting the Craig Station’s water to instream flow water rights held by the Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB) could be a “win-win” for local communities and the Upper Colorado River Basin as a whole.
“If the local community is going to pivot to an economy that is more recreation-based, then converting those coal plant water rights to instream flows benefits recreation,” Kuhn said.
Leaving water in Colorado River tributaries such as the Yampa could also aid the Upper Colorado River Basin’s Drought Contingency Plan, an agreement finalized last spring whose overarching goal is to boost water levels in Lake Powell as the region’s 20-year drought continues. Keeping the reservoir above minimum water levels ensures Glen Canyon Dam can continue to produce hydropower and that the Upper Basin can meet its water delivery obligations to Lower Basin states like California and Arizona under the terms of the 1922 Colorado River Compact and related agreements.
One emerging strategy for saving water under the drought plan is called “demand management,” where water users would be paid to cut their water use, with the saved water left to flow downstream to Lake Powell to fill a protected “drought pool.” Such compensated water use reductions are expensive, Kuhn argues, while converting coal plant water rights to instream flow rights held by the CWCB could be much cheaper.
“It’s cheaper than paying farmers to stop farming,” he says. “We would have to compensate [the coal plant owners] for a right that’s not used. What’s the value of a right that you are never going to use again?”
The Colorado Water Trust, a nonprofit group that works with the CWCB to acquire water rights for its instream flow program, has not yet begun exploring the conversion of Colorado coal plant water rights to instream flow uses.
“I know in the case of Craig, the company and local community are focused heavily on transition for their workers, and the local tax base, right now,” said Colorado Water Trust executive director Andy Schultheiss in an email. “Eventually, they’ll get to the water, and we’ll likely be involved in those conversations when they happen.”
Nelson Harvey is a freelance reporter and editor based in Denver. He has written for Modern Farmer, High Country News and many other publications. See his work at nelsonharvey.com
Fresh Water News is an independent, non-partisan news initiative of Water Education Colorado. WEco is funded by multiple donors. Our editorial policy and donor list can be viewed at wateredco.org.
