The Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency is proposing to further constrain the reach and potency of the Clean Water Act by re-defining what qualifies as “waters of the United States,” or WOTUS, which are streams, wetlands, and other water bodies under federal jurisdiction. The proposed definition would disproportionately affect the arid West by lifting protections from thousands of miles of streams, arroyos, and wetlands.

Under the CWA, a firm or individual looking to discharge pollutants or other material into, or dredge or reroute or otherwise alter, a WOTUS waterway must obtain a federal permit from the EPA or Army Corps of Engineers. A battle has raged for more than five decades over what constitutes a WOTUS. The Supreme Court’s 2023 Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency ruling called for a narrower definition, handing industry and right-wing ideologues a major victory.

The changes in the latest proposed supplemental rule are even more exclusionary than the administration’s November 2025 proposal, which removed “ephemeral” and “intermittent” waterways — i.e. arroyos or washes that run only after rains or snowmelt — from federal jurisdiction. Included as a WOTUS under that proposal were “relatively permanent … bodies of surface water that are standing or continuously flowing year-round or at least during the wet season.”

The new proposal omits the “wet season” verbiage. It then defines “relatively permanent” to be synonymous with “perennial,” which in turn is defined as ‘‘having standing or continuously flowing water every day of the year during ordinary conditions.’’ However, “a body of water does not lose its relatively permanent status if it dries up as a result of anomalous events such as drought or dry spell.1 A body of water also does not lose its relatively permanent status if it dries up for no more than a single period of up to 30 consecutive days in any given year as a result of non-anomalous events resulting in a temporary interruption such as low tide or a regularly occurring dry spell.” Yet, “if flow is interrupted for two periods in any given year, and each period consists of 10 consecutive days of no flow, the water body would not be jurisdictional.”

A Natural Resources Defense Council analysis found that the new proposal would remove protections from more than 94% of the nation’s wetlands and about 79% of its streams. The changes would hit the West hardest, leaving a state like Arizona with almost no federally protected streams or wetlands.

So here’s my interpretation of where the updated proposal leaves us:

• WOTUS waterways (keeps CWA protections): A year-round river, stream, or lake that never dries up, such as the Animas River, the San Juan River, the Colorado River, the Gunnison River, Cement Creek, Mineral Creek, the Fremont River, and so on, would retain federal protections under the CWA. However, since most of these rivers are fed by intermittent or ephemeral streams, they would also be potentially affected (since is someone altered or polluted a tributary, the effects would eventually reach the mainstem).

• Non-WOTUS waterways (would lose CWA protections): All intermittent and ephemeral streams, i.e. arroyos or washes that run only when it rains, such as are ubiquitous in the arid West, would be removed from federal jurisdiction. Other streams and rivers that run seasonally, but regularly dry up for more than 30 consecutive days per year, such as the Paria River, the Dirty Devil, Rio Puerco, Santa Cruz River, or the Mancos River, would also lose federal protections, as would wetlands that are only “wet” for part of the year.

• Vague WOTUS status: Rivers or streams that are perennial as a whole, but on which certain segments dry up for more than 30 days per year (usually because of upstream diversions), e.g.: the Rio Grande through Albuquerque, long sections of the Lower Dolores River between McPhee Dam and its confluence with the San Miguel, the North Fork of the Gunnison around Paonia, lower reaches of the La Plata River, or Junction Creek through Durango, and numerous desert rivers in Arizona and New Mexico.

While the proposed rule would remove federal CWA protections from many waterways, it would not automatically give developers or industry free rein to bulldoze or dump toxic waste into them. State and local laws would still apply, and arroyos and streams on public land would still be protected to some degree by federal environmental laws. Colorado lawmakers passed a bill in 2024 that effectively backfilled the regulatory gap left by the Sackett decision. New Mexico also has moved to implement its own layer of water protections. In more industry-friendly states such as Idaho and Utah, the proposed rule would leave thousands of miles of streams and waterways vulnerable to development and pollution.

The proposed rule is open to public comments until Oct. 9. You may send comments, identified by Docket ID No. EPA–HQ– OW–2025–0322, by any of the following methods:

• Federal eRulemaking Portal: https://www.regulations.gov/. Follow the online instructions for submitting comments.

• Email: OW-Docket@epa.gov. Include Docket ID No. EPA–HQ–OW– 2025–0322 in the subject line of the message. •

• Mail: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, EPA Docket Center, Water Docket, Mail Code 28221T, 1200 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20460.

• Hand Delivery or Courier: EPA Docket Center, WJC West Building, Room 3334, 1301 Constitution Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20004.

For more background on the long and winding struggle to define WOTUS, check out the following:

• My February 2022 High Country News piece on the Supreme Court taking up the Sackett Case, including a detailed timeline of the WOTUS definition battle.

And, from the Land Desk archives (you’ll need a paid subscription for access):

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🐟 Colorado River Chronicles 💧

A new paper is out from the group of Colorado River experts known by some as the “Traveling Wilburys of the Colorado River Basin,”2 and lo and behold, it actually contains some good news. Namely this: The Lower Basin users have managed to make significant reductions in water use over the last decade and a half without turning the Southwest into a dust-choked wasteland and getting ahead of the latest round of mandated cuts. This indicates that the users can continue to slash water use in the future — to a degree — if necessary.

The Lower Basin accounts for about 60% of all consumptive water uses and losses on the Colorado River. Irrigated agriculture, in turn, makes up about 60% of the Lower Basin’s consumptive use. The Imperial Irrigation District, which is primarily agricultural, is the largest single water user on the entire river. This means that the agricultural sector — and the IID in particular — “will play a significant role in future reductions in water use,” as the authors put it.

So far, the Lower Basin’s farmers and the IID have stepped up. In 2025, the Lower Basin states’ consumptive use was 5.76 million acre-feet, the lowest since at least 2010. Since 2023, California has used about 13% less water, a reduction attributable mostly to cuts at IID.

Notably, IID’s reductions came mostly during the summer months, the peak season for field crops such as alfalfa, Bermuda grass, and kleingrass, when it’s too hot to grow most garden crops, such as lettuce, onions, and broccoli. During the vegetables’ growing season, from November through March, water use stayed roughly the same as before. A similar, but less dramatic, dynamic shows up in Arizona.

This suggests a couple of things: 1. The Imperial Irrigation District and other large agricultural users may be able to significantly lower overall water use without harming important garden crops such as broccoli and carrots (easing fears that the Colorado River crisis will deprive us of vegetables); and, 2. The IID is successfully using its vast alfalfa crop as a giant water demand-response tool3. That is, through both fallowing some fields and putting others on a summer water diet, the district’s farmers have managed to slash water use, while still growing gobs of hay and alfalfa.

And because the IID still has about 150,000 acres of alfalfa, it has huge potential for future water cuts through these same methods, which is the good news. The bad news is that the federal plan for operating the river contemplates Lower Basin cuts of up to 3 million acre-feet per year (resulting in a total annual consumption of 4.5 MAF), which is about twice what the Basin has already achieved.

To consider the viability of such cuts, the authors summed up the smallest monthly use in each Lower Basin state since 2010, even though they didn’t occur simultaneously, and even though in some cases the reductions were due to heavy precipitation, not conservation efforts. The result was 5.03 MAF, still 530,000 acre-feet over the potential target. In other words, getting to 4.5 MAF/year is likely to be much more painful than accomplishing the reductions so far.

Yet some pain is likely to be necessary unless the West’s warming climate does a rapid about-face, and soon.

📸 PARTING SHOT 🎞️

🚣🏽 WATER WATCH 🌊

• New Mexico officials release about 2,000 acre-feet of water from Abiquiu Dam to provide a temporary un-drying of the Rio Grande’s desiccated riverbed through Albuquerque in an attempt to nourish stressed vegetation, recharge the aquifer, and to study the effects of such pulses. Audubon Southwest leased about 300 acre-feet of the water from various users, the Middle Rio Grande Conservation District contributed 300 acre-feet more, and the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority provided the remaining 1,400 acre-feet from its share of river imported from the Colorado River Basin via the San Juan-Chama Project. (Inkstain, Laura Paskus, KUNM)

• Aurora Water — a municipal utility on Colorado’s Front Range — looks to buy Lower Arkansas Valley farmers’ water rights to feed the city’s future growth, sparking concerns about negative impacts of “buy and dry” deals. But officials say it would be a “buy and (only partially) dry” deal that keeps some of the water in agriculture. (Colorado Sun)

🌵 PUBLIC LANDS 🌲

• A new study finds federal land management agencies spent $1 billion less on vendors in Western states in 2025 compared to 2024, acutely affecting the small business sector. Some of the largest cuts were to wildland fire management investments, particularly on-the-ground suppression work as spending was shifted to aerial firefighting. (news release)

• Conservation groups file a lawsuit challenging oil and gas leasing on hundreds of thousands of acres of public land in big-game migration corridors and wilderness quality lands in Wyoming and Colorado, saying the BLM violated federal law by skirting environmental protections. (news release)

• The Bureau of Land Management seeks public input on 38 proposed oil and gas leases on 66,221 acres in northwestern Colorado that would be auctioned off in March 2027. The bulk of the parcels are under the jurisdiction of the BLM’s Kremmling and Little Snake River field offices, with one in the Royal Gorge office. (news release)

🦫 WILDLIFE WATCH 🦅

• Colorado Parks and Wildlife officers euthanize a lethargic and unresponsive 300-pound male bear in Durango, finding that its stomach and intestines were completely blocked with trash. “We’ve all heard the oft-repeated phrase ‘garbage kills bears’ for years,” said Bryan Peterson of Bear Smart Durango. “And many have asked how in the world does trash get bears killed? Well, in many ways, but sometimes literally. Our community’s tepid approach to trash management got a bear killed. Thankfully, its pain and suffering was ended.” (news release)

