A snowtography installation near Red Mountain Pass, Colorado, will use inexpensive cameras to measure the snow depth at dozens of locations to learn more about how land management affects the snowpack. Photo: Mitch Tobin/The Water Desk
RED MOUNTAIN PASS, COLORADO – On a sunny day in September, with the leaves starting to turn more than two miles above sea level, scientists and volunteers hauled metal stakes, tall measuring sticks and simple trail cameras into Colorado’s high country to seek answers to pressing questions about forests and the snowpack.
Surrounding them were bald peaks, some exceeding 13,000 feet, that would soon be buried in the seasonal accumulation of snow. The snowpack serves as the foundation of the state’s water supply and a critical water source for tens of millions of people in 18 other states and Mexico, plus millions of acres of crops.
Jake Kurzweil, a hydrologist and associate director of water programs at the Durango, Colorado-based Mountain Studies Institute, hauls gear to the snowtography site on September 8, 2023. Photo: Mitch Tobin/The Water Desk
Despite the snowpack’s importance in Colorado and elsewhere, scientists still struggle to accurately measure how much snow is out there–and how much water it contains–as climate change threatens to further diminish the frozen reservoir that so many rely on.
In a region with complex weather and roller-coaster topography, each storm dumps a unique pattern of precipitation, favoring some mountains over others, and leaving behind vastly different snow totals due to such factors as elevation and the wind’s direction.
But even in an area as small as a single backyard, how the snow accumulates on the ground–and how long it sticks around–can vary tremendously depending on the presence of trees, shade and other features, posing challenges for traditional monitoring approaches.
“Snow distribution is very heterogeneous, so that means it’s very different within small spatial scales,” said Jake Kurzweil, a hydrologist and associate director of water programs at the Durango, Colorado-based Mountain Studies Institute.
Kurzweil was in a sunny clearing next to a stand of conifers, taking a break as his colleagues arranged stakes and pounded them into the ground of the heavily shaded forest, the sound of clanking metal mixing with the incessant barking of a squirrel.
“If we just move 20 meters to our south here,” he said, “we’re actually going to have quite a different snowpack than where we’re standing right here.”
Drone-captured image from above the snowtography site in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains. Researchers have deliberately chosen places where conditions change markedly over short distances so they can understand how this variability affects the snowpack. Photo: Mitch Tobin/The Water Desk
This corner of the rugged San Juan Mountains features a diversity of conditions even without human influences. But in Colorado and around the West, land managers are making their own mark on forests by pursuing projects that remove trees before a wildfire strikes, improve wildlife habitat and support scenic or recreational goals, all of which can affect the way snow accumulates and dissipates.
To understand how such treatments influence the snowpack, and to inform land-management decisions, researchers are looking to “snowtography,” an emerging approach that relies on automated trail cameras snapping repeated photos of the snow’s depth across a series of points on a straight line known as a transect.
“Snowtography is not a new technology but rather a novel application of fairly simple components,” according to a 2021 handbook produced by The Nature Conservancy, Western Water Assessment and U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service. The free publication explains how anyone can build and install their own snowtography equipment using materials from a hardware store and inexpensive cameras. (The handbook was funded by the Walton Family Foundation, which also supports The Water Desk.)
Haley Farwell, a graduate student at Northern Arizona University, attaches a camera to a tree as Lenka Doskocil, a research associate at the Mountain Studies Institute, and Taite Stotts, a student at Northern Arizona University, stabilize the ladder. Photo: Mitch Tobin/The Water Desk
As Kurzweil and others set up the stakes for the measuring sticks along the transects, Haley Farwell, a graduate student at Northern Arizona University, scaled a ladder to gingerly fasten cameras to the trunks of trees with screw-in mounts and carefully adjust the angle of the lenses so they targeted the stakes.
“I have a climbing background, so it’s not so bad for me,” said Farwell, whose master’s thesis will use data from the site to study the connection between forests and the snowpack.
Farwell adjusts the camera so it can photograph nearby snow stakes. “I have a climbing background, so it’s not so bad for me,” she said. Photo: Mitch Tobin/The Water Desk
Parker Randles, a sophomore at Fort Lewis College in Durango who is working toward his Snow & Avalanche Studies Certificate, had another demanding job: using a post driver to jam the stakes into the ground, which was sometimes unforgiving due to buried rocks.
“There were some rough spots, but overall it went pretty smooth,” said Randles, a ski patroller who said he was interested in the project because “snow is super cool to me.”
Even if a transect is short enough for someone to throw a snowball from one end to the other, the depth of the snow along that line will be anything but uniform. In fact, the researchers have deliberately chosen sites where conditions change markedly over short distances so they can understand how this variability affects the snowpack.
“Our goals are, one, to improve our understanding of forest dynamics and snowpack, and that’ll help us improve our hydrologic modeling, which will help us improve our water forecasting,” Kurzweil said. “But really the primary goal is to understand and work with forest managers and land managers and the Forest Service to say, ‘Hey, if you’re going to do forest treatments, can we optimize the treatments to accumulate and retain snow?’”
Kurzweil and Parker Randles, a Fort Lewis College sophomore who is working toward his Snow & Avalanche Studies Certificate, drive a stake into the ground that will hold a measuring stick. Photo: Mitch Tobin/The Water Desk
The collaborative effort is meant to complement the existing network of more than 900 automated SNOTEL sites that are scattered across the West and run by the federal Natural Resources Conservation Service. These monitoring stations employ a “snow pillow” filled with antifreeze liquid that can calculate the weight and water content of the snow above. They also measure snow depth and climatic conditions, but the SNOTEL stations can only beam data on a single point, giving a useful yet very limited glimpse at snow conditions.
“Critically, that one location was almost never in the forest. So we had information about snow conditions in open clearings, and not just any open clearings, but usually SNOTELs were located in positions on the landscape where snow persisted for the longest,” said Joel Biederman, a leader in the snowtography effort at the Southwest Watershed Research Center, part of the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service. “Trees have all these effects, and the way that they’re arranged geometrically are what we would call the 3D forest structure. It matters.”
In addition to gathering images from the cameras, scientists will learn about changes in soil moisture and collect data on “snow water equivalent,” the key measure of how much water lies within the snowpack.
“We’re really accountants for water, if you will,” Kurzweil said. “By having these different data points, it really allows us to quantify how much of that snow is going into the ground, how deep into the ground is it going, versus how much is going into the sky versus how much might be running off.”
Kurzweil and Randles hold measuring sticks that the cameras will repeatedly photograph to learn more about how the snowpack behaves. “We’re really accountants for water, if you will,” Kurzweil said. Photo: Mitch Tobin/The Water Desk
Researchers also want to understand what happens to snow at lower elevations as warming temperatures due to climate change threaten to decrease snow cover.
“Historically, a lot of good snow science has been done, but it’s been concentrated disproportionately in places that are cold, high-elevation, get lots of snowfall and have what we would call a stable seasonal snowpack,” Biederman said. “There’s an increasing prevalence as winters are warming of ephemeral snowpacks in places that used to have stable snowpack at kind of moderate elevations or lower latitudes, like here in Arizona.”
Across the West, scientists are employing and exploring a variety of technologies to improve the accuracy of snowpack monitoring, including shooting lasers out of planes and using satellites to aid in measurement. But even with a much clearer picture of how much snow is on the ground on April 1, a key date for the Southwest’s seasonal water supply, researchers and water managers still face challenges in predicting spring and summer streamflows, particularly in a place like Colorado where April and May can feature major snowstorms and highly variable weather.
“Even if we have perfect snow information and we could absolutely 100% quantify the snow at any time, we will still have runoff forecast uncertainty from the weather component alone. We don’t know on April 1st how the rest of spring is going to play out,” said Jeff Lukas, an independent climate researcher formerly at the University of Colorado Boulder who isn’t involved in the Colorado snowtography project.
While SNOTEL has limitations, it’s still the “essential backbone of snowpack monitoring and will remain so,” Lukas said. The Rio Grande Basin has been the “classic example in which SNOTEL has not worked as well” in predicting subsequent streamflows, Lukas said, possibly because the monitoring sites don’t capture the variability in the landscape. “Because of where they are and where they aren’t,” he said, “you can get a misleading picture in more years than in other basins where SNOTEL tends to work pretty reliably, at least at peak (snowpack).”
Scientists will examine how the snow depth changes at numerous points along a straight line known as a transect. They’ll also learn about changes in soil moisture and collect data on “snow water equivalent,” the key measure of how much water lies within the snowpack. Photo: Mitch Tobin/The Water Desk
The nearly $250,000 in funding supporting the two new snowtography sites in Colorado, each with dozens of sampling locations, is comparable to the cost of building, permitting and installing a single new SNOTEL station, but the snowtography funding also covers two years of monitoring and scientific research.
Funding for the project comes from the Southwest Water Conservation District, The Nature Conservancy, Town of Silverton, Northern Arizona University, Colorado Water Conservation Board and San Juan Headwaters Forest Health Partnership.
Other partners in the Colorado project include the Mountain Studies Institute, Fort Lewis College, USDA Agricultural Research Service, Dolores Water Conservancy District, Dolores Watershed Resilient Forest Collaborative, Center for Snow and Avalanche Studies and Western Water Assessment.
Researchers also have installed snowtography equipment in other Western states, including Arizona and Wyoming.
“Things are growing rapidly. We now have 15 snowtography stations averaging about 40 or 50 measurement locations. So daily snow depth at 40 or 50 points times 15,” said Biederman. “It’s our goal to get to where we’re actually informing management, but we’re not there yet.”
Drone-captured image above Red Mountain Pass, which is more than two miles above sea level. Researchers also want to understand what happens to snow at lower elevations as climate change threatens to further diminish the snowpack. Photo: Mitch Tobin/The Water Desk
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Exposed microbialite reefs create beautiful patterns at the surface of Utah’s Great Salt Lake. Credit: Photograph courtesy of the Utah Geological Survey
By Wynne Parry, bioGraphic | August 20, 2023
True to its name, the Great Salt Lake contains a great deal of salt. In the lake’s northern arm, salinity is so high that crystals spontaneously form on the surface, then sink into water tinted pink by salt-loving microbes. South of the 20-mile-long railroad causeway that divides the lake, influxes of fresh water lead to more prosaic hues of brown and green. Even there, though, the Great Salt Lake can be more than five times saltier than the ocean.
Salinity this high prevents water from freezing, corrodes and pummels boats, and increases buoyancy—perfect for people who want to float, but resistant to anyone who attempts to dive in. Should you try, and happen to open your mouth, the taste of the water reportedly calls to mind the burn of a salt lick.
A considerable snowpack and runoff this year has once again submerged the microbialite reefs left high and dry by recent drought conditions. But scientists are worried that this year’s runoff is an anomaly and that drought and high water demand will continue to threaten this ecosystem. Credit: Photograph courtesy of the Utah Geological Survey
Most living things can’t handle this salinity. There are no fish, no mollusks, not even any plants in the main body of the lake, which covered 2,300 square miles of northern Utah’s high desert in the 1980s. But paradoxically, the Great Salt Lake teems with life. Two tiny animals, brine shrimp and brine flies, thrive in its waters in enormous numbers. They in turn feed as many as 12 million migrating birds, including eared grebes (Podiceps nigricollis), red-necked phalaropes (Phalaropus lobatus), and American avocets (Recurvirostra americana).
Living in the Salt Lake Valley in the 1980s, my family had a strong connection to Utah’s wild and sometimes strange places. I grew up visiting the lake once or twice a year—more than most people I knew. With its swarms of brine flies, quicksand-like mud, and sulfurous odor, the Great Salt Lake doesn’t make for a conventional day trip. While other kids my age vacationed at Lake Powell much farther south, my family explored the shore of our local saline lake and waded in its briny waters.
