i was chatting with my son the other day, he told me he had just gotten back from hike the higher elevations (10k feet) in the john muir wilderness (the bristle cone pine forest area) and he said it snowed...
a lot...
don't know if that is unusual for that time of year...
s. utah has been in an extreme drought for a number of years...
check this out..
(i'm reading abbey's classic "desert solitaire" right now)
contracostatimes.com
Drought reveals 'living heart' of Colorado River
By Sandra Blakeslee
NEW YORK TIMES
ESCALANTE, Utah - In the early 1960s, the nation's environmental movement cut its baby teeth on a fierce battle to stop construction of dams along the Colorado River.
Two proposed dams were never built, but Glen Canyon dam, in an unprotected area, was completed in 1963.
Over the next 17 years, water backed up for 186 miles, forming Lake Powell and inundating Glen Canyon and hundreds of miles of side canyons.
The defeat was deeply felt. David Brower, who was executive director of the Sierra Club, called the death of Glen Canyon the greatest disappointment of his life.
Edward Abbey, the mischievous author and defender of the natural world, called Glen Canyon the "living heart" of the Colorado River and Lake Powell a "blue death."
He often spoke of floating a houseboat filled with explosives to the base of the dam to get rid of "Lake Foul."
What Abbey and the Sierra Club couldn't or didn't do, nature has now accomplished. A severe Western drought -- some say the worst in 500 years -- is shrinking Lake Powell at the rate of up to a foot every four days. Since 1999, the vast reservoir has lost more than 60 percent of its water.
Glen Canyon is returning. It is open and viewable in much of its former glory. At the confluence of Coyote Creek and Escalante River, where boaters once motored by to see famous rock formations, backpackers now pick their way up a shallow river channel.
Fifteen-foot high cottonwoods grow amid thickets of willow, gamble oak and tamarisk. Where fish thrived, mountain lions prowl.
The change may be permanent.
"Short of several back-to-back years with 100-year runoff, Lake Powell will never be full again," said Tom Myers, a hydrologic consultant in Reno.
Downstream users now consume 16.5 million acre-feet of water annually, but on average only 15 million acre-feet flow into the system each year, he said. Add more than a million acre-feet of water lost to evaporation and it is obvious that only during relatively wet years is it possible to add water.
The struggles over Glen Canyon and the other dams on the Colorado River above the Grand Canyon were among the battles that led to the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act and clean air and water legislation.
Among these successes, the dam was a defeat that has not been forgotten.
In 1981 the radical environmental group Earth First unfurled a 300-foot-long sheet of plastic shaped like a crack down the dam's face.
Now, Richard Ingebretsen, a physician and founder of the Glen Canyon Institute in Salt Lake City, a group dedicated to draining Lake Powell and restoring Glen Canyon to its natural state, says: "The drought is a godsend. Now is the chance for us to have the national debate we didn't have 40 years ago. With the lake so low, people can see what was lost, the life cycles, the ecosystem. There is a powerful beauty here that can change people's minds."
The changes are stunning. When it was full five years ago, the lake had 250 square miles of water surface and thousands of miles of shoreline. Each year, 2.5 million people came to enjoy vacations with boating, swimming, fishing.
The lake was rimmed by a starkly beautiful landscape where filmmakers shot movies like "Planet of the Apes" and "The Greatest Story Ever Told."
Today the lake is 129 feet lower, back to the size it was in 1970, covering 131 square miles. Canyon walls are plastered with a chalky white bathtub-like ring of calcium carbonate 10 stories high, where the water once reached.
Towering benches of silt line the former lake bed. This year 1.8 million visitors are expected.
"The lake is still beautiful," said Char Obergh, an information officer for the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area in Page, Ariz. "People can see more features than ever with the water low."
Paul Ostapuk, a spokesman for Friends of Lake Powell in Page, said: "Droughts are a regular part of the Colorado River. The lake draws down and it fills up again." In the meantime, he said, families can still get together on the lake for a wonderful time.
In two years, depending on the weather, Lake Powell could reach what hydrologists call inactive pool, meaning the water stored in the lake will not produce enough flow to generate hydroelectric power. A year or two after that, water could drop another 120 feet.
At that point, because of the steepness of canyon walls at the dam, Lake Powell would still have 2 million acre-feet of water spanning 32 square miles, offering continued recreation opportunities.
At that same point, hundreds of miles of side canyons would emerge into sunlight offering backpackers a chance to see what was lost. |