• Colorado Parks and Wildlife officers “lethally remove,” i.e. kill, two male yearling wolves from two separate packs after the animals were linked to attacks on sheep and cattle in Rio Blanco and Pitkin counties. (news release, Summit Daily)

🐮 GRAZING GAZETTE 🥩

• A Wyoming advocate shows how the state’s agriculture industry’s resource footprint — in terms of water use for irrigation and land-use for livestock grazing — significantly dwarfs its statewide economic footprint, and that should be considered before giving ranchers outsized political influence. (WyoFile)

🛢️ HYDROCARBON HOEDOWN 📈

• A pair of peer-reviewed studies link Permian Basin oil and gas operations to radioactive plumes and high ozone pollution in Loving, New Mexico, and other nearby communities, potentially increasing lung cancer and other health risks. (Capital & Main)

• The Bureau of Land Management and Southern Ute Indian Tribe launch a planning process to guide and analyze oil and gas development on 110,000 acres of tribal trust land within the tribe’s land in southwestern Colorado. (news release)

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⛈️ WACKY WEATHER WATCH⚡️

• A massive sinkhole emerges in actor Nicolas Cage’s oceanfront house’s driveway in Malibu, prompting city officials to declare and emergency, evacuate nearby homes, and shut off gas service in the gated community. Officials worry the situation could be worsened by forecasted high tides and rain and long-term weather disturbances resulting from the coming super El Niño. (Los Angeles Times)

🐓 REGULATORY CAPTURE CHRONICLES 🦊

• Radical right-wing U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) and fellow House Republicans launch an investigation of nineteen conservation groups, accusing the entities of profiting at the expense of taxpayers via statutory fee-shifting provisions, which can reimburse the organizations for legal costs when they win in court. (AFP, news release)

🤖 DATA CENTERS 👾

• Pinal County, Arizona’s board of supervisors vote to reject Vermaland’s proposed data center complex following widespread local opposition, even though the developer scaled back the original proposal. The scaled-back proposed facility, spread across 3,300 acres, would have included 11 buildings and a gas-fired power plant. (AZ Family)

• Tribal nations and Indigenous advocates push back on data center development in Arizona, Oklahoma, Nevada, and beyond. (Washington State Standard)

• Oracle seeks proposals for the development of 2 gigawatts of new solar, wind, geothermal, or other renewable energy technologies to provide “carbon-free energy matching” for its Project Jupiter data center complex under development in southern New Mexico, which is expected to be powered by gas-fired fuel cells. The firm is also offering $1 million to support carbon capture and sequestration at the facility. (news release, KRQE)

• Creekstone Energy, the developer of the massive Delta Gigasite data center in central Utah, looks to use untested technology to “create” more water than it uses by capturing condensation from natural gas combustion at the plant dedicated to powering the facility. (Salt Lake Tribune)

• Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs (D) opposes Attorney General Kris Mayes’ call for a pause on new data centers to get a better handle on their water and energy use, acknowledging the concerns are valid but saying a statewide moratorium is the wrong approach. (AZ Family)

• A peer-reviewed study finds that data centers, which typically combine large capital investments with little local labor demand, can strain a community’s public infrastructure without generating widespread economic gains. (SSRN)

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🔋ENERGY TRANSITION 🔌

• Officials and residents of the Coalmine Canyon Chapter of the Navajo Nation push back against 750-megawatt solar-plus-storage installation in northern Arizona, saying the developers have been less than transparent and the power will not go to local homes, many of which are off the grid. (High Country News)

• Accelergen Energy proposes a 125-megawatt solar-plus-storage installation on about 900 acres east of Cortez, Colorado. (Durango Herald)

• A new study finds small-scale, front-of-the-meter solar-plus-battery installations could serve about 32% of California’s largest utilities’ peak summer electricity demand; analysts say developing this asset would improve reliability and preserve affordability without significant transmission upgrades. (Utility Dive)

📈 DATAVIZ OF THE DAY 📊

The stats for August are in and, well, it was a warm one. This August was the hottest August on record for the contiguous United States, as well as for many counties in the Southwest. It was also the hottest month on record globally, barely edging out July 2023 for the dubious honors.

🦫 WILDLIFE WATCH 🦅

Just days after President Donald Trump angered U.S. ranchers by waiving tariffs on 300,000 metric tons of foreign beef (and whatever other meat-adjacent-material may pass as beef), he threw the livestock industry a bone by ordering a “review” of federal Endangered Species Act protections for gray and Mexican wolves. The order also instructs the Interior Department to push states into removing any state-specific protections and to “revise their standards for lethal takings of gray wolves and Mexican wolves to assist ranchers in combating predation.”

In other words, Trump wants to revive the late 19th and early 20th century campaign to exterminate wild predators to benefit ranchers. Will this please a handful of public lands livestock operators who are ideologically inclined to hate wolves, whether they affect their operations or not? Sure. Will it save the American rancher, or even offset the influx of foreign beef? Nope.

Wolves do kill cattle if they are not adequately protected (and the rancher is compensated for the lost livestock), and they can have other impacts on ranching operations in wild areas. But study after study has shown that other factors — from weather and climate, to sickness and disease — account for a far greater share of cattle and calf mortalities.

This is the administration’s latest ploy in its quest to boost the number of cattle on public lands. It is also peddling vacated grazing allotments and easing the already decidedly lax regulations on grazing.

• Federal staffing rosters show the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has lost 36% of its staff under the Trump administration, dripping from 9,957 staffers to 6,333 between 2024 and 2026, likely exacerbating a backlog of Endangered Species Act listing decisions. (news release)

🐟 COLORADO RIVER CHRONICLES 💧

The irrigation canals, laterals, and ditches are going dry in the Colorado River’s Upper Basin weeks before the growing season comes to an end, forcing farmers to rely on September rains or their own storage to get their crops to harvest time. It goes to show that even without mandatory cuts, many Upper Basin water users experience water shortages during dry years.

The biggest and latest user to get cut off by low river flows was the Grand Valley Water Users Association, which began drawing down its Government Highline Canal as “the river flows drop to undeliverable levels.” Flows in that canal fell from almost 1,500 cfs at the end of August to about 725 cfs early this week. The more senior Orchard Mesa Irrigation District and Grand Valley Irrigation Company continued to pull water from the river and deliver it to irrigators.

In the North Fork Valley, all but the most senior ditches were shut off weeks ago, after Paonia Reservoir hit dead pool. And on the Dolores River, even the most senior water rights holders — the Montezuma Valley Irrigation District — lost their water at the beginning of this month. Usually it holds out for at least another couple of weeks. (Other water users received dramatically curtailed amounts throughout the irrigating season).

In the Grand Valley, the canal’s loss was the river’s gain: The Colorado River near Palisade, after running as low as 42 cfs this summer, bounced back to around 300 cfs at the end of August. A corresponding increase in flow can be seen at the USGS gage1 near Cisco. This little boost, combined with a few intense, but patchy storms, and a slight increase in releases from Flaming Gorge Reservoir, have brought up inflows into Lake Powell, somewhat slowing the drop in surface levels.

The Dolores River, on the other hand, remains virtually dry downstream of McPhee Dam, and McPhee Reservoir’s surface level is currently about 12 feet lower than it was a year ago.

• The Central Arizona Project’s board of directors authorizes its attorneys to take legal action “if necessary” to protect its allotment of Colorado River against the Bureau of Reclamation’s plans for operating the river’s infrastructure in the coming decade. The CAP stands to lose the most water under a shortage, as Arizona agreed to junior water rights in exchange for federal funding for the vast plumbing project that delivers river water to the central and southern parts of the state. Nevada already sued the federal government over potential cuts to its share of water. (Arizona Republic)

• Western Colorado anglers and boaters call on the Bureau of Reclamation to increase water releases from Blue Mesa, Morrow Point, and Crystal Reservoirs to preserve streamflows in the Gunnison River in the Black Canyon, the Gunnison Gorge, and further downstream, saying the decision to reduce releases to protect reservoir levels has “exerted a toll on a vital and cherished natural resource.” (Aspen Journalism)

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🤖 DATA CENTER WATCH 👾

• The Big Data Center Buildup drives up electricity demand in Wyoming and spurs a wave of proposed gas plants, some of which would serve the grid and others dedicated to powering server farm facilities. (WyoFile)

⛏️ MINING MONITOR ⛏️

• The Southern Ute Indian Tribe says it will pull out all of the stops to block potential mining projects in the La Plata Mountains in southwestern Colorado, adding to the list of entities opposing Metallic Minerals’ exploratory drilling project on the western side of the range. (Durango Herald)

• New Mexico Land Commissioner Stephanie Garcia Richard puts state trust lands off-limits to new uranium mining leases, and orders her office to instead focus on cleaning up the more than 1,000 former uranium mining-related sites in the state. The order does not affect private or federal lands. (news release)

• Anfield Energy looks to raise at least $50 million to finance its plan to refurbish and reopen the Shootaring uranium mill — which has been idle since 1982 — near Ticaboo, Utah. Anfield is the firm behind the Velvet-Wood uranium mine in the Lisbon Valley and has designs on mining near Slick Rock, Colorado. (Northern Miner)

🌵 PUBLIC LANDS 🌲

• A federal judge temporarily blocks the Trump administration’s effort to evict bison from public lands in Montana, finding that the Bureau of Land Management’s decision to kick the animals off American Prairie-held grazing leases was likely “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, and otherwise not in accordance with the law.” (Public Domain)