Scientists survey exposed microbialite reefs at the edge of a shrinking Great Salt Lake. Credit: Photograph courtesy of the Utah Geological Survey
Over the past couple of years, however, average Utahns, as well as people elsewhere in the country and the world, have paid more attention to the Great Salt Lake. In 2021 and again in 2022, the lake’s level plunged to record-breaking lows, making headlines and raising the apocalyptic specter of a barren future lakebed, largely devoid of wildlife. In this dire scenario, winds traveling across the dry expanse will loft increasing amounts of toxic dust into nearby communities, and industries that depend on the lake will suffer, including the brine shrimp fishery, which supplies tens of millions of pounds of dormant brine shrimp eggs to fish and shrimp farms around the world.
From my current home on the East Coast, I followed news of the lake’s retraction. And with a mixture of curiosity and worry, I visited again in October 2022. At the lake’s southern edge, I looked out over a muddy, vacant marina and a vast, smooth beach. Further out, beyond a channel dredged to let boats pass, was something I had never seen over decades of visits: An exposed reef. It protruded above the mirrored water like a scab over a wound, its grey mass stretching across the horizon.
Although the reef was now high and dry, it had formed underwater, built by communities of microbes over potentially thousands of years. Here and at other sites across the lake, salt-tolerant, single-celled organisms draw calcium carbonate from the lake water and deposit it in ridges, mounds and other shapes. Like coral colonies, these structures—known as microbialites—can grow to form massive reefs. And like corals, they support entire communities of living things.
Microbialites aren’t unique to the Great Salt Lake. Researchers have documented microbes hard at work building similar structures in the protected waters of Shark Bay, Australia, in Alchichica crater lake in Mexico, and around the vent of a geothermal spring in India, to name just a few places. All of these modern microbialites belong to a primordial lineage; scientists have found fossilized ancestors that date back roughly 3 billion years.
Geologists began studying Utah’s microbialites during various dry periods in the 20th century before the lake rose and submerged them again. In recent years, as the shrinking lake has exposed progressively more barren reefs, researchers have been studying microbialites and the organisms they support to learn what an ongoing drought and demand for water might mean for this spare yet vibrant ecosystem.
The falling water level of The Great Salt Lake has reveal many stunning patterns and countless insights, but scientists are worried about losing the microbialite reefs that help sustain this vital ecosystem should the region’s drought and rising water demand continue. Credit: Photograph courtesy of the Utah Geological Survey
The remnant of a much larger, ancient body of water known as Lake Bonneville, the Great Salt Lake receives much of its water as snowmelt from the nearby mountains. The water from most freshwater lakes eventually escapes via outlet streams to rivers and then flows to the ocean. But the Great Salt Lake, like other saline lakes around the world, is locked in its basin. With no outlet to carry minerals away, those that arrive in mountain runoff concentrate in the lake water.
The level of the Great Salt Lake typically fluctuates over the course of the year, reaching a low point in October before rebounding with spring snowmelt. But since the 19th century, homes, farms, and industries have drawn enough water from the lake’s tributaries to drive a long-term decline. The drought that’s gripped the Southwest for the past 20 years has exacerbated the situation. In fall of 2021, the lake dropped to a record low of 4,190.4 feet above sea level. When I visited in fall of 2022, it had fallen even further, to less than 4188.8 feet. Overall, it had lost more than half of its historical surface area and nearly three-quarters of its water, according to a report released in early January.
While in Utah, I accompanied a group of scientists to the lake. Much-needed snow and rain had fallen a few days earlier, and now, a porous layer of clouds blocked the sun. In groups of two, we ferried across the glassy water on a paddleboard until everyone stood atop the reef I had seen from shore. Then we fanned out across “the graveyard,” as one student described the skeletal mounds of dried microbialites beneath our feet. Further out, the exposed reef sank to meet the water, the mounds giving way to small, nearly swamped ridges that eventually faded into reflected sky.
Scientists use paddle boards to move from one exposed microbialite reef to another in Utah’s Great Salt Lake. Credit: Photograph courtesy of the Utah Geological Survey
Michael Vanden Berg, a geologist and microbialite scientist with the Utah Geological Survey, gauged the history of one of the grey structures by kicking it. “I can tell you this has never been exposed before,” he said. “It’s still spongy.”
Parts of this reef likely surfaced around 1963, when the lake reached what was then its record low. Exposure to Utah’s intense sun and dry air would have hardened these tall mounds, rendering them more rocklike. In 2021, as the lake dropped below its previous record, it exposed new microbialites, including the one Vanden Berg kicked. That mound had almost certainly been growing undisturbed underwater long before Mormon settlers began recording lake levels in the mid-19th century.
When reefs are submerged, the living microbes that built them coat their surface. But marooned above the water, the organisms die within about two weeks, Vanden Burg told me. This reef was already thoroughly desiccated, the heat and sun leaving behind only stony remains. Yet at the foot of the mounds and nearly covering the low ridges, I saw remnants of the reef’s living skin; it was dark and knobby, with a rusty hue.
Scientists discuss the state of exposed microbialite reefs in Utah’s Great Salt Lake. Credit: Photograph courtesy of the Utah Geological Survey
This layer might look like unremarkable crud, but it contains hundreds of species of bacteria, archaea, fungi, and silica-shelled algae called diatoms. The members of the mat include Navicula, a diatom shaped like a boat viewed from below, and Euhalothece, a kind of cyanobacteria—the group of organisms that invented photosynthesis. Euhalothece and other photosynthetic microbes turn sunlight and carbon dioxide into food for other living things in the lake. Not only does photosynthesis aerate water with the oxygen it produces as a byproduct, it also changes the water chemistry in such a way that granules of the mineral calcium carbonate can form. Those granules, plus other bits of debris, adhere to the sticky goo that Euhalothece secretes. In this way, the stony structure beneath the mat accumulates and grows over millennia.
Rob Baskin, a hydrologist who’s since retired from the U.S. Geological Survey, is among the few people who have seen this underwater ecosystem firsthand. Nearly two decades ago, Baskin began mapping the contours of the lake bottom. His sonar revealed unexpected rough patches. He had read about microbialites in research published in 1938 and suspected they might be responsible. Putting on his SCUBA gear with extra weight to counteract the lake’s increased buoyancy, he dove down for a look.
Underwater, he found mounds like those I had stood on, but instead of barren and gray, they were a dark, dense green and bore dozens of pale, wormy brine fly larvae. Tiny brine shrimp swam nearby. Gas bubbles, presumably oxygen, clung to the living reef.
“It was just”—he paused and exhaled sharply—an “ecstasy of motion.”
Scientists wade among partially submerged microbialites at the edge of Utah’s Great Salt Lake. Credit: Photograph courtesy of the Utah Geological Survey
Eleven years after Baskin’s dive, when I visited the lake, he suspected that the swarm of life he encountered had gone still. Researchers estimate that in the summer of 2022, receding water left up to half of the microbialites in the lake’s southern arm to dry out, with consequences that will likely reverberate up the food chain.
Brine fly larvae rely on the microbialites for shelter and also eat their microbes. Brine shrimp, meanwhile, feed primarily on microbes in the water, but they too munch those that form the microbialite’s living skin. The flies and shrimp, in turn, nourish resident wildlife like the California gull (Larus californicus), as well as the roughly 330 species of migrating birds that stop here.
The receding lake’s ever more concentrated salt content has already pushed salt-tolerant organisms closer to their limits. All the microbialite-building communities in the northern half of the lake, for example, are dead. And scientists have suspected that the increase in salinity and the desiccation of microbialites are squeezing brine flies. During the summer, brine flies typically rise in clouds around the feet of anyone walking along the shore. Second only to the lake’s distinctive smell, the flies are perhaps the thing Utahns most love to hate about the lake—until recently.
A group of gulls lifts off over The Great Salt Lake in Utah. Credit: Photograph by Jason Finn / Shutterstock A California gull, feasts on brine flies at the edge of Mono Lake in California, another key stopover for migrating birds. Credit: Photograph by Farjana.rahman / Shutterstock Brine flies gather in abundance at the edge of and on the surface of the Great Salt Lake, providing much needed food for migrating birds. Credit: Photograph by Floris van Breugel
“We haven’t seen flies in any number for months,” biologist and Great Salt Lake Institute director Bonnie Baxter told me when I met with her in October of 2022. “This summer has just been eerie.”
To get a better handle on the flies’ fate, Baxter had invited David Herbst, a self-described “salt lake junkie” and freshwater ecologist and physiologist at the University of California-Santa Barbara, to join the expedition. Standing with Vanden Berg, Baxter, and other scientists atop a partially submerged reef, Herbst swept his foot through the water. Like caterpillars metamorphosing into butterflies, brine fly larvae anchor themselves to microbialites to form pupae. “There should be hundreds of pupae floating to the surface,” he explained. “There’s none, or at least very, very few, and those that are [here] are not looking viable.” The few that did rise resembled elongated grains of dark rice; many appeared too small to produce adults.
The loss of brine flies will inevitably impact the birds that eat them, says John Luft, the Great Salt Lake ecosystem program manager at the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources. When Luft’s group and the National Audubon Society examined data on 37 bird species collected over 21 years, they saw a significant decline in only one, the redhead duck (Aythya americana). But preliminary data suggest bigger declines may be on the horizon, and Luft and others worry that the relatively stable bird populations in the Great Salt Lake region may conceal the impact of lost water and food, here and elsewhere.
“We often hear that, oh, the birds can just go somewhere else. But really, when all the saline wetlands and lakes of the West are experiencing this problem… I fear that certain species are going to see declines.” — Heidi Hoven, Audubon
The Great Salt Lake belongs to a network of saline water bodies across the western U.S. that provide critical habitat for millions of migrating shore and water birds, including 90 percent of Wilson’s phalaropes (Phalaropus tricolor) and 99 percent of the North American population of eared grebes. Overconsumption of water and protracted drought are also shrinking the smaller lakes in the network, potentially forcing some birds to reroute to the Great Salt Lake and thus masking local changes. Thanks to its size, the Great Salt Lake “is kind of the last place available,” Luft told me. Overall, populations of migrating shorebirds, which depend on these salty oases, have dropped nearly 70 percent since 1973, according to Audubon.
“We often hear that, oh, the birds can just go somewhere else,” said Heidi Hoven, a conservation specialist at an Audubon sanctuary on the lake’s southern shore. “But really, when all the saline wetlands and lakes of the West are experiencing this problem of drying up, I really fear that certain species are going to see declines in their populations.”
An American avocet forages near Swan Lake Refuge in Lemmon Valley. Nevada. Credit: Photograph by Diane McAllister
Although people have lived in what’s now northern Utah for thousands of years, human demand for the region’s scarce water didn’t become significant until around 1847, when Mormon pioneers began diverting it for farming. Today, agriculture remains the largest user, removing 1.3 million acre-feet annually that would have flowed into the lake. In contrast, homes, businesses, and industries use just 381,000 acre-feet. Altogether, human uses of tributary water account for a decline of roughly 12 feet in the Great Salt Lake’s level, according to David Tarboton, a hydrologist at the Utah Water Research Laboratory. Natural variability in weather explains the loss of another four feet, while warming caused by climate change appears responsible for a drop of more than one foot.
The effects extend beyond biodiversity and into the region’s human communities. Already, winds sweeping across patches of the empty lakebed pick up dust, some of which contains carcinogenic arsenic, and loft it all over northern Utah. Researchers don’t yet know the degree to which the dust affects human health, but it poses one more risk in a region already beset with air quality problems. As the protective crust covering the empty lakebed breaks down, these dust plumes will likely worsen.
The drying also threatens industries. By one calculation, the lake contributes nearly $2.5 billion to Utah’s economy through its brine shrimp fishery, mineral extraction, recreation (the lake is a destination for bird watchers, among others), and through evaporation, which provides moisture that forms clouds and falls as snow on the famous ski resorts in nearby mountains.
Tiny brine shrimp like these serve as a critical food source for migrating birds and other creatures. Credit: Photograph by Jan Hamrsky
Leaders in this desert state have long known they need to better manage its water, including that bound for the Great Salt Lake. But their efforts have recently taken on new urgency.