• The U.S. Department of Agriculture releases its final Forest Service reorganization plan, which includes moving the headquarters to Salt Lake City and shuttering 23 facilities nationwide, including four in California, one in New Mexico, and one in Oregon, with the remainder being in non-Western states. The USDA says “less than 200” of the agency’s 30,000 employees are expected to need to relocate, mostly from Washington, D.C. to Fort Collins, Salt Lake City, or a newly established center. (news release, OPB)

• The Center for Western Priorities fact-checks Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s numerous erroneous statements about the administration’s dramatic reduction of Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears National Monuments, finding that on this topic (and others) the cabinet member is a serial liar. (Westwise)

🏠 RANDOM REAL ESTATE ROOM 🤑

• Anita Verma-Lallian, a real estate investor who made her name buying and selling multi-million-dollar Phoenix-area properties for data centers, unveils a plan for a massive development in Tonopah, Arizona. Tentative plans for the $6 billion to $10 billion development include a movie studio, amusement park, hotels, retail, and a data center complex. The property is adjacent to one where Bill Gates’ investment firm is planning a “futuristic smart city.” (Phoenix Business Journal via KTAR)

🛻 TRANSPORTATION 🚂

• The Utah Department of Transportation completes the $152 million Energy Corridor highway improvement project on State Routes 162 and 262 in San Juan County. The routes pass through the Aneth Oil Field and could potentially be used for uranium ore haul trucks traveling from New Mexico mines to the White Mesa Mill near Blanding. (ABC4)

🤯 ANNALS OF INANITY 🤡

• When will it stop!?! Amid a flurry of inane, bizarre, and cognitively-impaired social media posts, President Donald Trump on Sunday suggested New Mexico’s name should be changed to “New America.” (CNN)

📈 TODAY’s DATAVIZ 📊

Are coal and electricity consumption getting back together? For the latter half of the 20th century, U.S. coal consumption climbed in tandem with electricity demand: As Americans used more power, more coal was burned to generate that power, and vice versa. In 2008, electricity demand plummeted due to the financial crisis, dragging coal consumption down with it.

While electricity demand rebounded along with the economy, and then plateaued, coal-burning continued dropping precipitously; the two phenomena had been decoupled from one another. But over the last three years electricity demand has shot back up, in large part due to data centers’ guzzling up a lot of power, but also because of electrification of transportation and buildings, and an increasing need for air-conditioning to fend off rising temperatures. And last year the electric power sector’s coal consumption shot back up as well. Is the decoupling being undone? Or is this just a minor blip? Only time will tell.

📸 PARTING SHOT 🎞️

🌵 Public Lands 🌲

The Trump administration continues its crusade to make America’s public lands motorized again. This time it’s the Forest Service launching a revamp of its travel management rule by “simplifying regulatory requirements” to “increase access, including for motorized vehicles, e-bikes, and other mobility devices.” The move follows, and is an attempt to implement, President Donald Trump’s rollback this summer of Nixon-era restrictions on off-highway vehicles on public lands. Comments are being accepted on the proposal until Sept. 23.

This rule would bolster the administration’s rollback this summer of the 2001 Roadless Rule, which prohibits roadbuilding and commercial timber operations — with exceptions — on 45 million acres of National Forest lands.

The current action starts the process of developing an environmental impact statement, which will give more specific details. But the notice of intent gives an overall look at what the administration proposes. Most basically, it aims to open the door for individual forests to relax motorized travel restrictions and open currently closed areas to the vehicles. The “public access rule,” as they’re calling it, would:

• “… establish a presumption that existing roads, trails, airfields, trailheads, and other access routes and points on NFS lands are open to appropriate public use,” unless the closure is required by law (or other specific reasons). This is a switch from the current “closed unless designated open” policy to an “open unless closed” framework, with possibly dramatic effects.

• “ … establish a requirement to consider new roads, trails, airfields, trailheads, and other access routes and points where appropriate to increase access.” This appears to be aimed at optimizing, if you will, the Roadless Rule rollback by encouraging new roadbuilding.

• “… establish processes and conditions for authorizing limited off-route motor vehicle and other motorized equipment use for, among other things, downed big-game retrieval, firewood collection, dispersed camping, and for designating areas for over-snow and other motorized recreation.” This one’s pretty scary, because it would open the door to allowing OHVs or snowmobiles to drive just about anywhere in a forest (except in designated wilderness areas).

You have until Sept. 23 to weigh in on the proposal. To do so electronically (preferred) through the Federal eRulemaking Portal, go to https://www.regulations.gov, docket number FS-2026-0100, and look for the COMMENT button. Or send snail mail to: Director, Public Benefits, 201 14th Street SW, Public Benefits Office, Washington, DC 20250.

Several tribal nations, advocacy groups, and Patagonia have filed lawsuits — and/or revived dormant ones — seeking to block President Donald Trump’s proclamations this summer shrinking Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments. The legal argument behind the lawsuits is clear and potent: The 1906 Antiquities Act authorizes presidents to establish national monuments, but not to shrink or revoke them. Therefore Trump’s 2017 and 2026 shrinkages are illegal and should not stand.

History backs the plaintiffs. In 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sought to revoke the Castle Pinckney National Monument, a former military installation in South Carolina. His attorney general’s analysis, however, determined that the Antiquities Act “does not authorize [the President] to abolish [national monuments] after they have been established.” FDR, respecting the rule of law, let the monument stand. Eventually, Congress, which does have the power to alter national monuments, voted to revoke national monument status for the site.

In 2017, a quartet of legal scholars, including Mark Squillace, of the University of Colorado Law School, published their own analysis in the Virginia Law Review. They, too, found that in 1906 Congress did not delegate to the president the authority to downsize or abolish a national monument or weaken the protections granted by the original national monument proclamation. Furthermore, the Federal Land Policy Management Act of 1976 clarified that only Congress has the power to modify or revoke a national monument.

The cases likely will take years to wend their way through the courts, and may ultimately lead to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the power of the Antiquities Act.

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🌨️🦦🚣🏽 Water Watch 🌊

While climate change-exacerbated drought most notably diminishes the amount of water in rivers, it also raises the temperature of streams, which is especially problematic for fish and other aquatic life. The Colorado River downstream from Glen Canyon Dam, which includes the long stretch through the Grand Canyon, is warming up fast.

When the river stalls out and becomes Lake Powell, the reservoir’s surface just sits in the sun and bakes, while the deeper waters remain chilly. Some fish, like non-native smallmouth bass prefer the warm water, and stay near the surface. When the reservoir is full, the depth of the water at the penstock intakes — where released water exits the dam — is too cold for the bass, so they aren’t likely to escape the reservoir into the river below. But as the surface level drops, the depth of the water at the penstock intakes on the dam decreases, meaning that the water released through the dam’s turbines and into the river below gets increasingly warmer — and is more likely to include warm-water fish.

Currently, Lake Powell’s surface is a mere 28 feet above the penstock intakes, meaning the released water is warm and includes a lot of bass. This, in turn, warms up the river below, making it more favorable to the invading bass, which prey on and compete with endangered native fish. Meanwhile, the warmer water stresses the trout, potentially harming the recreational fishery between Lees Ferry and the dam.

So in 2024 as it became clear low reservoir levels were chronic, the Bureau of Reclamation began doing “cool-flow mixes.” When the river water temperature downstream of the dam hit 59.9° F, dam operators would begin releasing cooler water from the lower river outlet tubes. This dropped the river temperature enough to help downstream fish, and hurt the bass.

This year, however, the feds halted the cool flow mixes to ensure that all releases go through the turbines and generate hydropower. The Grand Canyon Trust built a nifty online gadget that shows the consequences, which aren’t good: The water temperature at the monitor just below Soap Creek Rapid in the Grand Canyon soared above 70° F during the waning days of August, and has been above the cool-mix threshold for 78 days this year so far. Click on the interactive graph to see how water temperatures have changed over the years — and how well the cool-mix flows worked in 2024 and 2025.

🤖 Data Center Watch 👾

The first data center project on public lands has been halted — for now.

On Tuesday, the Interior Board of Land Appeals granted a stay on the Townsite Solar 2’s planned data center on federal land near Boulder City, Nevada, blocking further development while legal challenges are considered. The order also expedites consideration of the appeals filed by environmental groups and the city.

In 2023, the Bureau of Land Management authorized Townsite Solar 2 to develop a solar-plus-storage installation on public land in southern Nevada. Then, in November 2025, before beginning construction on the solar facility, the firm requested an amendment to its right of way that instead would allow it to develop a hyperscale data center, a 70-megawatt battery energy storage system, a substation, and biodiesel generators on the same site. The BLM approved the amendment without conducting a new environmental review or public scoping after determining that the new project “is substantially the same” as the former one.

Both the Biden and Trump II administrations proposed opening national laboratories and other federal properties to data center development. However, this was the first such project to be approved for BLM land.

Boulder City, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Sierra Club appealed the approval and requested the stay, arguing that the agency failed to adequately consider the data center’s potential impacts. The board’s ruling notes, “Appellants are likely to prevail on that question because the two projects are not ‘substantially the same.’” The board also determined the appellants “demonstrated that permanent and irreparable harm is likely to occur to its members’ aesthetic and recreational interests in the project site.”

⛏️ Mining Monitor ⛏️

Federal regulators on Tuesday approved the Navajo Transitional Energy Company’s proposed Navajo Mine expansion, authorizing the tribal-owned company to extract some 503 million tons of coal over the next 110 years. Yes, you read that right: The coal industry may be in decline, but these folks just got permitted to keep digging up the dirty fuel for over a century more, despite strong opposition from residents and advocacy groups.