During the state legislature’s 2022 session, elected officials approved an unprecedented set of measures to support water conservation and related infrastructure. Appropriations made that spring and during the 2023 session have funded efforts to help farmers grow their crops with less water. That money will support tracking the amount of water used for lawns and gardens, as well, and establish a commissioner’s office to coordinate efforts to protect the lake. Legislators also tweaked water law to allow farmers to conserve water without fear of losing their water rights, changes that give them the option of leasing water that they save to a new trust created to acquire water for the Great Salt Lake.
Even if successful, changes like these probably won’t deliver a significant amount of water to the lake for some time. Meanwhile other measures, including one that would have set a target lake level, failed, much to the frustration of environmental advocates.
In a stroke of luck, though, plenty of rain and snow made this past winter one of the wettest on record. Six months after my October visit, the lake level had risen about three feet. Tarboton expects it to rise more this year, but even so, it will likely be three feet shy of the low end of its optimal range.
“What happens after that depends on what we do in terms of conservation,” Tarboton told me, “and what happens with the climate in future years.”
Microbialites, some submerged and growing in the The Great Salt Lakes for millennia, dry out in the early spring sunshine, victims of recent drought and growing water demand in the region. Credit: Photograph courtesy of the Utah Geological Survey
On March 11, 2023, I visited the marina again. Snow covered the mountains and still mottled the lower elevations, and the influx of spring melt had submerged much—but not all—of the reef I had walked on in the fall. The tallest mounds remained clustered above the surface like an archipelago, breaking up ripples driven by a soft wind.
I wondered about the microbialites that had again disappeared beneath the water. History suggests—and researchers’ experiments confirm—that microbial mats can return even after prolonged exposure to air. In the years following the parched summer of 1963, which temporarily exposed some microbialites, those that submerged again “redeveloped a really nice, thick microbial mat,” Vanden Berg had told me. Like all desert creatures, the microbes in the Great Salt Lake have some built-in resilience to drought.
But ensuring the long-term health of the ecosystem they support requires water, and a lot of it. One wet season, even an exceptional one, isn’t enough without other, more drastic changes in how people consume water—and how much fossil fuel we burn. Still, looking out over the gently moving water, a silvery mirror to the sky’s rich blue and cottony white, I found it hard to imagine an end to the Great Salt Lake, or to the flurry of life hidden beneath its surface.
Wynne Parry is a freelance writer whose work focuses on science and the natural world. A former Utahn, she has traded that state’s desert and mountains for the streams and woods of Pennsylvania. You can find more of her work at wynne-parry.com.
Tree stump on ice in Antelope Island at dawn. Credit: Photography by kojihirano / Shutterstock
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder.
“It snowed again!” exclaimed Crystal Tulley-Cordova during a phone call on a frigid January morning. After years of drought, it felt like a relief. “This is the most snow the Navajo Nation has seen in a long time,” she said. Only months before—in summer 2022—the nation had been in severe drought. Now it was facing a different emergency, as a lack of local tribal resources to clear roads of snow had left many people without access to food, medical services, and water.
Tulley-Cordova, 40, grew up in the remote community of Tohlakai, New Mexico. She and her family were “water haulers”: They had to drive to fill a tank on a trailer at a “watering point,” which was a livestock well. “I didn’t grow up thinking that water comes out of the tap,” she said. “When you are a water hauler, you have an understanding that the water is coming from somewhere. The water that I grew up on was essentially unregulated livestock water.”
Water Desk Grantee Publication
This story was supported by the Water Desk’s grants program.
Navajo Nation hydrologist Crystal Tulley-Cordova: “I didn’t grow up thinking that water comes out of the tap.”
Like Tulley-Cordova’s family, up to 40 percent of families in the Navajo Nation lack piped water. And like their watering point, many other tribal water sources are feared to be polluted by salinity (from drought and oil production) and the toxic legacy of uranium mining. Even so, Tulley-Cordova’s grandmothers taught her a lesson that would shape her life: that water is connected to the land it comes from and that every drop is unique.
Tulley-Cordova went on to study climate change and its effects on hydrology at the University of Utah. Her PhD dissertation focused on the science behind her grandmothers’ traditional wisdom: pinpointing the stable isotopes that give every drop of water a signature, a thumbprint of its origin, be it from snow, rain, lakes, streams, springs, or groundwater. Now, as one of the Navajo Nation’s principal hydrologists, Tulley-Cordova is responsible for the water security of 173,000 Diné (as the Navajo call themselves) as they struggle to adapt to a 23-year drought, the Southwest’s worst in more than 1,000 years. The significant snowfall last winter provided only a glimmer of relief. “Drought and above-average precipitation and flooding concurrently exist,” she said. “People don’t realize this. It would take a decade-long string of above-average winter precipitation to reverse this situation.”
The Navajo Nation spans the borders of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah, a semiarid region that gets between five and 25 inches of rain a year. The tribe’s water is mostly sourced from 20 aquifers—a finite and dwindling underground supply with a diminishing annual snowpack to recharge it. Additional water is drawn from springs, creeks, and the San Juan River.
But almost no water is drawn from the Colorado River. Although it passes through ancestral Diné lands, the river remains largely untapped by the tribe 174 years after the United States stole its land. (Only the Diné community of LeChee gets its water from Lake Powell.) Now, with water levels hitting record lows and more parties than ever sticking straws in the river, the Navajo Nation is facing off against the Department of the Interior in a Supreme Court case that legal experts say could shape the future of water use—and treaty rights—in the West.
WATER INEQUALITY IN THE UNITED STATES goes hand in hand with the dark legacy of colonization, systematic racism, and efforts to wipe out Indigenous cultures. For the Diné, it began with a treaty signed with the US government in 1849 that placed the nomadic tribe “forever” under the “exclusive jurisdiction and protection” of the United States, which included the promise of establishing a reservation. Instead, starting in 1863, the US cavalry forced 10,000 Diné to walk 400 miles from their homelands to a concentration camp at Bosque Redondo in eastern New Mexico, where they were detained for five years in an effort to eradicate their culture and language. In these “fearing times,” alkaline water caused crops to fail, water and firewood were scarce, and thousands of Diné died of dysentery, exposure, and starvation.
Water inequality in the United States goes hand in hand with the dark legacy of colonization, systematic racism, and efforts to wipe out Indigenous cultures.
When the Diné were released in 1868, they signed another treaty with the United States, Naal Tsoos Sani (“the Old Paper”), which formed the Navajo Nation and guaranteed enough water to sustain it. That promise was bolstered by the Winters Doctrine, after a 1908 Supreme Court ruling on tribal water rights. The doctrine established that the Navajo Nation has rights to the water that is necessary to fulfill the purpose of the reservation that the United States established for them, and that the United States has a federal trust responsibility to protect those rights.
Despite the doctrine, the Diné have struggled to regain access to their water. In 2003, the Navajo Nation sued, claiming that the US had breached that trust duty. Eighteen years later, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit finally sided with the Diné. According to circuit judge Ronald Gould, federal agencies “have an irreversible and dramatically important trust duty requiring them to ensure adequate water for the health and safety of the Navajo Nation’s inhabitants in their permanent home reservation.” To the disappointment of many Diné, President Joe Biden’s Interior Department appealed the ruling to the Supreme Court, which heard the case in March.
Both sides of Interior v. Navajo Nation insist that understandings of the 1868 treaty at that point in time must be considered. The government contends that the main stem of the Colorado River should not qualify for the breach-of-trust claim because the Diné had not established that such trust duties existed. An amicus brief filed by the Diné Hataałii Association, an organization of over 200 Diné medicine men and women, argues that the case must consider how traditional Diné law interpreted the original treaty, which was drawn up while the Diné were under the duress of captivity and desperate to return home. The brief argues that the US has an affirmative duty to assess the Navajo Nation’s water needs and develop a plan to meet them, in keeping with Diné traditional obligations: Tó dóó dził diyinii nahat’á yił hadeidiilaa (“Water and the sacred mountains embody planning”) and Nitsáhákees éí nahat’á bitsé silá (“Thinking is the foundation of planning”).
Diné water-law expert Heather Tanana: “For the Supreme Court to take up this case is a little scary. No one can guess the outcome.”
During oral arguments, the US tried to avoid what the Supreme Court watchers at SCOTUSblog called “the default interpretative rules of Indian treaty construction, which strongly favor the Nation.” Instead, the US argued that the 1908 Winters Doctrine had granted the Diné a property right to water but that it wasn’t the government’s obligation to enforce it. Justice Neil Gorsuch, one of the court’s conservatives who is historically sympathetic to the protection of treaty rights, asked, “Could I bring a good breach-of-contract claim for someone who promised me a permanent home, the right to conduct agriculture and raise animals if it turns out it’s the Sahara Desert?”
The representative for the Interior Department expressed concern that a Navajo Nation victory in the case had the potential to limit the water available to other users in the drought-stressed Colorado River Basin, and that it would open up opportunities for other tribes to confront the federal government with similar cases. While a decision in favor of the Navajo Nation would not instantly resolve the tribe’s water woes, it would bolster the nation’s legal efforts, which have been at a standstill for decades. A decision in the case is expected this summer.
Diné water-law expert Heather Tanana, 40, is intimately familiar with the stakes of the case. When she was in middle school, her father, who worked for the Indian Health Service, accepted a job at IHS headquarters and moved the family from the Navajo Nation to the Washington, DC, area. “I saw the real disparity in education and infrastructure like roads and buildings,” she said. “It was my first time sensing not everyone is subjected to poor economic conditions like unreliable water.”
Until the Navajo Nation’s water is quantified, Arizona is making management decisions on water that is legally not theirs.
That unreliability affects the quality of life in Diné communities beyond the availability of drinking water. It limits agriculture, contributes to food insecurity, and delays the construction of essential infrastructure like hospitals. Seeing the effects of federal laws and policies on tribes, Tanana decided to follow her father in service to Native people by pursuing a law degree. But it was her family’s experiences during the pandemic that spurred her focus on water. “When COVID hit, my parents were living in Monument Valley, where high incidence rates were connected to lack of water,” she said. “This is directly correlated to the necessity of hauling water from community source points and thus not being able to take all the recommended CDC precautions.” (At one point in 2020, the Navajo Nation had the highest rate of COVID infection in the United States.)
The Navajo Nation spent $5 million in pandemic relief funds to increase watering points, waive water fees, and distribute disinfectant tablets. But the lack of safe piped water continues to be a health barrier for Diné communities. To address it, Tanana helped launch an initiative with several other tribal members and water experts called Tribal Clean Water, which pushes the federal government to address universal access to clean water for all tribes in the Colorado River Basin.
That objective is, of course, based on the government’s treaty and trust responsibilities as mandated by the Winters Doctrine, and Tanana was initially hopeful when the Ninth Circuit Court upheld it. “The government knew when they established these tribal lands that they didn’t have water and that they needed water to survive.”
That’s why she finds the Interior Department’s position that it has no obligation to provide the water so deeply worrisome. “For the Supreme Court to take up this case is a little scary, just because of everything else they’ve been doing in other cases,” Tanana said. “No one can guess the outcome with high certainty because they have shown they are willing to displace established precedent.”
Map by Anna Riling/Four Corners Mapping and GIS; Background photo: Mylo Fowler
THE UNITED STATES HAS GROWN and prospered by stealing not only Indigenous people’s lands but also their water. While the water rights of the Navajo Nation and 11 other tribes to the Colorado River remain unresolved, the river’s water continues to sustain and develop major southwestern cities. Or, rather, it did before the drought. In the past two years, Lake Powell, the second-largest reservoir in the United States, which harnesses the Colorado behind Glen Canyon Dam, has hit record lows. On a winter walk around Powell’s rim, which spans the Arizona-Utah border, former Navajo Nation water commissioner Leo Manheimer, 67, stopped to look down at the growing “bathtub ring,” the thick coating of white sediment on orange sandstone that marks the falling water level. “As for the lake, there is no middle,” he said. “It should be full and thriving, or it should be no more.”
During Manheimer’s childhood in Shonto Canyon, Arizona, his family didn’t have a car. Instead of hauling water, they collected it from nearby potholes and built earthen dams to capture rainwater for their farm. When he tended his family’s sheep in the surrounding canyons, he never carried water with him. “I knew where all the springs and potholes were,” he said. Manheimer fears that such knowledge will be lost in the shift from traditional lifestyles to a more consumer-driven economy, and with it wisdom about how to adapt to climate change and drought.
Much of Manheimer’s traditional knowledge about the region was gleaned from Diné medicine man Buck Navajo, who was born in 1919 and lived to be 103. Among the massive changes to the landscape that Navajo witnessed was the completion of Glen Canyon Dam in 1963. The Colorado River backed up for 186 miles, flooding Glen Canyon, its tributaries, and many cultural sites of deep significance to form Lake Powell. When Navajo crossed the river to hunt and gather herbs, Manheimer said, “an offering was made at the river, thanking the gods and the deities for success and safe travels.” All that changed after the lake came up. “The lake affected grazing, farming, and the gathering of sumac, a plant harvested to make baskets and water jugs.”
According to Buck Navajo’s teachings, the construction of Glen Canyon Dam caused direct environmental and cultural harm. Manheimer said, “[He] talked a lot about the balance of life and how things need to be in sync, in terms of seasons, with animal and human life. There must be balance in weather, and that balance is dependent on the two major rivers, the San Juan and the Colorado. The birthplace of moisture is at the confluence of these two rivers. He taught that this balance was interrupted when Lake Powell flooded the confluence. The lake is receding because the confluence is teaching us all a lesson through the extreme drought.”
APART FROM the Interior v. Navajo Nation ruling, the fate of the Colorado River lies with the seven states that depend on its water—Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming—the signatories to the 1922 Colorado River Compact, which governs the distribution of its waters. Unfortunately, this “law of the river” was drawn up during an abnormally wet period in the Southwest and neglected then-available scientific data pointing to the region’s past prolonged droughts; it over-allocated the water in the river even at its highest flows.
Also ignored by the 1922 compact were the Indigenous peoples who have been stewards of these waters for millennia. In 1963, tribal water rights for reservations adjacent to the Colorado River in Arizona, California, and Nevada were reaffirmed by the Supreme Court in Arizona v. California, but the court blocked the Navajo Nation from intervening, citing the federal government’s role as the trustee of the tribe’s water. While the case defined and recognized tribal water rights as senior to states’ rights, the Navajo Nation wasn’t among the four Arizona tribes whose water rights were quantified as a result of the decision.
In recent years, water levels in Lake Powell and Lake Mead have dropped so low that they risk falling below the minimum level to spin the Glen Canyon Dam’s antiquated turbines to generate hydropower. If levels fall below that, the reservoirs will hit “dead pool,” meaning that no excess water could escape through the dam’s outlets, drastically reducing the water supply for people in Southern California, Arizona, Nevada, and Mexico as well as tribal nations. LeChee and the city of Page, Arizona, have already successfully pressed the Bureau of Reclamation to construct a new outtake tube in the dam, allowing water to be drawn from 100 feet below the current dead pool level.
Last winter’s significant precipitation and snowpack may stave off a worst-case scenario, but to move either reservoir out of long-term danger would require many such winters. Even in recent years with close-to-average snowpack, runoff has been weakened by higher average temperatures and dry soils sucking up the moisture. According to Seth Arens, a climate research scientist for Western Water Assessment, the highest Colorado River runoff years were 1983 to 1986—which happened to be one of the wettest four-year periods in the past 1,200 years. He estimates that even with a similar sustained period of record precipitation, the reservoirs would both still be 7 million acre-feet below capacity. (An acre-foot is enough to supply two or three US homes for one year.) It is unlikely, he said, that Powell and Mead will ever fill completely again.
To prepare for a more arid future while maintaining these two major reservoirs, the Biden administration pressured the Colorado River Basin states to come up with a plan to cut water usage by 15 to 30 percent on top of water reductions made in 2007 and thereafter, but they failed to agree. The Interior Department stepped in with a Solomonic alternative: to spread the cuts evenly among Arizona, Nevada, and California. Finally the states agreed to collectively cut their water use by 3 million acre-feet over the next three years. In exchange, the states will receive $1.2 billion from the Biden administration as part of the Inflation Reduction Act. The deal will only be temporary, and the states will reconvene in 2026 to make bigger and more lasting changes to how they use the Colorado River.
But from the Navajo Nation’s perspective, until its share of the river is determined—likely to fall somewhere between 2 million and 5 million acre-feet a year—other entities will be using their water. “It’s almost an incentive for tribes’ water rights to not be resolved,” Tanana said. “A lot of the tribes tend to have senior water rights that would get priority if they were able to utilize them.”
This is in part why Interior v. Navajo Nation carries so much weight. “Many people have talked about the need for certainty in the Colorado River Basin and settling outstanding water rights,” Tanana said. “This case has the potential to add to the chaos and confusion.” Until the Navajo Nation’s water is quantified, the entire state of Arizona is making management decisions on water that is legally not theirs.
That will change, however. Negotiations over the future management of Lake Powell and Lake Mead, slated to take place in 2026, are beginning to ramp up, and this time, all 30 of the region’s tribes have been invited to participate. Tulley-Cordova looks forward to the negotiations and to sharing her research and knowledge: “We can’t wait for people to create that seat at the table. We have to propose solutions, propose opportunities that we’re willing to participate in to meet our needs.” Tanana is confident that the inclusion of Indigenous perspectives will be part of the long-term solutions for the changing climate and water conditions. “The Navajo Nation, like many [Colorado River Basin] tribes, has traditional teachings about balance,” she said. “For Navajo, the concept of Hózhó means that we must be in balance with ourselves, with our community members, and with the environment. When something gets out of balance, bad things happen.”
The Navajo Nation needs more than paper rights to Colorado River water. It also needs what are known as “wet rights”—settlements that require states or the federal government to provide tangible access to water through the necessary funding and infrastructure. The 2022 Utah Navajo Water Rights Settlement, for example, solidified the Diné’s right to water from aquifers, the San Juan River, and Lake Powell and also granted $210 million in federal funding and $8 million from the State of Utah for drinking-water infrastructure. A 2009 agreement with New Mexico allots the Navajo Nation water from the San Juan River and Cutter Reservoir; some water supports Diné agriculture, while the remainder will eventually be piped 300 miles to the eastern portion of the Navajo Nation and the Jicarilla Apache Nation via the Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project.
Every day as Tulley-Cordova drives to work, she passes the pipeline construction. In February, the Interior Department announced that it would use $580 million, mostly from President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, to fulfill water rights settlements with 12 tribes. Included is $137 million for the Navajo-Gallup pipeline and $39 million for drinking-water infrastructure.
Money is essential to water security in the Navajo Nation, but Tulley-Cordova maintains a Diné perspective on the Colorado River: “How do you place a value on something that’s so special to you, that you want to pass on for generations?”
IN SEPTEMBER 2022, Tulley-Cordova joined three other Diné scientists on a 280-mile field study of the Grand Canyon between Lees Ferry and Lake Mead, looking especially at non-runoff contributions to the river. “Sometimes people only attribute flows in the Colorado River to precipitation events, like snowmelt runoff,” she said. “But there is a major contribution from groundwater, including springs.”
It was Tulley-Cordova’s first float through the Grand Canyon. She said the journey made her reflect on how the water propelling her downriver—much of it sourced from the Navajo Nation—united landscapes, people, and wildlife, upstream and downstream, across the Southwest. The problems facing the Colorado River go beyond human consumption. If water levels fall below dead pool in Lake Powell, it would sever the Grand Canyon and all its wildlife from their primary water source. Rafting down the river, she said, “may not be a possibility of the future.”
An important stop during the Grand Canyon trip was at the confluence of the Colorado and Little Colorado Rivers. According to Diné stories and teachings, it is more than just the geographic uniting of two waterways. It is a sacred place, home to Diné deities, a place for prayers and offerings. “I felt a spiritual connection that has extended for millennia in the region,” Tulley-Cordova recalled, “to know where we are in our land as Navajo people—to fully understand the significance of where we are as a people.”
At the confluence, Tulley-Cordova saw monsoonal runoff form ephemeral waterfalls and transform beaches with rockfall. The Little Colorado’s typically turquoise waters ran a muddy brown—river sediment temporarily churned up by a storm. “I knew that meant it was raining somewhere upstream on the Navajo Nation,” she said. “That water was coming down to meet us at the confluence.”
Update: On June 22, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 against the Navajo Nation, striking down the Navajo claims that the federal government has an obligation to help the Navajo access Colorado River water rights.
Morgan Sjogren is a writer based mostly in the wilds of the Colorado Plateau. She is the author of Path of Light: A Walk Through Colliding Legacies of Glen Canyon.
Mylo Fowler is a photographer who grew up in the Navajo Nation.
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder.
A recent change in California law is expected to result in significantly more public funding for groundwater recharge like this state-run project, which diverted floodwater from the San Joaquin River to a Madera County ranch in winter 2023. Source: California Department of Water Resources
By Nick Cahill | Western Water | September 7, 2023
A new but little-known change in California law designating aquifers as “natural infrastructure” promises to unleash a flood of public funding for projects that increase the state’s supply of groundwater.
The change is buried in a sweeping state budget-related law, enacted in July, that also makes it easier for property owners and water managers to divert floodwater for storage underground.
The obscure, seemingly inconsequential classification of aquifers could have a far-reaching effect in California where restoring depleted aquifers has become a strategic defense against climate change — an insurance against more frequent droughts and more variable precipitation. The state leans heavily on aquifers, drawing about 40 percent of its water supply from the ground during an average water year and up to 60 percent during dry years.
More than $1 billion in state funds could become available to a wide range of projects that replenish groundwater, including flood control improvements and wetlands restoration, according to the Planning and Conservation League and the conservation nonprofit River Partners, which pushed for the designation.
“We’re not talking about [funding] one thing at a time anymore — flood control or recharge or improving wetlands — but now everything.” ~Judy Corbett, Planning and Conservation League board member
“There’s no question this is a critical step,” said Judy Corbett, a board member of the league. “We’re not talking about [funding] one thing at a time anymore — flood control or recharge or improving wetlands — but now everything.”
The new law also positions local water managers and nonprofit groups to potentially tap Proposition 1 funds – a 2014 statewide bond that dedicated $7.5 billion for water projects – and a sweeping climate resilience bond that Gov. Gavin Newsom and lawmakers are planning for the 2024 statewide ballot.
In the world of environmental policymaking, “natural infrastructure” refers to natural landscape features that provide concrete benefits to the public and to wildlife. Wetlands and floodplains, for example, can slow and retain water to reduce flooding while filtering pollutants and providing habitat for fish and water birds.
Bringing Basins into Balance
Adding the designation to aquifers opens doors to a wider array of funding programs. Water suppliers and communities looking to replenish groundwater basins and jumpstart flood control improvements can now compete for state funds on more equal footing with projects to restore riparian forests, floodplains, coastal wetlands and other types of natural or green infrastructure.
Matt Hurley, who helps farmers in Fresno County balance their groundwater use, said the additional funding opportunities could help local water managers comply with California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act.
Widespread flooding following this year’s epic snowfall piqued California lawmakers’ interest in ways to store more water underground, as this Fresno County orchard did in March with floodwater diverted from the nearby Kings River. Source: California Department of Water Resources
The 2014 law requires local managers of the state’s most depleted aquifers – many of them in the San Joaquin Valley – to end overpumping and bring their basins into balance by 2040 or 2042.
“Clearly river and floodplain-related items are going to get more water in the ground,” said Hurley, general manager of the McMullin Area Groundwater Sustainability Agency. “If we’re trying to deal with groundwater overdraft by recharging to offset it, sure it would be helpful to provide more funds for [floodplain projects].”
In the past, putting water back into a California aquifer wasn’t considered a public benefit under the state’s resources code but rather a strategy water districts and growers used to protect their interests against drought.
Projects to expand floodplains or restore wetlands for wildlife habitat or flood control didn’t qualify for state grants earmarked for recharging groundwater even though these improvements would help replenish water tables tapped for drinking water and irrigation.