The surface mine sits on the Navajo Nation north of Burnham and about 22 miles southwest of Farmington, New Mexico. It was built in the 1960s to serve the nearby Four Corners Power Plant, and remains the facility’s sole fuel provider.

NTEC says it needs the expansion to continue serving the plant until its closure; its primary owner, Arizona Public Service, plans to shutter the facility by 2041. After that the firm, which also owns coal mines in the Powder River Basin, would apparently try to peddle Navajo Mine coal elsewhere.

This has set off alarm bells for anyone concerned about the landscapes and air quality of the Four Corners region. Not only would the mine tear apart another 9,000 acres of land, displace residents and dwellings, and destroy dozens of historic cultural properties, but that coal would also be burned somewhere, releasing climate-warming and health-harming pollutants in the process. Also concerning is the prospect that the Four Corners plant, which has sullied the region’s air for more than 60 years, would continue operating indefinitely.

***

The San Carlos Apache Tribe, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Lower San Pedro Watershed Alliance have filed a lawsuit seeking to stop further exploratory drilling or other development at Faraday’s proposed Copper Creek mining project. The groups accuse the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service of failing to consider drilling’s impacts on endangered Mexican spotted owls that are known to inhabit the area.

The mine is proposed for about 78 square kilometers in the Galiuro Mountains east of Mammoth, Arizona, on private, state, and Bureau of Land Management parcels. Last June, the Bureau of Land Management approved Faraday’s plan to construct 67 drill pads, along with associated roads and infrastructure, and the company recently completed the first round of water-intensive drilling.

The complaint also says the BLM failed to consult with the San Carlos Apache Tribe, as required under the National Historic Preservation Act.

📸 Parting Shot 🎞️

⛈️ Wacky Weather Watch⚡️

Wow. Just wow. Huge flash floods in the Grand Canyon this past weekend, with the biggest damage along Bright Angel Creek and Phantom Ranch. Bridges were washed away, dozens of people were evacuated, the Trans Canyon Waterline was destroyed (forcing the closure of rim hotels), and there was so much debris in the river that National Park Service officials had to shut down the river to rafting — though it is now reopened. As of Tuesday morning, two fatalities had been confirmed and one person were still missing.

The storm cells plowed across the Colorado Plateau during the waning days of August, and of meteorological summer, dumping large volumes of rain in short periods of time, leading to hot-chocolate-hued waterfalls cascading off of cliffs and down canyons. In some cases, wildfire burn scars from last year or earlier this summer exacerbated the impacts. In the Grand Canyon it’s likely that the Dragon Bravo Fire scar contributed to the severity of the flooding.

The storms tended to be isolated, pounding one area, while leaving others just miles away virtually dry, as can be seen in wildly varying streamflows.

• Video from the Grand Canyon shows that the storm and its impacts were widespread, but certainly the most significant flooding was on Bright Angel Creek, which joins the river at Phantom Ranch. The normally clear and burbling brook was flowing at about 14 cubic feet per second at 11:20 on the morning of August 29; at 12:50 p.m. the gage showed a flow of 347 cfs; then the readings vanished as the gage was overwhelmed by a torrent, disabling the gage. Witness accounts and videos show a wall of water that sounded like a freight train slamming into the Phantom Ranch area.

• Always wanted to float one of those classic, usually un-runnable desert rivers but could never get big enough flows? Now’s the time to hit at least one of them, if you dare. The San Rafael River’s USGS gage near Green River was reading 800 cfs as of early Tuesday morning, which is runnable for the intrepid and skillful folks out there. But you’d better hurry: The forecast is calling for clear skies starting Wednesday. Meanwhile, flows on the Escalante River near Escalante, the Paria River near Kanab, and the Dirty Devil exceeded 2,000 cfs on Monday afternoon. But for these one’s it’s probably best just to sit on the canyon rim and watch the show, since American Whitewater recommends against running any of these rivers at these levels. But maybe this is just the dramatic ushering in of more gentle, widespread rains, and the flows will level out in the low-200s, making them quite floatable indeed.

  

• The Big flows on three of the above mentioned rivers will give a bit of a boost to Lake Powell inflows, while the Paria will supplement the waters moving past Lee Ferry from the Colorado River’s Upper Basin to its Lower Basin. So far, however, the storms are too isolated and short-lived to significantly slow Lake Powell’s decline. The reservoir’s surface level is currently at about 3,517.6 feet.

• Speaking of classic desert rivers, the sorrowful Lower Dolores River got a little bit of life back over the last few days as the storms moved into Western Colorado, pushing streamflows near its confluence with the Colorado above 600 cfs (after running below 30 cfs for the previous week). That’s good enough to float the lowest section of the river, which includes Stateline rapid, but the flows dropped back down below 100 cfs pretty quickly, which would leave anything but a SUP high and dry. What the rain gave to the river, it took from the roads: Highway 141 between Gateway and Whitewater was shut down Monday due to multiple debris flows; it had reopened as of Tuesday morning, according to the CDOT website.

• Zion National Park was hit by the same wave of storms, leading to flash flooding and big water in the Virgin River. Rockslides shut down the Zion Mount Carmel Highway.

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Note: I wrote the following essay for the Utah Monthly, an insightful newsletter that provides an inside look at the sometimes maddening, always spectacular, and often confounding state.

This historical piece jumps off from a feature story I wrote for High Country News back in 2012. The thesis behind that story was that even as Utah and the Mormon Church moved rightward politically with a full-throttle embrace of capitalism, they paradoxically held onto slivers of the collectivism espoused by Brigham Young. Since then, Utah has continued its rightward slide, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has continued to grow its corporate empire.

Reporting from Bloomberg shows the Church and its real estate arms own some 2.4 million acres in the U.S. worth more than $20 billion, and that they are ramping up efforts to develop some of that land. Tributary is a planned community under development in Aurora, Colorado, south of Denver International Airport and adjacent to I-70. It covers about 960 acres of former farmland along a creek, and it is designed to eventually house some 12,000 people.

Where will the water come from? Given that this will be in Aurora, I’m guessing it will be from Aurora water, which is currently under stage 1 drought restrictions.

Anyway, on to a bit of Western history …

Mormonism’s Collectivist Roots
And what remains of it in our era of financialized capitalism

The curiously named community of Orderville sits in a narrow valley in southern Utah on the banks of the East Fork of the Virgin River. It is propitiously placed along the highway between Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks, yet it wasn’t until the last decade or so that businesses—a couple coffee shops, food trucks, and upscale glamping and vacation rentals—popped up to capitalize on the thousands of visitors passing through. But this isn’t just a modest farming community now taking up tourism. It was once the stronghold of the United Order communalist system, perhaps the most audacious economic experiment ever undertaken in the American West. Orderville, wrote historian Dean L. May, was for the Latter-day Saints a “near-successful effort to build the City of God on Earth.”

Over the last half-century, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has wholeheartedly embraced free-market capitalism, and not only in ideological terms. The church is decidedly corporate, and owns Utah’s second-biggest newspaper, a book publisher, dozens of radio stations, financial companies, hotels, and restaurants. It spearheaded the $2 billion redevelopment of its land comprising a major portion of downtown Salt Lake City, and is one of the nation’s largest landowners, with about 2 million acres of agricultural, residential, and commercial properties across the United States. Up until McCarthyism and the Red Scare of the 1950s, however, the church leaned strongly in the opposite direction, favoring a communal, even socialist approach to economics.

When Brigham Young led his followers into present-day Utah in 1847 to build a homeland, he championed industriousness combined with cooperation and central planning over the frontier individualism commonly associated with the western frontier at the time. The Mormons began with a cooperative effort to build an irrigation system that belonged to everyone, and then laid out the towns. “The towns and villages were not established inadvertently or by individual initiative … they were a result of very definite plans,” wrote Hamilton Gardner in Cooperation Among the Mormons in 1917.

This relatively loose-knit system worked to build communities, but it wasn’t clear that it could protect them from the Gentiles pouring into the region in search of land and wealth. In the 1860s, as the transcontinental railroad approached Utah from both sides, bringing with it an orgy of capitalism and greed, financed with credit that the banks handed out like lollypops, Young buckled down in an effort to protect his holy land from the invaders.

He formed the School of Prophets, which, writes Leonard J. Arrington, the late LDS church historian, “countered an energetic and powerful laissez-faire capitalism with a vigorous, well-organized, socially minded and theocratically directed program of economic action.”

That program included creating an organization to build the section of railroad that came closest to the capital, to keep out the riffraff that might otherwise do the work. It funded the creation of cooperative furniture and wool manufacturing along with other businesses, to reduce reliance on eastern imports. The School created the Zion’s Cooperative Mercantile Institution and instituted uniform pricing controls to minimize competition among Mormon merchants.

The Utah Territory successfully resisted becoming a mineral colony for the eastern industrialists, and the School disbanded in 1872. But Young, whose collectivist leanings grew as he aged, wanted yet more.

A chance for radical change emerged in September of 1873, when the Jay Cooke & Co. bank—one of the big railroad backers—collapsed. Other banks toppled like dominoes, foreclosures were rampant, and the Panic of 1873 swept the nation and the world, leading to one of the worst depressions in history.