Likewise, many groundwater recharge projects that coincidentally provide flood relief and bird and fish habitat missed out on state funds for environmental restoration and flood control.
Recasting Aquifers for Public Good
The solution, proposed by environmental groups, former Assemblyman Roger Dickinson and officials with the California Department of Water Resources, was to expand the state’s view of natural infrastructure.
“This bill would add ‘aquifers’ to a list of examples of aquatic or vegetated terrestrial open spaces for purposes of this definition of natural infrastructure.” ~Text of Senate Bill 122
Following a winter of historic snowfall and widespread flooding, lawmakers were eager to talk about ways to store more water underground.
In April, Assemblymember Steve Bennett, D-Ventura, proposed bringing aquifers under the umbrella of natural infrastructure in Assembly Bill 900, saying the expanded definition would increase state grant opportunities for a wider variety of recharge projects.
Bennett’s proposal eventually ended up as a single sentence in Senate Bill 122, a 62-page “trailer” bill needed to implement the state budget for the 2023-24 fiscal year.
Ann Hayden
Ann Hayden, who promotes “climate resilient water systems” for the Environmental Defense Fund, applauded the change, saying it was far overdue for the state to invest in aquifers like it would a dam or irrigation canal.
“We’re learning – far too late – that the aquifers need ongoing care and management,” Hayden said in an email.
The move comes as California steps up efforts to protect its underground water supply.
Earlier this year, Newsom signed an executive order that temporarily allowed water managers and property owners to pull water from flooded streams and store it underground without a permit. The state estimates nearly 4 million acre-feet of water went back into aquifers this year, enough water to supply 11 million households for a year. The budget trailer bill extends the streamlined floodwater diversion rules through 2028.
The banner 2022-2023 water year created a flood of interest in groundwater recharge and inspired the relaxed regulations, said Paul Gosselin, California Department of Water Resources deputy director of sustainable groundwater management.
“This allows people to plan ahead, invest and start thinking about how to divert water if and when the next big atmospheric river event occurs,” Gosselin said.
Capitalizing on ‘Climate Resilience’
With aquifer replenishment now deemed a public benefit, more recharge projects are certain to come online before the next banner water year and increase the state’s ability to corral floodwater.
The change in law also appears to be designed to help aquifer projects capitalize on a new “climate resilience” bond that is likely to land on the 2024 ballot.
“It’s another tool in the box, it means there’s more channels for funding.” ~Charles Delgado, Sustainable Conservation’s policy director, on designating aquifers as “natural infrastructure”
A bond proposal still pending in the Legislature includes hundreds of millions of dollars for groundwater-related projects and states “preference shall be given to natural infrastructure projects.”
The decision to invest in aquifers mirrors a policy California adopted in 2016 when then Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation that defined the upper mountain watersheds that are the source of water for the State Water Project and federal Central Valley Project as “integral components of California’s water infrastructure.”
A key function of the bill was to make source watershed restoration projects eligible for the same funding as other water collection and purification infrastructure, such as wastewater treatment plants.
Many California water experts cast the expanded natural infrastructure definition as a simple fix that will benefit farms, communities and ecosystems.
“It’s another tool in the box, it means there’s more channels for funding,” said Charles Delgado, policy director at Sustainable Conservation, a California advocacy group.
“It’s really important that we find ways to do projects that not only put water back into the ground,” he said, “but shore up community drinking water supplies, address water quality issues and also safeguard the environment.”
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Nicolás Pineda, professor of public policy at the Colegio de Sonora, Hermosillo, Sonora, México. Behind him is the artificial lake that partially supplies Hermosillo’s drinking water. Credit: John Washington
As severe water scarcity becomes an increasingly real and increasingly dire prospect for Arizona, looking south to Sonora offers important insight. Understanding the experience of our neighboring Mexican state in recent decades could also help steer Arizona towards a more responsible – and less dry – future.
To learn more about the water challenges Sonora has long faced and how they mirror those in our state, Arizona Luminaria spoke with Nicolás Pineda, professor of public policy at the Colegio de Sonora, Hermosillo, Sonora, México. His research focuses on water policy and urban water governance in México and the U.S.-México border region.
“We can learn from Arizona, and maybe Arizona can learn something from Sonoran towns as well,” Pineda says.
Hermosillo, the state capital, used to be known as Pitic, an Indigenous Seri word meaning “where the rivers meet.” It was a place where “you could have access to water all year round,” Pineda says. That’s no longer the case.
Pineda explains the history, and what Hermosillo — one of the hottest cities in all of Mexico — has done to try to guarantee water for its residents and businesses.
The shallow Abelardo L Rodriguez dam in Hermosillo, Sonora, finished in 1948. The water typically dries up every year in the summer heat.
Sister cities
There are a lot of comparisons to make between Hermosillo and Phoenix, Pineda says. They are both capital desert cities with rivers that can’t provide enough water for consumption. Both cities also continue to grow, and both of their populations contend for water with surrounding agricultural interests.
“In Hermosillo, we’re seeing increased competition between city dwellers and farmers,” Pineda says. That tension may soon be matched in the Phoenix area.
“The city has a big problem with efficiency,” Pineda says of Hermosillo. Inefficiencies include unaccounted for water — as not all of the houses have meters — and leaks. In total, he says, more than 71 million cubic meters of water are lost in Hermosillo every year. That’s about 19 billion gallons, or enough to fill about 30,000 Olympic size pools.
While major cities in Arizona don’t waste nearly that much water, excessive usage north of the border remains a serious issue.
With the Colorado River being depleted by a decades-long drought — poignantly made clear by the “bathtub ring” left around Lake Mead — the agriculture industry, which uses more than 70% of Arizona’s water, will have to act fast to adapt to hotter conditions and less water accessibility.
Paul Brierley, Director of Arizona Department of Agriculture, told Arizona Luminaria that rising temperatures, and the region’s decades-long drought, will have unexpected impacts as well.
Heat and limited water “change the equation a little bit about the types of pests and plant diseases we see,” Brierley said. He added that the crops themselves farmers grow may have to change.
A May 2021 study for the National Bureau of Economic Research estimated that a two degrees Celsius increase in temperature would effectively “eliminate profits from the average acre of current farmland in the eastern U.S.” Farmers in the western U.S. may be better able to adapt, but still face stiff challenges in the summer growing seasons.
Arizona cities, and their residents, which account for about 22% of total water use in the state, also need to start adapting. While Arizona is ahead of the curve compared to Sonora, “there’s a lot Arizonans should be doing to save more water,” Pineda says.
One of the major problems facing both states is what Pineda calls “pork politics.” In Hermosillo, he explains, the city keeps changing the water directors.
In Arizona, Gov. Katie Hobbs accused her predecessor, Doug Ducey, of sitting on a report that showed some areas in Phoenix — undergoing a development boom — do not have the mandatory 100-year water supply to continue building.
The state will begin limiting future growth in some areas around Phoenix. Unchecked urban growth is the major factor in Hermosillo’s water challenges, Pineda says. Understanding how such growth affected the water supply is important, he says, if we are to avoid going completely dry.
A history of water management and mismanagement
Farmers in the valleys around Hermosillo — growing vegetables, cotton and feed crops — started using electric pumps in the late 1940s and ‘50s, Pineda explains, as they began developing agriculture in the area between the city and the Gulf of California, about 80 miles west. At the time, the pumps were drilled down about 7 meters below the surface to dip into the aquifer.
Today, wells have to be drilled down to about 120 meters below the earth to reach the aquifer. And some of the water, in recent years, is coming up brackish, meaning the aquifer is so depleted that it’s below sea level, and has been tinged with salt water.
To deal with a burgeoning urban population and more farmers — beginning to grow wheat as well — the city built the Abelardo L Rodriguez dam, finishing it in 1948.
The dam was originally intended to store water for farmers, but it was poorly designed, critics have long contended. “They say it’s a very bad dam because it’s basically a large mirror and the water evaporates,” Pineda says. “It has very little depth and, especially in the summer, it dries up completely.”
In the 1970s the city started pumping dam water into residential pipes as well. There were about 80,000 people living in Hermosillo at the time, but demand was increasing.
The population now almost reaches a million.
The area around the San Miguel River, which curves its way through downtown Hermosillo, frequently flooded, causing a problem for the growing city. So, in the 1980s and 1990s, “the city urbanized the river,” Pineda says, turning what was a frequently flooding and often muddy waterway into a cement chute. But, Pineda says, controlling water with concrete — both the dam and the paved riverbottom — didn’t match the growing demand for water.
Looking for water elsewhere
“The focus has always been on supply,” Pineda says. “If there’s not enough water, you need to bring more water, but we’re trying to refocus on ‘demand management,’ and not just bring more water to meet constantly growing needs.”
Hermosillo uses as much water as Tijuana, Pineda offers as an example. And yet Tijuana has a population of about four times as large as the Sonoran city. Leaks and inefficiencies are the primary culprit of Hermosillo’s over-usage, Pineda says.
The San Miguel river, which was “urbanized” in the 1980s and 90s to control flooding, trickles through downtown Hermosillo.
Water shortages in the late 1990s and 2000s led Hermosillo officials to implement the first “tandeos,” or water restrictions, cutting off water to parts of the city for a few hours every day. “It was a problem with the city growing too fast,” Pineda says.
“Mismanagement and bad planning made things worse,” he says. The restrictions helped, but, with a still-growing population, it wasn’t enough.
In 2010, the Sonoran government proposed the construction of an aqueduct which would transport water from the Yaqui River, about 80 miles away, to Hermosillo. Critics, among them members of the Yaqui tribe, said that developers failed to consult relevant local stakeholders and were illegally pushing forward on the project.
The Independencia Aqueduct, which started flowing in 2013, now accounts for 20% of Hermosillo’s water. 10% comes from the nearby dam, and the remaining 70% comes from wells — which continue to suck up the depleting aquifer. Even with the aqueduct running, it’s still not enough.
“Could something like CAP be built in Hermosillo?” Pineda asks.
The Central Arizona Project aqueduct, commonly known as CAP is a more than 300-mile system of built waterways that carries water from Northern Arizona to Phoenix, Tucson, and elsewhere.
The project was enormously expensive and largely funded by the federal government. Given the exorbitant costs, and necessary local, state and federal cooperation, “something like CAP is just not possible in México right now,” Pineda says.
Catching water, and using less of it
One small effort – not the ultimate solution but what Pineda says is still important to start scaling back usage and raising consciousness – is rainwater harvesting.
“There is zero water harvesting in Hermosillo,” Pineda says. Hermosillo should follow the models of Tucson and other places, he says.
Tucson mayor Regina Romero has been vocal about the city’s ambitious climate action plan, with a goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2045. Part of the plan, Romero says, includes “investing in urban shade, capturing rainwater to grow trees and native vegetation, promoting infill and transit-oriented development, and piloting cool pavement technologies.”
The consumption of water in desert cities spikes in the summer, Pineda says, by as much as 30% per person. At the same time, both Hermosillo and Phoenix act as heat traps, with temperatures blistering in the “islands of concrete,” Pineda says, which yet further increases water demand.
Most of Hermosillo’s efforts at developing a better water management system, focus on the agricultural sector.
Farmers in Sonora have begun changing to drip irrigation. Similarly, Yuma area farmers, among others in Arizona, are also implementing more water efficient growing systems.
All of the above, “and a lot more,” must be undertaken, Pineda says, for Hermosillo and Arizona’s desert cities to survive. In recent years, the water in the Hermosillo dam has dropped so low that they were days away from not being able to deliver water through city pipes.
In 2022, with another water crisis pending, Hermosillo officials set out to repair wells, install more water meters, provide reserve tanks, and implement electronic leak detection equipment. Not until August, when sufficient rainfall finally hit the city, could residents rest assured they’d have enough water through the end of the year.
Hermosillo could soon dry up even more and simply not have enough water to pump through the pipes. “Those risks exist,” Pineda says. He pointed to Monterrey, in northeastern México, which has had to limit water usage for certain residents.
Though he doesn’t expect water rationing to hit Arizona any time soon, it’s not out of the question. Arizonans have never faced water restrictions, Pineda says, though Tucson has recently taken other steps to decrease water usage, including banning ornamental grass, among other water saving incentives.
For now, Pineda says everyone in the entire borderlands region should be more water conscious.
“If we’re more efficient, we can survive longer,” Pineda says.
Drinking the ocean?
With more than two-thirds of the planet covered in water, albeit salty, many have wondered whether our oceans could be a solution to water shortages. But desalination, or taking the salt out of salt water is not the solution for Sonora or Airzona, Pineda says.
“I think they’d kill the Sea of Cortez,” he says. “They’d release too much brine back into the sea, throwing off the equilibrium.”
An Israeli company, IDE Technologies, proposed in late 2022 a $5 billion desalination plant to be built in the resort city of Puerto Peñasco — the popular vacation destination also known as Rocky Point — which would pump water hundreds of miles away, all the way up to Phoenix.
In a 2022 report to the Water Infrastructure Finance Authority of Arizona, IDE proclaimed that adding a new source of water to Arizona would be a boon for both farmers and cities in the state.
It would also “benefit the sensitive ecosystem of the lower reach of the Colorado River.” The company touted the benefits to Sonora, as not all of the water would have been heading to Arizona. Though there was some initial support for the idea on both sides of the border, Sonoran Gov. Alfonso Durazo Montaño has become a staunch opponent.
After meeting with envoys from IDE in January, Durazo took to Twitter to say that the potential sale of water was a federal matter, adding that IDE was lacking ethics and he wouldn’t meet with them again.
“I am going to defend the interests of Sonorans. That is my responsibility,” Durazo said at a late January press conference, describing IDE’s plans as “utter absurdity.” Despite dashing hopes for desalination, the two countries must work together.
Binational water dialogue remains key, Pineda says.
Our drier future
“We share an ecosystem, a climate,” Pineda says of Arizona and Sonora. He says there’s a lot each state can learn from the other, and it’s important to look not just to innovative technologies, but the ways people have long lived in the desert.
Pineda points to the temperature efficiency of adobe as building material, the use of less thirsty native plants, and more thoughtful urban design.
We may need to revive some older traditions, he says.
A lot of the people who have moved to Arizona and Sonora over the last half-century or so don’t come from desert environments, Pineda explains.
“We need to learn from the history of these places, and the people and plants who have long lived here,” he says.
In other words, looking into the past may be the only way to survive the future.
This article first appeared on AZ Luminaria and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Intrepid though they were, the first European explorers and settlers along the West’s various river systems did a lot of complaining. Pioneers groused about downed trees blocking their path and waterlogged ground that made footing treacherous. Mosquitoes, debris jams, underwater snags, and a confusing network of secondary streams thwarted humans’ attempts at efficient travel.
“It was hard to boat, hard to hike,” explains Ellen Wohl, an author and geosciences professor at Colorado State University who has researched written accounts of early exploration–along with virtually every other aspect of changing stream structure and ecology.
The tangles were particularly thick at headwaters—the source streams feeding into the larger rivers that we know by name, such as the Colorado and South Platte rivers. Beavers typically turned these smaller waterways into a vexing labyrinth of dammed pools and wetlands choked with water-loving willows and trees.
And so, feeling antagonized by the headwaters’ soggy, messy terrain, Colorado’s early European settlers devoted their energies to tidying up. They killed the beavers and demolished their dams; settlers also straightened and diverted the streams to irrigate crops and fill miners’ rocker boxes. Human engineering replaced nature’s infrastructure across most of the state’s headwater systems.
Fast forward almost 200 years and Colorado communities are facing new threats. Catastrophic wildfires, enduring drought, and waterborne pollutants endanger the many cities that developed downstream of headwater systems. Experts now believe that the swampy ecosystems that once tormented early explorers may actually become allies in weathering and adapting to these new threats. Restoring natural infrastructure, such as beaver habitat and the wetlands it creates, could shield communities from damaging floods, remove toxins and high sediment loads from water, and reduce the apocalyptic effects of megafires.
***
The Big Thompson River headwaters flow through Moraine Park, which doesn’t appear to be degraded—at least not to most observers. They see a simple ribbon of water snaking among grasses that allow for unobstructed views of the surrounding summits as well as the valley’s resident elk—making this one of the best-loved areas of Rocky Mountain National Park. Even anglers flock here to cast for Big Thompson trout without worrying about tangling their lines in trees or shrubs, both of which are largely absent.
However, this kind of naked channel isn’t natural, explains Mark Beardsley of EcoMetrics, a collective of scientists that analyzes and restores headwaters. The Big Thompson’s ribbon-like stream resulted from previous generations’ attempts to impose order on what was once a jumbled, waterlogged valley. Before, willows and trees slowed the water’s flow and created sanctuaries for juvenile members of many wildlife species. The slower water also would let woody debris like leaf litter, branches and roots settle out of the flow, keeping downstream rivers cleaner.
Now across Colorado, many headwater streams look as stripped-down as the Big Thompson. “We have simplified our headwaters into ditches,” says Wohl. “Like a tree that’s had all its branches cut off, but actually, all those branches are really important to the health of the tree.”
Ellen Wohl is a geosciences professor and researcher at Colorado State University. Here, she poses for a photograph along Spring Creek, in Fort Collins. Photo by Matt Staver
Changes began with the fur trade in the early 1800s, when trappers all but eliminated beavers from Colorado. By some estimates, today’s beaver population represents just 10% of historical numbers. Without those dam-builders, many headwaters lost the ponds and waterlogged uplands that once filled valleys such as Moraine Park. Where wetlands persisted, settlers drained them to establish streamside homesteads and ranches.
Regardless of where they’re located, headwaters often take on tangled shapes that slow the water’s progress and distribute it across meandering oxbows and liquid fingers that look more like wet webs than streamlined ribbons. Though some Colorado headwaters stop flowing during dry seasons, historically they’re moist, soggy places that keep water on the landscape, like sponges.
And headwater streams are often so small that they could be plowed over or piped underground, explains Wohl. Many were diverted to run mines and ranches. Others served as flumes conveying felled timber, and, says Wohl, as those logs rode snowmelt rushing downstream “it was like taking a scouring brush to the channel.”
The complex of wetlands and connected floodplains found in intact headwater systems can slow runoff and reduce flood flows, creating better downstream conditions, trapping sediment to improve downstream water quality, and allowing groundwater recharge. Graphic by Restoration Design Group, courtesy of American Rivers
Over time, as headwater streams lost their “branches” and became a single trunk of water, they began to act like irrigation ditches that accelerate water, and everything in it, to locations downstream. With climate change intensifying both storms and droughts, the canal-like efficiency of modified headwaters is proving to be a detriment.
Here we see an unhealthy system with an incised stream channel that is disconnected from its floodplain, resulting in reduced water storage, less groundwater recharge, and degraded water quality. Graphics by Restoration Design Group, courtesy of American Rivers
“Floods get bigger, with a higher peak flow for a shorter time,” Wohl says. Researchers are only now beginning to measure the flood-intensifying impact of channelized headwaters and every site is different, but according to unpublished modeling studies conducted by Nicholas Christenden, a PhD student at CSU’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, one Front Range site demonstrated that restored beaver structures and associated vegetation might reduce peak flow by 26%.
Faster, stronger floodwaters threaten bridges and riverside roads, and pollutants—including everything from sediment to agricultural chemicals—get funneled into municipal water sources.
Biodiversity also suffers from this channelization, because without complex wetlands and floodplains, streams support a less diverse population of insects, fish, amphibians, plants, birds and even bacteria.
Yet Colorado has managed to preserve a limited number (about 20% of the state’s total headwaters mileage, estimates Wohl) of “stage-zero” headwater streams that still function as nature designed—streams, which have recovered to near pre-disturbance levels. Stage-zero systems demonstrate remarkable resiliency during extreme weather events, and they’ve persuaded some experts that we need to up our investment in preserving and restoring headwaters, not as we made them, but as they were.
***
Should you hike up to the uppermost reaches of Cochetopa Creek, within La Garita Wilderness in the San Juan Mountains, you will find a waterlogged, willow-choked valley that Wohl adores. “Oh it’s beautiful,” she croons of this stage-zero gem.
With its beaver ponds and meandering secondary channels where juvenile amphibians and fish can take shelter and grow, the Cochetopa Creek headwaters is a de facto sponge that slows and retains water passing through. Floods are dispersed across its many inlets, which trap pollutants and suspend sediment and return clear water to the flow downstream, just as a water treatment plant might do, but without the multi-million-dollar price tag.
Healthy mountain meadows and wetlands are characteristic of healthy headwater systems and provide a variety of ecosystem services, or benefits that humans, wildlife, rivers and surrounding ecosystems rely on.
The complex of wetlands and connected floodplains found in intact headwater systems can slow runoff and attenuate flood flows, creating better downstream conditions, trapping sediment to improve downstream water quality, and allowing groundwater recharge. These systems can also serve as a fire break and refuge during wildfire, can sequester carbon in the floodplain, and provide essential habitat for wildlife.
Cochetopa’s stage-zero beaver complexes store water that’s slowly released during late summer’s hot, dry periods, which improves water quality and quantity for downstream trout, says Dan Brauch, a Colorado Parks and Wildlife fisheries biologist. “That water retention is also important to this area’s agricultural properties, because it means that more water is likely to reach those irrigators for a longer portion of the season,” he continues. Of course not all stream systems react to beaver activity in the same way. A 2015 study looking at the impacts of beaver dams on streamflow and temperature in Utah found that beavers don’t have consistent results on streamflow. During the study period, beaver development caused more variability in stream systems but, the report says, continued study is needed to better predict and understand beavers’ impacts.
The complex of wetlands found in intact headwater systems, such as at Cochetopa Creek, also can serve as a fire break and refuge for the area’s animals during wildfire. “Every living thing that can get there will,” attests Beardsley. After widespread fires, waterlogged headwater systems remain as a “big green patch,” he continues, from which repopulation efforts take hold in the surrounding burn.
These wetlands even sequester carbon in the floodplain to counterbalance the factors fueling climate change. Wohl’s study of North St. Vrain Creek concluded that while its broad, sponge-like floodplains represent just 25% of the total channel length within the river network, they store 75% of its organic carbon. “Headwaters that remain in their original condition provide a lot of ecosystem services,” Wohl says.
Headwaters’ power is their complexity, says Sarah Marshall, a wetland ecologist with CSU’s Natural Heritage Program. “When you take water out of that system,” as has happened at the Big Thompson and so many Colorado headwater streams, “You take away that complexity piece.” It’s like trying to support a reef ecosystem without the coral. Headwater wetlands, like coral reefs, “Provide a structure or a home for a lot of living species, and is itself a living thing, with fungi and bacteria that live in the soil,” Marshall explains. Trout, for example, depend on the deep pools that beavers create to survive the cold Colorado winters, because only those pockets stay warm enough to keep fish alive, whereas most headwater streams are so shallow that they freeze solid.
But the biggest concern about restoring source streams and wetlands comes from downstream water users, including some water providers, municipalities, agricultural producers and others who raise concerns about the potential implications of holding water on the floodplain. These water rights holders worry that water retained upstream in headwaters areas—whether in wetlands or behind beaver dams—might alter or limit the amount of flows or timing of runoff, impacting the water that they legally have a right to use.
But, says Marshall, “If you want to catch fish and you want clean water to drink, you really need the mess upstream.”
***
Indeed, it’s not always easy—or desirable—to try to recreate the past with today’s streams. After all, they’re living, dynamic systems, not museum artifacts, and they’re healthiest when they have the freedom to change and adapt. “You could pick a point in history to return to,” says Beardsley, “But these ecosystems are always changing and evolving. So there’s no point in trying to create a static system.” The idea is to restore streams’ multi-faceted functionality, so earth, water, rock, chemical and biological elements all work together—and then let the system run itself.