Utah’s mining towns were hit hard. But Brigham City, a settlement of about 1,500 people, actually thrived. It had organized a mercantile cooperative in the pre-railroad days, and, by the time the panic hit, it had expanded into a major manufacturing enterprise mostly owned by the worker/shareholders. It built houses for the poor and widows and provided labor for jobless drifters, and its leaders instituted central economic and land-use planning and zoning, dictating where houses and factories and public transit should be built. Novelist Edward Bellamy, who visited Brigham City after the panic, reportedly drew inspiration for Looking Backward, his 1888 utopian novel set in a socialist Boston in the year 2000, when greed and capitalism are no more.

Young didn’t need to wait another century for utopia to arrive. In the aftermath of the 1873 panic, he set about spreading the Brigham City model—combined with an element of Joseph Smith’s Order of Enoch wealth-redistribution plan—across Deseret. He started in St. George and worked his way northward, converting communities to the order as he went.

Each adopted the order in its own way, but the core principals were the same: communalism, cooperation, and equal distribution of wealth. That this occurred just after the Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engles, had been published in America bears noting, if nothing else. The language in the St. George United Order Constitution gives a sense of what Young was trying to do, mentioning the struggle between capital and labor, bemoaning the “oppression of monied monopolies” and railing against “a growing … spirit for extravagant speculation and over-reaching the legitimate bounds of the credit system; resulting in financial panic and bankruptcies.”

“It was clear to all that the United Order,” writes Arrington, in Great Basin Kingdom, “was an attempt to retard, and, if possible, to prevent the development of a market-oriented economy dependent on extensive importation and exportation.” About 200 communities implemented the Order. Some, like Brigham City, took a moderate approach. Others were quite radical.

Orderville fits into the latter category. The community was founded in the spring of 1875 by twenty-five families who had broken off from the Mount Carmel community a few miles down valley. The Orderville citizens pitched in to build houses surrounding a central plaza and common dining hall. All property was turned over to the community corporation, including land, livestock, and machinery. Decision-making was centralized. The population grew to 600, with around 200 acres of communal fields. The citizens built a sawmill, cabinet shop, woolen mill, shoe shop and tannery. Wealth was distributed evenly. Everyone ate together and wore locally made uniforms.

Orderville thrived in its collective state even as other southern Utah communities abandoned all or parts of the United Order. The community gained population and was able to quadruple its communal assets over just several years’ time.

Orderville’s successes, however, only highlighted the failures of the predominant, free-market system in use everywhere else, drawing resentment from the outside world. The timing wasn’t so great, either: In 1882, in a direct affront to the Utah Territory and the church, Congress passed the Edmunds Act, banning polygamy. A few years later, the feds rounded up and jailed hundreds of suspected polygamists, including in Orderville, leaving many communities leaderless. Church leaders, looking to remove yet another source of negative outside attention, urged Orderville to abandon its communal ways. The town’s leaders eventually complied—the central dining hall had been wiped out by a flood a few years earlier anyway—but kept the industries under communal ownership for another couple of decades.

By the early 1900s, the United Order had died in practice. For its part, the church continued to start its own businesses and to invest in other firms—sometimes to its own detriment. The aim, for the most part, was not to turn a profit, but to provide resources for its members. Still, the communalist spirit lived on, permeating the politics and the economics of the church for years afterward.

One of the embodiments of this spirit came in the form of a Utah Mormon banker and conservative Republican named Marriner S. Eccles. Eccles had long believed that hard work and thrift were all one needed to be successful. His father, David Eccles, had built up an empire on those principles, most famously owning the Utah Construction Company, one of six firms that built Hoover Dam and the largest company of its kind in the nation. The senior Eccles died in 1912, leaving everything to his children from two wives, one in Logan, one in Ogden. Though Marriner was in the lesser-endowed Logan branch, he ended up in Ogden, rose to the top of the bunch with his business acumen, and became president of Utah Construction Company, First Security Corporation, and several other interests. Then the Depression hit. Though Eccles’s wealth insulated him and his businesses, he noticed all around him people who had toiled and saved their whole lives, and who were now ruined, unemployed, even homeless.

“It is a national disgrace that such suffering should be permitted in this, the wealthiest country in the world,” he said. “The present condition is not the fault of the unemployed, but that of our business, financial, and political leadership.”

In 1933, Eccles and forty-five other citizens addressed Congress on ways to stop or slow the downward economic spiral. Most witnesses suggested that extravagance, nature, or God had caused the crash, and that balancing the federal budget was the only solution. Not Eccles. He said the root cause was maldistribution of wealth. There was plenty of money out there, it had just all ended up in the hands of a small group of the ultra-rich—the 1 percent, if you will—leaving the other 99 percent broke. That left the bulk of Americans not only hungry, but also without any of the purchasing power necessary to fuel the economy, and that’s what led to the crash.

How to fix the problem? The federal government had to raise taxes on the rich, forget balancing the budget, and spend like crazy in order to redistribute the wealth. Eccles’s five-point plan included allocating $500 million for unemployment and poverty relief, increasing funding to state and local governments for public works and infrastructure projects, and refinancing farm mortgages.

The approach was both compassionate and coldly rational. It would feed the hungry with direct handouts. And it would push a little bit of the wealth back into the hands of the working class, restoring the purchasing power of the masses. That, in turn, would revive consumption and jump-start industry, creating more jobs and more wealth. For as Eccles often said, “Labor is our only source of wealth.” Meanwhile, it would bolster the infrastructure of the nation, providing a foundation for future economic growth.

Trickle-down economics simply wouldn’t work. “The orthodox capitalistic system of uncontrolled individualism … will no longer serve our purpose,” Eccles said, echoing Brigham Young and presaging John Maynard Keynes’s 1936 work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money—the basis for one of the principal schools of modern economic thought. “We must think in terms of the scientific, technological, interdependent machine age, which can only survive and function under a modified capitalistic system controlled and regulated from the top by government.”

Eccles, who was not a church leader but whose family remains powerful in Utah, became the chairman of the Federal Reserve, and his theories provided the seeds of the New Deal. In 1936, around the same time that the federal government was launching its wealth redistribution effort, the church created its Welfare Program, which today spans the globe, providing food, shelter, medical help, and emergency aid to those in need.

The church adhered to the collectivist values of Smith, Young, and Young’s successor, John Taylor (also a strong proponent of wealth redistribution) for the next couple of decades. But when McCarthyism infected the nation in the 1950s, the Church’s communalist ways once again put them at odds with the nation’s mainstream. Then, maybe fearing more persecution, church leaders started an effort—perhaps concerted, perhaps not—to change their public image from borderline theocratic communists to full-on capitalists.

The ideological leader of this new, free-market, staunchly conservative Mormonism was Ezra Taft Benson, whom the church named to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in 1943. He served as President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s secretary of agriculture from 1953 until 1961, during which he became more and more rabidly anti-communist. In 1961, he told the church’s general conference: “No true Latter-day Saint and no true American can be a socialist or a communist or support programs leading in that direction.”

Benson was a contemporary, friend, and ideological twin of W. Cleon Skousen, the ultra-conservative political theorist whose teachings would influence the Sagebrush Rebellion of the 1970s, the Wise Use and Patriot movements of the 1990s, and the violent right-wing uprisings of the mid-2010s, including the armed occupation led by Ammon and Ryan Bundy of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in 2016. Benson and Skousen both were strong supporters of the John Birch Society, which was considered extreme even by the likes of hardcore conservatives such as Barry Goldwater. The society’s founder, Robert Welch, derided Eisenhower as a communist and Benson concurred. And in 1963 Benson predicted that within the decade the United States would be ruled by a communist dictatorship, which would include military occupation, concentration camps, and the like.

Many church leaders considered Benson’s beliefs not only to be too radical, but also blatantly racist, and at times he was chided for being too political and too extreme—though his status as apostle was never threatened. Still, his beliefs trickled down into more tempered elements of the church. In 1966, Apostle Marion G. Romney, former Sen. Mitt Romney’s father’s cousin, felt compelled to use his entire speech to the annual LDS general conference to outline the differences between socialism and the United Order (distillation: the United Order has God, socialism doesn’t). And in 1999, Phillip J. Bryson, a professor at Brigham Young University, wrote a paper called “In Defense of Capitalism” to counter some LDS scholars’ anti-capitalist leanings.

These efforts served gradually to pull the church rightward politically, and in 1985, Benson was named the church’s thirteenth president, a position he held until his death in 1994.

Utah’s politics have long been dominated by the church—nearly 90% of the state’s legislature identify as practicing Mormons. As a result, the state’s politics tend to reflect the church’s. Prior to 1980, for example, the state’s voters were as likely to elect a Democratic governor or federal or state lawmaker as they were a Republican one. But during the Reagan era and, for that matter, the Ezra Taft Benson era, the state has become bright red, only electing Democrats to represent isolated liberal strongholds such as Salt Lake City.

During the same time-frame, the church shifted economically, as well. In 1960, a Canadian oil company executive named N. Eldon Tanner was appointed by then–church president David O. McKay as an assistant to the twelve; two years later he became an apostle. He introduced corporate financing to the church and pointed it to not only achieve solvency, but to become a full-on business empire within a few decades.

It’s the latter, capitalist version of Mormon history that the modern media has glommed onto. And it’s not inaccurate—under Young’s leadership, the church had its hands in a number of business enterprises, just like today—but it’s also not complete. There still is a faint undercurrent of the old United Order beliefs. The church’s welfare program and Deseret Industries continue to be a significant part of its larger workings, providing humanitarian assistance across the globe as well as food and clothing and jobs to people closer to home. And it’s safe to say that the church’s current capitalist successes are rooted in, and wouldn’t be possible without, Brigham Young’s collectivist, quasi-communist experiment from the late 1800s that played out in a tiny town called Orderville.