In fact, headwaters’ adaptability is precisely what makes them such valuable assets for human communities looking to boost their resiliency in the face of climate change. “We want systems that can react and adapt to future pressures,” Beardsley continues. When torrential rains fall on mountainsides that have been denuded by wildfire, headwater systems can slow the flooding and filter the water before it arrives at municipal infrastructure—but only if these streams retain some version of their original, natural processes.
That’s why the Mile High Flood District (MHFD) recently helped a landowner in Parker to create a development plan that restored Stroh Gulch, a headwater stream that feeds Cherry Creek. Located on a cattle ranch, it includes reaches that have lost their native scrub oak and have become channelized. But as the landowner prepared to offer the property to housing developers, the MHFD collaborated on a vision for the project that would revive the headwater stream’s health and meet builders’ economic needs. Three years ago, E5X Management and Muller Engineering Company accepted the project parameters, and this year, construction begins on the 1,200-acre Tanterra development.
Instead of lining Stroh Gulch with concrete and reducing it to nothing more than a ditch, developers are planting grasses, shrubs and trees that restore the stream’s heterogeneity. “We look at them as infrastructure,” explains Barbara Chongtua, MHFD’s development services director. “One benefit to homeowners is the aesthetic component, that these become places to walk, meditate and play,” she continues. “But the natural system—we refer to it as nature-based solutions—also slows the water down and prevents erosion,” she explains. The water infiltrates the ground closer to its source, so it doesn’t all dump into the active channel. According to simulations conducted by Muller Engineering, the interplay of rocks, shrubs, and trees “really beat down the peak and the frequency of runoff,” says Chongtua.
“The Mile High Flood District is dedicated to protecting people, property, and our environment, and we used to do that with a lot of concrete and rock, to contain [flooding],” Chongtua continues. “But now we’re realizing that we can achieve that protection by working with nature, by working with its living systems, which are a lot more cost-effective and get stronger over time.”
Improving the health of Stroh Gulch makes a positive difference, even though the stream isn’t likely to achieve stage zero status. Headwaters health isn’t an all-or-nothing game: Degrees matter. The rehabilitation efforts that are most likely to succeed also work by degrees, so that the best candidates for restoration typically retain some of their defining characteristics, says Beardsley. For example, it’s hard to relocate beavers to a zone where they have no food, habitat, or building materials.
It’s difficult to relocate beavers, period, says Beardsley. They’re natural forces that humans can’t readily control. So at Trail Creek, located within the Taylor River headwaters between Gunnison and Crested Butte, efforts merely invited beavers onto the mile-long segment. Wanting to improve water quality above Taylor Park Reservoir, local land managers worked with funding partners that included the National Forest Foundation and the Coca-Cola Corporation to restore water-holding wetlands. Beginning in 2021, volunteers sunk wooden posts into the stream banks and wove willows between them to create artificial beaver dams that, they hoped, would attract beavers from the surrounding forests.
It worked: By the following summer, beavers had returned to the valley after a 20-year absence and had constructed a dam and lodge that had begun to saturate the once-parched riparian zone. Retained water nourished the 200-plus willows that teams had planted, and the revived interaction between plants, water and wildlife promises to reverse the encroachment of sagebrush that had replaced riparian plants throughout the corridor.
“The big benefit is that water remains on the landscape,” says Beardsley. “That provides a big resiliency factor in times of drought.”
Coloradans have different needs and face a fresh set of threats that didn’t bear on those European settlers 200 years ago. “We’ve traded away a lot of those functions and benefits [of headwaters] by some of our past land uses,” says Beardsley. “But we can trade back, which is exciting.” Trail Creek and related projects indicate that headwater streams can indeed heal, when humans set them up to self-adapt.
“We don’t know how they should respond to a lesser snowpack or drier conditions or wildfire,” admits Beardsley. But he trusts nature to figure it out. “We have to give [headwater systems] what they need in order for them to give back to us.”
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.
A freelance writer living in Steamboat Springs, Kelly Bastone covers water, conservation and the outdoors for publications including Outside, AFAR, 5280, Backpacker, Field & Stream, and others. She is a regular contributor to Headwaters magazine.
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder.
As many of you know, Luke is not only one of the nation’s finest water journalists but also a leader in the broader field of environmental journalism and board president of the Society of Environmental Journalists.
Water Desk Co-Director Luke Runyon
For the past 12 years, Luke has been a journalist at NPR stations, reporting and editing stories on the West’s environmental issues. As KUNC’s managing editor and reporter covering the Colorado River Basin, he built a successful reporting project from scratch and developed a network of partner news organizations that share work and collaborate on projects—an effort he plans to expand on at The Water Desk.
We’re very grateful to the Walton Family Foundation for supporting our work and allowing us to expand our staff.
We will be making changes to our approach going forward and will use our email newsletter to keep you posted on The Water Desk’s evolution. Although we are not currently accepting applications for grants, we’ll also use the newsletter to announce any future funding opportunities for journalists and media outlets.
In the meantime, we’re continuing to republish water-related stories and also adding new photos and videos to our free multimedia library of key water-related locations in the Colorado River and Rio Grande basins.
Please join us in welcoming Luke to The Water Desk. We’re looking forward to seeing more of his fantastic journalism!
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Jessica makes sure her boys are drinking plenty of water and slathers sunscreen on all three of them. When she deems them ready, like a mother duck and her ducklings, the little group wades into the dry Santa Cruz River, along with the other volunteers. The group traverses the rocky and sandy bed in search of cleaner waterways.
The Santa Cruz River may be dry but on this spring morning it is alive with people who are making a seasonal river cleanup a community conservation tradition in Tucson.
The three little boys look at the river, puzzled about what happens next.
The sound of running water is replaced instead by that of the rustling of trash bags. The bike route above the river is filled with cyclists zooming by.
Jessica White helps her sons, Asher, Corbin and Wade, get ready for the cleanup. They shared a laugh about wearing bandanas like bandits.
At 10 a.m. Luke Cole, the Sonoran Institute’s director for resilient communities and watersheds, stands atop the ramp that leads down to the Santa Cruz River. Cole looks like the intrepid wildlife explorers you would imagine as a child. His cowboy hat, bright, button up shirt and the teal and yellow handkerchief on his neck pair harmoniously with his white, clean-cut beard and mustache.
Through a bullhorn he makes an announcement: We’ve met our goal. Volunteers, you’ve collected 2,000 pounds of trash!
Cheers scatter the air as the message reaches everyone working along the snaking riverbed. The sun never lets up and, after a brief pause, neither do the volunteers. They continue cleaning, pulling, carrying and dragging trash out of the river before the event ends. This is their chance to clear out as much litter as they can before the monsoon season comes, and along with it a flowing river that carries more trash along connected Arizona waterways.
It’s 11 a.m. “Thank yous,” and “Good jobs,” shower down from the bike route as cyclists speed on by and notice the cleaner Santa Cruz River. With the cleanup complete, volunteers trudge their way up the ramp. They return all the supplies, the gloves, the trash grabbers and bags, back to Tucson Clean and Beautiful, a community partner that supplied all the tools used.
The river cleanup event was sponsored by Caterpillar and included partners from governmental agencies, like Tucson Clean and Beautiful and Pima Flood Control, and local ones, like Dragoon Brewing and food truck ViriViriBombBomb! An anonymous donor offered $1 for every pound of trash collected.
Standing together, the group eyes their day’s conservation work.
With about 70 volunteers, they helped collect almost 4,000 pounds of trash out of the Santa Cruz River in just 2 hours. This one stretch connects to miles and miles of Arizona waterways that experts say are critically endangered.
Luke Cole, the Sonoran Institute’s director for resilient communities and watersheds, removes a box spring that had been dumped in the river bed. Claire Zugmeyer, the lead ecologist and project manager for the Santa Cruz River projects, fills a trash bag.
A river at risk
Due to climate change, overuse and outdated management, American Rivers, a nonprofit that advocates for protecting waterways, named the Colorado River the most endangered river of 2022.
The Colorado River is critical to “30 federally-recognized Tribal Nations, seven states, México and the drinking water for 40 million people,” the American Rivers report stated. “Also threatened is vital habitat for wildlife, as the Basin is home to 30 native fish species, two-thirds of which are threatened or endangered, and more than 400 bird species.”
The rivers and lakes connected to it, such as the Santa Cruz River, are also at risk. While water legislation and interstate drought plans are regularly changing, conservation experts argue that without movements in favor of cleaner habits, any efforts to expand water resources will suffer, as those resources become increasingly contaminated.
The institute had planned to host its first Santa Cruz River cleanup in 2020. But then COVID-19 hit and they had to cancel the event. So instead, the Sonoran Institute began working on a trash study with interns from the University of Arizona. The study was made to figure out what kind of trash was in the Santa Cruz River and where.
This analysis is vital information for the future of Tucson’s environmental policies.
They also started the #NotinmyRiver hashtag to make people aware of all the ways they can help by simply picking up trash in their neighborhood. Finally, in October of 2022, they hosted their first river cleanup. They’ve hosted two more since.
The cleanup event concluded with a group picture.
Michael Zellner is the Sonoran Institute’s CEO. In a February interview, Zellner advocated not only for the Santa Cruz River but for a change in perspective that incorporates more personal responsibility and collective community action in conservation efforts.
“For the past 100 years we have been protecting nature from human beings, parks and rivers. ‘Don’t touch it, leave it alone.’ But in the next 100 years what we are seeing is that we have to take care of natural resources for ourselves,” Zellner says. “If you look at it along the Colorado river and all the rivers like the Santa Cruz River, their water is running out. That phenomenon has to do with us, not with nature, and in fact nature will be alright. It will be us that suffer from our conduct.”
For conservationists, the growing worry of the Colorado River water crisis has been getting people more involved with their local bodies of water and pushing people to start asking: How can I be part of the solution?
Melissa Cordero is the Sonoran Institute’s marketing and communications manager. Cordero says they’ve seen a huge influx in community participation, including clicks on their social media pages and questions about how to get involved.
“I think it has a lot to do with our great turnouts to these kinds of events,” she says.
Getting kids involved
Jessica, the mom who took her three sons to the May river cleanup, is a respiratory therapist who works long hours. While she’s careful about how she manages her family’s time, Jessica saw volunteering as an opportunity to work collectively.
Unfortunately, the river being that dirty did not catch her family off guard.
“I live on the southwest side of Tucson near the Casino Del Sol and they’re just dumping trash pretty much everywhere – it just makes me really sad,” she says. “But I was happy that there was a group of people to do it. It’s hard to make a difference, one individual just doing something, so having a big group of people like that can be so impactful.”
Jessica White volunteers with her sons, Asher, Corbin and Wade.
Her boys got a kick out of volunteering.
“They were mostly excited that they got to wear a vest and some trash grabbers,” Jessica says, chuckling at the memory.
The Sonoran Institute works to hold events that are open to anyone, including families with children.
“As far as bringing my kids out there, I didn’t know how that was gonna turn out,” she says. “I didn’t know whether we would last 20 minutes and we would have to leave, but I thought it would be a good opportunity for them to kind of learn about looking outside of themselves.”
Jessica says she was not too environmentally conscious or active until 5 or 10 years ago. She wants her kids to start early.
“I really wanted to get them out and get them introduced to things outside of our little world early, so that they have a broader perspective,” she says. “And so they don’t grow up not wanting to get involved.”
Volunteers pick up as much trash as they can in 2 hours in the Santa Cruz River bed.
We are one: Our river, our community and our change
“It really is important when we are facing challenges like we are right now, when it comes to water conservation and restoration of these rivers, it’s not something just one organization can do,” Cordero says.
Successful outreach and turnout for events starts with collaboration, she says. The institute regularly interacts with organizations like the LGBTQ+ Chamber of Commerce, Watershed Management and Ward 1 and Ward 3.
The institute wants to change the outlook people have on volunteering and environmental activism. They want it to be fun.
“What we’re really trying to do is to set ourselves apart by incentivizing,” Cole says. “All these great local businesses are offering up gift certificates, are offering up bags of coffee and nice treats like that so that we can reward people for coming out here.”