📸 Parting Shot 🎞️

It seems like every time the Colorado River and other Western water woes make national headlines, some pundit — usually from the East Coast — weighs in with their “simple” or “obvious” solution. And I get mad and start throwing things around the room, then type out some blistering rant riddled with epithets and insults.

Well, the Colorado River is in the news again, and with it have come the usual swarm of oversimplified hot-takes. The one that really got my goat this time is from Matthew Yglesias, who wrote a piece headlined: The Western water crisis has a simple solution: Stop giving the majority of the water away to farmers for almost nothing!

These things piss me off so much not because they’re wrong, but because there is no “simple” solution to the Western water crisis. That’s because the crisis itself isn’t simple, and saying that it has simple fixes implies that the folks who have spent a lot of time trying to solve the problem are a bunch of idiots, since they hadn’t come up with this solution already. It seems as if Yglesias and his ilk assume that the West is not only monolithic, but that we Westerners are a bunch of backwoods bumpkins who don’t understand the region’s own problems.

Who cares what these bozos believe, right? Right. But judging by the comments on Yglesias’ social media posts, a lot of other people are similarly deluded. So I figured his piece provides a nice opportunity to clear some things up.

In fact, there is no single “Western water crisis.” The West is huge and is geographically, hydrographically, and ecologically diverse. While most, but not all, of the Western U.S. is in some stage of drought currently, not all of those places are experiencing a water crisis, per se. There is a Colorado River water crisis and a Rio Grande water crisis and a San Joaquin Valley water crisis, but those crises are not all the same.

The Colorado River crisis is multifaceted and manifests in different ways in different places and on different levels. The river itself is in crisis, in that stretches of the mainstem and its tributaries virtually dry up during summers like this one. Its users are facing a potential crisis, i.e. looming shortages, as in some of them are getting less water from the river than they did in the past. And the vast and complex plumbing system and legal framework that has been built up to harness and govern the river is perhaps facing the most immediate crisis: It is collapsing under its own weight and in many ways has become obsolete. Each of these is a distinct calamity, with its own twists, turns, causes, and bevy of potential solutions.

From his perch in the Northeast, however, Yglesias sees just one dimension, writing in the “nut graf” of his piece:

Even worse, the whole Western water conflict has an incredibly simple solution: End federal law’s current stipulation that a huge share of the available water must be sold at very low prices exclusively for the purpose of agriculture.

The issue here is well known, well understood, and not particularly controversial. It’s just that nobody seems to want to actually fix it.

Uh, not quite.

Yes, irrigated agriculture is by far the dominant consumer of Colorado River water, accounting for 52% of overall consumption and 74% of direct human consumption. And yes, agricultural users typically and notoriously pay less for the water than municipal users. No, this is not dictated by federal law.

Agricultural users were among the first entities in the colonial-settler era to put large quantities of water to beneficial use, giving them the most senior rights to the largest quantities of water. The Imperial Irrigation District, for example, has senior rights to about 3 million acre-feet of Colorado River water, most of which is used for agriculture.

These water rights holders have a legal right to use a set amount of water each year. They are not leasing or purchasing the water from the federal government or anyone else. It’s essentially theirs, for free, as long as they are able to divert it from the river and put it to beneficial use.

Usually the water rights are held by irrigation districts, ditch companies, municipalities, corporations, or, in some cases, very large individual landholders. In the late 1800s, these entities built their own diversions, canals, and delivery systems. Construction was often financed by private investors and the individual irrigators, who held stocks, or shares, in the ditch company. Each share would entitle its holder to a set amount of water from the canal. The shareholder would pay an annual fee for each share to cover construction, maintenance, and operating costs.

The Bureau of Reclamation was established in 1902 to build larger scale dams, diversions, and canals to deliver water to users and to spur agricultural development in the arid West. Call it the nationalized version of an irrigation district, but on steroids. The federal government paid for the projects, but the irrigation districts and municipal water utilities they served were expected to pay back the costs over time. The taxpayers supposedly wouldn’t have to pay a dime. Yet as the years went by, and as the budgets of the projects skyrocketed, the terms of the paybacks were relaxed, especially for agricultural users. This effectively subsidized water delivery, which in turn lowered farmers’ costs.

One of the Bureau’s big projects was the 80-mile-long All-American Canal, built in the 1930s to ferry Colorado River water to the Imperial Irrigation District and other users. The IID entered into a 50-year payback contract, which ended in 1994. The Bureau still owns the canal, but the IID operates and maintains it and other infrastructure that delivers Colorado River water to nine cities and some 500,000 acres of farmland.

The IID pays nothing for the Colorado River water itself. It does pay to operate and maintain its vast water delivery system, and offsets those costs by charging agricultural and municipal users just $20 per acre-foot for water it delivers, a bargain basement rate. In other words, Imperial Valley farmers do get cheap water, but so do Imperial Valley cities and even industry (which pays $85/af, also relatively affordable). IID also brings in about $160 million annually by selling water to the San Diego County Water Authority. The operating costs for the All-American Canal system are lower than, say, the Central Arizona Project’s, because the All-American Canal is gravity fed, whereas the CAP uses huge amounts of electricity to pump water uphill.

Similar setups exist across the Colorado River Basin. But each system is distinct, and each has its own mix of federal and private funding and operational scenarios and rates.

And here’s one of the main flaws of Yglesias’s argument: He assumes that there’s some all powerful actor out there that sets rates and standards for water from the Colorado River, although he himself clearly doesn’t know who or what that actor is (he always uses the passive voice, or the all-encompassing “you” in these cases). That’s because that entity doesn’t exist. While the feds could stop subsidizing agriculture, and should not build any more water projects, they don’t have the authority to step in and adjust water rates. States probably could set rates for groundwater, but they can’t charge the IID for exercising their water rights on the Colorado River.

Next, Yglesias pivots to pillorying alfalfa, because that’s in vogue these days. I’m not going to get into that too much, because I’ve written about it so many times here before, but this little bit is pretty funny:

“The whole crisis is because of alfalfa” sounds ridiculous, in part because alfalfa is a funny word. But also because it’s so random. Wheat? That’s in bread and pasta. Everyone loves wheat. Cotton? That’s my shirt, I get why we need cotton.

But alfalfa?

Alfalfa is grown as animal feed.

Now, I’m no alfalfa apologist (nor am I an alfalfaphobe), but I feel like I should point out that most of the alfalfa grown with Colorado River water is used to feed dairy cows, which in turn produce milk and cheese and ice cream. Unless Yglesias is a vegan, he might want to consider that. He then argues that since alfalfa is relatively low-value (money wise) compared to Las Vegas casinos, Phoenix microchip factories, or housing, the water should be going to casinos, factories, and housing, not farms, which would presumably happen if farmers had to pay more for water (i.e. they’d go broke and be forced to sell).

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He continues:

The real point here, though, isn’t that the farmers are living high on the hog and need to be taken down a peg. You could easily let them keep their windfall water rights but turn those rights into property that they’re able to sell. Then existing cities or industrial users or real estate developers looking to build new housing or whoever else could just buy out the alfalfa farmers. The land currently under cultivation could shift to less water-intensive uses. Even a golf course uses significantly less water per acre than an alfalfa farm. Much of the land would, of course, turn into housing, but some could become non-irrigated parks with native vegetation.

First off, there is nothing novel or groundbreaking about this idea. Sprawl has been gobbling up farmland, and water rights, for decades in the West. Phoenix didn’t just grow into the desert, it also grew into citrus orchards and alfalfa fields, and will probably continue to build housing and data centers on what ag land remains. A different version of this concept, where a city or developer purchases a farmer’s water rights, but uses them somewhere else — a practice known as buy and dry — is also not uncommon.

This does not solve the water crisis. Instead of cutting consumption, which is what’s needed, it merely shifts the consumption from one use — agriculture — to other ones, such as housing and golf courses and chip manufacturing and data centers. This may wring more cash out of each acre-foot of water, but it doesn’t lower consumption. An acre-foot is an acre-foot, whether it’s going to alfalfa, a golf course, a neighborhood’s lawns, a data center or a swimming pool.

Besides, transitioning land out of agriculture comes with its own problems. We can argue forever about whether farming alfalfa or any other crop in the desert is appropriate, or of adequately high value, or whatever. We can argue that the Bureau of Reclamation should never have existed, and that irrigating the arid West should have been left to private entities operating in a free market. But the fact is, there is farming in the desert, those projects did end up subsidizing the agriculture industry, and communities, economies, cultures, and even new landscapes have emerged from and formed around those farms.

Taking vast swaths of land out of farming, whether to build houses or solar panels or to buy the water rights and use them somewhere else, has myriad consequences, many of them negative. Fields can become noxious-weed-clogged dust pits, the wildlife and ecosystems that have come to rely on irrigation runoff dry up, farm workers and families and the businesses that rely on them are displaced, communities’ economies are upended. As Madeline Wilson, an agricultural systems specialist for Colorado State University’s extension office pointed out at a 2024 panel on dust-on-snow, every field fallowed in the San Luis Valley for conservation purposes also represents a family. “We’re not just talking about drying up lands,” she said, “but the drying up of our economy.”

In no way does this mean that farms should be immune from curtailment. Indeed, because agriculture is the biggest user of Colorado River water, it will have to take the largest cuts in consumption. There is simply nowhere else from which the 4 million acre-feet or more of reductions per year needed to bring demand into line with dwindling supplies can come. But forcing farmers into bankruptcy by jacking up water rates (if there was a mechanism to do so), or prescribing “incredibly simple” policy solutions that don’t consider the complexities of the situation and its myriad moving parts or the on-the-ground impacts, isn’t the way to do it.

The “root cause” of the Colorado River crises is not alfalfa or pecans or cotton or cattle, it’s not the prior appropriation doctrine or the low price of water, it’s not overpopulation, it’s not data centers or golf courses or lawns or bad forest management or lack of or too many reservoirs. The root cause is twofold. First, there’s scarcity. The Southwest is an arid place, and climate change-exacerbated warming is drying it out more: there is less precipitation; the precipitation we do get is falling as rain, not snow; the snow we get is melting faster; and evapotranspiration is happening at a higher rate. This all leads to less water in the streams, reservoirs, rivers, and even aquifers. Secondly, there’s the chronic and long-term failure to acknowledge the scarcity, and the stubborn refusal to adapt to it and adjust consumption accordingly.

There has been progress. Over the last two decades some of the biggest water users on the river have slashed their water use considerably, sometimes because they had no choice, in some cases because they were incentivized to do so, and in other cases they did it to get ahead of future cuts. Last year, for example, the Imperial Irrigation District used 900,000 acre-feet less than it did in 1999. By its count, it has conserved over 9 million acre-feet since 2003 by fallowing fields and deploying various efficiency measures. And yet they’ve done so while continuing to grow nearly $240 million worth of alfalfa annually. It will need to do more; everyone will. But it’s a pretty big start.

There is one simple solution to the Colorado River crises: Everyone on the river has to use less water. Period. This won’t come from pithy policy prescriptions or one-dimensional solutions. It will require the tribal nations, the states, and all of the water users in the basin to come together and find a new way to approach and think about and revere the lifeline of the Southwest.

🗒️ Land Desk News Feed 📝

Coming in September: The Land Desk News Feed! This will be a once-a-week roundup of the West’s most important headlines, journalism, and commentary, curated and summarized by yours truly. I’m thinking it will probably drop on Wednesdays, but haven’t settled on anything, yet. Most weeks it will come in addition to the regular two Land Desk dispatches, but some weeks it may take one of the others’ place (meaning you’d only get two newsletters that week so as to not clog up your inbox all the time!).

All paid and free subscribers should expect the first edition on Sept. 9.

📸 Parting Shot 🎞️

THE NEWS: The U.S. Interior Department on Friday handed down the operating guidelines for the Colorado River for the next two years, while also finalizing the 10-year decision framework that will guide these plans. And on Monday, Nevada filed a lawsuit challenging both the framework and operating plan, saying that potential shortages required by the plan could cause “cause devastating environmental, socioeconomic, and health and human safety impacts to southern Nevada and its citizens.”

THE CONTEXT: Interior, i.e. the Bureau of Reclamation, did two things. The first was to hand down a record of decision on the framework that will guide operating plans for the next decade, which I wrote about here, so I’ll skip the details this time.

They also released a more specific plan for the 2027 and 2028 operating years. In the new plan, the feds affirm their commitment to “defending” minimum power pool in Lake Powell, or a reservoir surface elevation of 3,490 feet. When the water falls below this level, water can no longer be released via the penstocks and hydropower turbines, so it must all go through the lower river outlet works, which weren’t designed for sustained use.

Notably, Reclamation plans to do this by “initially seeking to maintain a minimum elevation of 3,510 feet. This provides an operational buffer and provides additional flexibility in recognition of the operational risks associated with sustained operations below elevation 3,490 feet … .”

The current elevation is 3,518 feet, meaning it could reach that upper buffer zone of 3,510 feet in October if current levels of decline continue.

To prevent it from falling any further, Reclamation would cut back releases from Glen Canyon Dam, which in turn would cut flows through the Grand Canyon and into Lake Mead, which would pull down Mead’s levels and trigger mandatory cuts for the Lower Basin users. Under the new operating plan so far, these cuts aren’t as onerous as many feared, and actually match up with what the Lower Basin had proposed to do voluntarily. The deets:

• The Lower Basin would receive 6.25 million acre-feet from the Colorado River, or 1.25 MAF below the Colorado River Compact’s allotment of 7.5 MAF.

• Arizona would receive 2.04 MAF; California 3.96 MAF; and Nevada 250,000 AF.

• This means Arizona would take a 760,000 AF cut; Nevada a 50,000 AF cut; and California a 440,000 AF cut.

Arizona takes the largest cut by percentage and volume because the Central Arizona Project, which delivers most of the state’s Colorado River water, has junior water rights to other big users on the river.

But if reservoir levels continue to drop, then Reclamation could impose further cuts on the Lower Basin, potentially slashing Nevada’s water deliveries by as much as 213,556 acre-feet, or about 71% of its total entitlement of 300,000 acre-feet. This would be truly disastrous for the Las Vegas metro area, which relies on the Colorado River for about 90% of its water. And it’s not like there are a bunch of alfalfa fields the city could “buy and dry” for the water rights.

The Southern Nevada Water Authority has managed to cut overall water consumption over the last three decades, even as the population has soared, through system-wide efficiencies, incentives, tearing up ornamental grass, water recycling, and extra fees for water gluttons. Las Vegas still has room to conserve, but as Western water scholar John Fleck put it, there “is an absurdity to a plan that would require Las Vegas to cut 71%. That’s existential.”

Even more astonishing than the fact that the federal government is considering virtually drying up one of the Southwest’s major metropolises is their justification for doing so: To protect Glen Canyon Dam and keep it producing hydropower, even at greatly diminished levels, and — though it’s not stated — to keep lake-based recreation somewhat viable.

You have to remember that when the feds vow to defend the 3,500-foot level at Lake Powell, and when they refuse to even consider re-engineering Glen Canyon Dam to allow for releases at lower levels, either by rebuilding the outlet tubes or tunneling a bypass around the dam, they are also saying they are going to trap more than 4 million acre-feet of water behind the dam that could otherwise flow downstream into the Grand Canyon and Lake Mead. That’s enough water to fill Nevada’s entire allotment for more than 13 years that, instead, will be sitting in the reservoir and slowly evaporating.

Nevada’s lawsuit — which is against the federal government, not the Upper Basin states — alleges that the feds’ plan violates the Law of the River. It slams the plan for not explicitly calling for releasing more water from Upper Basin reservoirs to prop up Powell, does not require Upper Basin states to make any cuts, and fails to consider a long-term alternative or engineered solution alternative to address Glen Canyon’s infrastructure limitations. The plan also does not account for its potential impacts on hydropower production at Hoover Dam, which drops off steeply as reservoir levels decline (meaning that preserving power output at Glen Canyon could lead to a net reduction in combined output from the two dams).

Save the Colorado, a river advocacy group, came out in support of Nevada’s lawsuit in a written statement. "Las Vegas has one of the best water conservation programs in the entire U.S.,” said Gary Wockner, the group’s executive director. “Penalizing Las Vegas for water use is like penalizing an obese person who lost a lot of weight taking GLP1s.”

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🌵 Public Lands 🌲

Rough Times at the national parks these days. In Bryce Canyon, a sudden thunderstorm left visitors stranded on trails and requiring rescue, with two of them transported to a hospital for hypothermia. It also unleashed some serious flash flooding. In Zion National Park, a rockslide narrowly missed a shuttle bus and forced the closure of a portion of the Zion Canyon Scenic Drive. And in Canyonlands, officials were searching for a missing individual in Horseshoe Canyon, a remote area north of the park’s Maze district. Temperatures in the area were in the 90s. In Death Valley, a French tourist died after his car got stuck in the mud on a remote road in 116° F heat.

The video below shows flooding near Tropic, Utah, downstream from Bryce Canyon National Park. Source: Garfield County Sheriff.

📸 Parting Shot 🎞️

In May, I wrote about how climate change and aridification and a shrinking Lake Powell were coming for the Bullfrog Marina, on the northwest side of the reservoir. The water was simply getting too low for the marina to remain viable, so they were planning on moving it across the reservoir to Halls Crossing Marina.

At the time, it was not yet clear how lower water levels and the marina’s removal might affect visitation to the remote area. Now preliminary numbers are in.

• 67,277: Total recreation visitors to the Bullfrog District of Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, January through July 2025

• 44,206: Total recreation visitors to the Bullfrog District, January through July 2026.

That’s a decrease of over 23,000 visits, or a 34% drop. Even more dramatic is the drop in overnight stays in July, from over 47,000 in 2025 to just 17,000 in 2026. Then did folks make the long drive over to Halls Crossing, instead? It appears that some of them may have once the marina was moved, but overall this year visitation is also down on the northeast side of the reservoir.

• 18,023: Total recreation visitors to the Halls Crossing District of Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, January through July 2025.

• 15,099: Total recreation visitors to the Halls Crossing District, January through July 2026.

That’s a decrease of 2,944 visits, or a 19% drop. This may not all be related directly to the dropping lake levels. Horseshoe Bend, which is in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area but downstream from the reservoir, has also seen a significant drop off in visitors this spring and summer. In a future dispatch I’ll take a closer look at tourism numbers in general to get a better sense of how widespread the declines are.

And now for the images showing Bullfrog with the marina, and without. The first image is from August 2024, when the reservoir’s surface elevation was at about 3,580 feet. The marina was still there, and the boat ramps still made it all the way to the water. The second image is from August 2026, with a surface level of just over 3,518 feet. Look closely and you’ll see the marina is gone, and the ramps are high and dry.

Sometimes it feels like the deeper the Trump administration sinks into various quagmires of its own making, the more it lashes out at politically popular protections for public lands. Each passing day brings a new assault on the environment, the climate, and, well, humanity.

This time, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has moved (again) to rescind the Roadless Rule, which protects some 45 million acres of U.S. Forest Service land from new roadbuilding and logging. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins predictably and baselessly claimed that the rule has hampered forest management and fire-fighting capabilities. This is untrue.