They are also trying to bring out food trucks like ViriViriBombBomb. Dragoon Brewery gave all the river cleanup volunteers of drinking age a coupon for their first drink. “The last thing we want to do is have Tucson’s excited volunteer community get burnt out on cleaning the river,” says Cole.
Jessica appreciated that local businesses like 81 Barbershop and The Loft offered prizes but says internal motivation often outweighs incentives.
“I don’t think that a raffle is going to draw people out to the 90 degree weather to go clean up the river bed if they already don’t have the right intentions,” she says.
Jessica White and son, Wade, walk up a ramp out of the river bed at the end of the cleanup event. Behind them is a pile of trash bags filled by volunteers.
What a river says about its communities
It is vital to clean the river, even if the river does not always carry water, says Cole. Monsoon storms move water from various sources, especially through the downtown corridor of the Santa Cruz River.
“Getting that trash out of the river, even when the riverbed’s dry, at a minimum is us being good neighbors to Marana and other communities downstream where this trash would get washed down into,” Cole says. “Plus the Santa Cruz River is a wildlife corridor, you’re gonna want those beautiful animals to be using a river that isn’t full of trash.”
Cole says that because of the way Tucson is engineered all the water drains into the Santa Cruz River.
“It really genuinely makes a difference for you to clean up trash that you see when you’re walking around in your neighborhood because it will find its way to the Santa Cruz River,” Cole says. “Just throw it in the trash barrel and you’ll feel great for having done it and you’re benefiting the river by doing that too.”
Cole hopes the river cleanups can be done quarterly in coming years. There would initially be one in the spring, in the fall, in the winter and one right before the summer gets too hot and the monsoon season comes.
What you find in a river can say a lot about its city. Sometimes there are medical masks that flutter in bushes on the banks. Thirstbusters that stick out of the sand like trash hermit crabs or used needles that end up in the river bed.
On a good day, sometimes you will find volunteers dedicated to something bigger than themselves.
Glance into the Santa Cruz River on a hot May morning and you would find people ankle deep wrestling with old wet blankets clinging like cement to the moist sand. People walking around with milk gallons, collecting needles to correctly dispose of the hazardous waste.
People throwing faded, torn face masks, a signature pandemic symbol, and thinking back to a time when they could not come together like they did today.
You would see a mom guiding her three little boys, dressed in vests way too big for them, and gripping trash grabbers, working with a community conservation effort to remove nearly 4,000 pounds of trash out of the Santa Cruz River in just 2 hours.
How to get involved
The Sonoran Institute needs donations to further their research and outreach for projects in renewable resources, water conservation and sustaining natural resources. You can follow them on their Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, or Twitter and visit their website for upcoming events and volunteer opportunities.
This article first appeared on AZ Luminaria and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Beavers have constructed a network of dams and lodges on this Woody Creek property. Pitkin County is betting big on beavers, funding projects that may eventually reintroduce the animals to suitable habitat on public lands. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
During the summer of 2020, Woody Creek landowner Jennifer Craig noticed that beavers had taken up residence on her property, building a dam across the channel and creating a pool.
The network of dams, pools and lodges has continued to grow over the past few seasons, creating a lush, muddy wetland thick with willows. And despite what Craig characterized as complaints about flooded land from downstream neighbors and calls for her to clear out the beaver handiwork she says the beavers are beneficial because they keep water on the landscape.
“As an upstream landowner, the best thing I can do is nothing,” she said. “Flooding from a beaver dam is natural, but people don’t like the chaos. Beavers provide habitat for so many other creatures, and they are keeping water in that whole corridor down there.”
Pitkin County is hoping that other landowners see things the way Craig does as it makes beavers a top priority, funding measures that may eventually restore North America’s largest rodent to areas it once lived in the Roaring Fork watershed.
Prized among early trappers for their fur that made fashionable hats, beavers were also seen as a nuisance to farmers and ranchers — perspectives used to justify killing them. But there has been a growing recognition over the past few years that beavers play a crucial role in the health of ecosystems. By building dams that pool water, the engineers of the forest can transform channelized streams into sprawling, soggy floodplains that recharge groundwater, create habitat for other species, improve water quality, and create areas resistant to wildfires and climate change.
The growing popularity of the animal caught the attention of Healthy Rivers board members, a group whose mission includes improving water quality and quantity. They are hoping to teach landowners how to coexist peacefully with beavers, correct beaver misconceptions and maybe even reintroduce them onto carefully chosen areas of the watershed. The Pitkin County Healthy Rivers board has spent just over $70,000 to date, with another $50,000 planned toward bringing back beavers, according to Healthy Rivers staff.
“They are so important for our environment and, in particular, our water environments,” said Wendy Huber, chair of the Healthy Rivers board. “How do we shift people’s perception of them from being destructive rodents to being our partners in protecting the environment?”
Woody Creek landowner Jennifer Craig points out the network of beaver dams, ponds and lodges on her property. She first noticed the animals had moved in during the summer of 2020 and the beaver dam complex has been growing each season. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Forest Service inventory
Healthy Rivers has, so far, come up with two ways to do that.
One is a public-awareness campaign called Bring Back Beavers that features cute yet edgy beaver characters and catchphrases (“It’s About Dam Time,” for example), with plans to put the slogans on T-shirts and stickers. A new website presents beaver facts (their teeth never stop growing) and busts beaver myths (they don’t eat fish).
The other part of the strategy is to fund a program with the U.S. Forest Service for a beaver survey that aims to document more than 200 randomly selected riparian sites on public land in the headwaters over two years to find where beavers are thriving and identify locations where they could be successfully relocated in the future. Healthy Rivers has spent $50,000 on the project, which paid for two Forest Service technicians to carry out the work and has earmarked another $50,000 for next season.
Clay Ramey, a fisheries biologist with White River National Forest, is leading the effort, along with two technicians in the field, Samantha Alford and Stephanie Lewis, who are spending the summer chasing beavers. Ramey said that for a watershed-scale project such as this, it is important to analyze data collected from around the entire region, not just in places where beavers live.
“Beavers come and go, so measuring known sites is not helpful,” he said. “We are in the habitat business, so we want to know the big-picture questions like where do we have beavers, where do we not have beavers and what is the habitat like at the places where we do have beavers and what is the habitat like at the places where we do not have beavers.”
To that end, Alford and Lewis have been heading into sometimes-remote sites on streams throughout the watershed — North Thompson Creek, Fryingpan River, Conundrum Creek, Hunter Creek, Snowmass Creek and others — to measure the width of waterways, the slope of streams, the types of vegetation present and any signs of beaver activity, past or present, such as dams, lodges or chewed sticks.
Beavers generally like slow-moving streams that are not too steep and have plenty of nearby willows, aspens, cottonwoods and alders, which they can use for food and building materials.
“We know slope is relevant to where a beaver can prosper,” Ramey said. “Aspen, cottonwood, alder — a site that has none of those is not a place a beaver is going to do well because it doesn’t have any food.”
Ramey hopes the information collected by the inventory project will be incorporated into revisions for the updated forest-management plan, which is in progress.
Samantha Alford, right, and Stephanie Lewis, technicians with the U.S. Forest Service, measure the slope and width of Conundrum Creek. Pitkin County has spent $50,000 on this summer’s beaver habitat survey and has earmarked another $50,000 for next season. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Beaver relocation
Tom Cardamone, executive director of the Watershed Biodiversity Initiative and former longtime director of the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies, is one of several beaver boosters who have been quietly meeting over the past few months, plotting how to communicate with the public about beaver restoration.
With permission from Colorado Parks & Wildlife, Cardamone has relocated nuisance beavers on Nicholson Creek, which is a tributary of Capitol Creek, but he realized that a more formal protocol will be needed if rehoming them becomes more frequent. An eventual outcome of Pitkin County’s campaign may be relocating troublemaking beavers on private land to sites identified by the Forest Service survey as prime habitat on public land.
“You need to catch a whole group and move them to get them to stick,” Cardamone said. “It takes a few days to catch them and you have to hold them someplace that’s protected and secure, so no predators. You have to clean them and make sure they are healthy and then move them all as a group. That’s a bit of a lift.”
But there may be a looming legal question about new ponds created by relocated beavers. This year, Colorado lawmakers rejected a version of a bill that would have made it easier for environmental groups to do stream-restoration projects that mimic beaver activities because of potential unknown impacts to downstream water rights holders. Engineers from the Division of Water Resources last year told groups proposing projects on Eagle County Open Space that would have included beaver dam analogues that they must get an augmentation plan — which are costly, require the work of attorneys and engineers, and involve a lengthy water court process — to replace the water lost to evaporation by the creation of small ponds.
Could the same thing happen if the ponds were created by actual beavers on Forest Service land?
“We have not seen any indication that there’s a substantial legal concern,” said Pitkin County Assistant Attorney Laura Makar.
That’s good news for Huber, who has such an affection for the creatures that she once tried but failed to carry a favorite stick she found on a Montana fishing trip — its ends chewed and denuded of bark by beaver incisors — through airport security.
“Let’s bring them back,” she said. “They were here first. It’s a no-brainer.”
Aspen Journalism is a nonprofit, investigative news organization covering water, environment, social justice and more. Visit http://aspenjournalism.org. Aspen Journalism is supported by a grant from the Pitkin County Healthy Community Fund. Jennifer Craig is the daughter of Carol Craig, a long-time Aspen Journalism supporter.
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder.
A marina at Blue Mesa Reservoir where boaters are returning in droves, thanks to improved water levels. Photo credit: National Park Service/Matt Johnson
Southwestern Colorado’s Blue Mesa Reservoir, drained by years of drought and a major release of water designed to aid a plummeting Lake Powell, is experiencing a rebirth this summer and could fully fill by the end of the recreation season.
“The water has been shooting up,” says Eric Loken, who manages the two marinas on the reservoir.
Blue Mesa is one of four federal reservoirs in the Upper Colorado River Basin designed to hold water to help the Upper Basin states—Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming—meet legal obligations to send water downstream to Arizona, California and Nevada. The other Upper Basin reservoirs include Utah’s Flaming Gorge, New Mexico’s Navajo, and Utah and Arizona’s Lake Powell.
In 2021, already partially drained by years of drought and thin snowpacks, millions of gallons of water were sent from Blue Mesa downstream to Lake Powell in an effort to bolster that reservoir and keep hydropower-generating turbines operating.
Even more water was released upstream that year, from Flaming Gorge.
But this year, thanks to abundant snows and a cool, rainy spring across the region, Blue Mesa and Flaming Gorge are in recovery mode, according to Alex Pivarnik, a U.S. Bureau of Reclamation hydrologist.
“Flaming Gorge is on the up. Blue Mesa is on the up. Powell is going to be increasing as well,” Pivarnik says.
Two years ago the picture was much different. Marina operators were scrambling to move docks and gasoline tanks as reservoir levels plummeted.
Blue Mesa is Colorado’s largest reservoir, holding more than 940,000 acre-feet of water when it is full. An acre-foot of water equals nearly 326,000 gallons and is enough to serve two to four urban households for one year. Though reservoir levels fluctuate, depending on releases to downstream water users, Blue Mesa held 747,000 acre-feet of water as of July 25, meaning it was nearly 80% full.
Last year, with little recovery in sight, Loken was forced to close the Elk Creek Marina, the largest on Blue Mesa. He, and the thousands of boaters, campers and anglers who visit the giant watering hole, worried that the future was so bleak that the reservoir might not recover.
“There was some concern that it would never refill,” Loken says. “There was concern we might have to send everything we had downstream [to Powell].
“But this year we are way up. It’s a lake again. It’s quite nice,” he says.
And for this year, at least, as the water levels rise, federal officials say there will be no need for additional emergency releases under a special drought plan approved in 2019, giving everyone some room to breathe and enjoy the giant pool.
“There is no plan to do additional drought response [releases] in 2023,” Pivarnik says. “But we don’t want people to sit there and think one good year of runoff and snowpack gets you out of 20 years of drought. We still have to manage for a drier future.”
This article first appeared in Water Education Colorado’s Summer 2023 issue of Headwaters Magazine.
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 numerous donors. Our editorial policy and donor list can be viewed at wateredco.org.
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder.