When the Bill Clinton administration implemented the Roadless Rule in 2001, it culminated a multi-decade effort to identify and set aside forest lands that hadn’t been disturbed by roads for possible designation as wilderness. At the time, management of inventoried roadless areas was carried out by individual Forest Service offices. The Roadless Rule put a nationwide prohibition on timber harvesting, road construction, and road reconstruction in inventoried roadless areas, with a number of exceptions. The intent was not only to conserve these relatively undisturbed areas, but also to save money: By 2001, the Forest Service’s existing road network was over 386,000 miles long, with an estimated $8.4 billion in deferred maintenance and reconstruction. Building more roads would just exacerbate that deficit.

While inventoried roadless areas have many of the same characteristics as wilderness areas, the Roadless Rule stops far short of offering wilderness-level protections, and expressly allows for motorized uses of existing roads, off-highway motorized use in specified areas, livestock grazing, and energy and mineral development.

So it’s hard to take Rollins seriously when she says the rule is hampering access for fire prevention and fighting efforts. In fact, the rule clearly allows for road-building to fight fires. It also allows for cutting, removing, and selling “generally small diameter timber” for various reasons, including “reducing the likelihood of uncharacteristic wildfire.”

In a Senate hearing this spring concerning Sen. Mike Lee’s (MAGA-UT) amendment aiming to repeal the Roadless rule, Sen. Alex Padilla, D-California, pointed out that 240,000 acres of inventoried roadless areas in his state alone had been treated for wildfire hazard mitigation treatment, showing the dubiousness of Lee’s (and now Rollins’) claims. And the Trump administration, for better or worse, has lagged on forest thinning: A Center for Western Priorities analysis found the Forest Service treated 35% less acreage in 2025 than it did under Biden in 2024. That suggests that vegetation management is being stifled not by regulations, but by a lack of resources — the Trump administration has slashed Forest Service staffing and budgets considerably since taking office.

In fact, the evidence suggests that the Roadless Rule has actually helped deter wildfires. A 2007 Pacific Biodiversity Institute study found that 88% of the nation’s wildfires are sparked by humans, and 95% of human-ignited blazes occur within a half-mile from a road. Roads act like syringes, injecting humanity — along with their errant cigarette butts, untended campfires or grills, sparks from machinery or hot catalytic converters — further into the backcountry than they would go by trail.

The Roadless Rule originally applied to almost 60 million acres, but in the years following its implementation, it was bandied about by presidential administrations and the courts. In 2005, the George W. Bush White House revoked the rule and replaced it with the alternate roadless rule, which allowed states to petition the Forest Service to create their own standards; Colorado and Idaho chose to do so. When the Tenth Circuit court later reinstated the 2001 rule, the 2005 rule was nullified, but Idaho and Colorado’s rules remained in effect. As a result the administration’s proposed repeal would not affect Colorado and Idaho’s plans.

The rule and its moderate protections for habitat, wildlife, forests, and watersheds have proven deeply popular across a wide demographic swath of the public. Last June, Rollins moved to repeal the Roadless Rule for the first time, resulting in intense backlash not only from environmentalists, but also from the more conservative-leaning hook and bullet crowd and general public, which barraged the department with comments supporting the rule. It’s worth noting that even Project 2025, the ultra-right-wing “blueprint” for the Trump administration, called for repealing only the portion of the Roadless Rule that pertained to Alaska’s Tongass National Forest. This spring, when Lee tacked a Roadless Rule-repealing amendment onto bipartisan wildfire legislation, he annihilated the cross-aisle support for the larger bill, effectively ruining its chances of passing.

Now the public has a chance to weigh in once again. The USDA is accepting comments until Sept. 21, so go here and say your piece.

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⛈️ Wacky Weather Watch⚡️

The summer of nightmare heat continues as yet another heat dome settles over parts of the West. Parts of southern California, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and most areas in-between are under heat watches or extreme heat warnings for the next several days. There is also a chance of thunderstorms, which may bring a bit of relief, but if the summer so far is any indication, they’re just as likely to bring catastrophic flash flooding, damaging winds, fire-starting lightning, and huge dust storms, a.k.a. haboobs.

🛢️ Hydrocarbon Hoedown 📈

I know that many of you have been hating on data centers lately, especially the ones used to process all that AI slop so that billionaires can become trillionaires (through some process that defies all logic). But please, I beg you, save some of your disdain for the oil and gas companies, too! After all, they are using the data center energy-use scare to justify drilling for natural gas to power the damned things. Not only that, but every day that our president screws up negotiations to end his war on Iran is another day that the Strait of Hormuz remains closed to oil tankers, another day of rising oil prices, and another day of record-high profits for petro-corporations, their executives, and their shareholders.

For example: ExxonMobil reported adjusted earnings of $23.5 billion for the first half of 2026; Chevron’s adjusted earnings were $14.7 billion; Valero raked in a $5.4 billion profit … you get the picture.

🗺️ Messing with Maps 🧭

If you want to know what’s happening on the U.S.-Mexico border, you go to the Border Chronicle. And now, if you want to know what’s happening with Trump’s border wall, which is just a monumental piece of environmental disaster, you can go to the Border Chronicle’s new Wall Watch, the publication’s community-reported interactive map tracking construction of the barrier.

Say you want to know what sort of wall is being built in the Big Bend region? Or what sort of structure already exists near Lochiel, Arizona, where border wall contractors have destroyed old-growth cottonwood trees and are threatening the remainder of the grove? You can toggle the map to the satellite view, zoom in on the place of interest, and click on the border and get a pop-up informing you of what work is taking place, who the contractor is, and the expected cost.

📝 Hoback Report

A guest post by Bob Frodeman

Could the West be the place where America finally gives up its belief in endless growth? Probably not, but you can imagine different triggers. For instance, drought, a shrinking snowpack, and a parched Colorado River could halt growth in Phoenix. Or overwhelming numbers of tourists in Yellowstone or Arches National Park could force the establishment of timed entry (which Arches had, until the Trump Administration decreed that this was oppressing the right of people to sit in traffic). Or climate change-driven wildfires threatening entire cities (see Spokane) could put a crimp in sprawl.

But in my neck of the woods traffic may be the trigger.

Traffic is getting absurd in Jackson. The chaos used to be limited to the summer months; now it’s pretty much year-round. Climate change has extended the hiking season on both ends: this May a new record was set for visitation in Grand Teton National Park. And while the valley floor was denuded of snow last winter (a brown Christmas – in Jackson?!), the snow fell higher up, giving us some of the best skiing in the West during a generally horrific snow year.

Policy, history, and geography all contribute to the situation. First, it’s just plain hard to get here: there are only three roads into the valley. The spectacular mountains and forests mean that more than 97% of Teton County is publicly owned – Teton and Yellowstone National Parks, Bridger-Teton National Forest, and the National Elk Refuge. The Elk Refuge offers a striking visual: created in 1912, when Jackson had a population of a few hundred, the Refuge now hems town in on the north side, preserving land that would otherwise be jammed with hundreds of homes. Another 1% of the land is covered by conservation easements.

Caught between public land, various bumps and ridges, and the Snake River, there’s only one artery in town, called Highway 89 when it runs north-south, and Broadway when it turns east-west. Pressed up against Saddle Butte, Broadway already is five lanes and would be hell to expand. Highway 22, a two-lane spur that runs up and over Teton Pass that WYDOT wants to expand to five lanes, is already a traffic nightmare morning and night. And all the other roads in town are suburban streets lined with homes.

Nonetheless, the Town of Jackson currently has 825,000 square feet of additional development in the works. This includes the 245,000 (down from the original 400,000) square-foot Mogul development, a humungous hotel and condo complex planned for the northern entrance to Jackson (traffic already backs up a mile or two every afternoon on that road coming into town). The Jackson Town Council has approved the sketch plan for the complex. The other 600,000 square feet are scattered across the downtown area. On top of this, on the southern edge of town – on what will essentially become an extension of town – a new subdivision called Northern South Park has begun construction. Situated on ranch land, Teton County has approved a neighborhood of 1,437 homes, which would add 23% to the existing housing stock of Jackson.

What’s bizarre is the lack of self-consciousness about what’s happening. A few weeks ago I wrote a town council member asking for the list of ongoing projects. There isn’t one. I generated the 825,000 number by calling up the town clerk and asking her to go through the various applications. We added it up together.

Given all this, plus the 4 million annual tourists, it’s hard to see how Jackson will avoid utter and complete gridlock. But wait—it gets better, by which I mean worse. Because land is so scarce in Teton County, and home prices so high (median price $2.5 million, eight times the Wyoming average), workers drive in from Star Valley (30 miles to the south) and Teton Valley, Idaho (30 miles to the west). Both areas are primed for more growth: the population of Teton Valley doubled from 2000 to 2020 (to 10,000) and is projected to be the fastest growing part of Idaho. And this is to say nothing about the dangers of traveling Teton Pass – there was a landslide there two summer ago that diverted traffic for three weeks, and this summer a runaway truck killed two people.

Most of these people, as well as the commuters from Star Valley, come to Jackson for work and play. It adds up to a traffic apocalypse. Alas, Jackson and Teton County has no control over these outlying areas. The obvious move is to create a regional authority to work on the problem. But no such authority exists, and the political culture of these areas is quite different from Jackson, which makes conversations hard.

In Jackson you hear a lot of talk about managing growth. What you don’t hear is talk about the necessity of stopping growth. But this is the conversation that Jackson needs to have – as well as many other places across the West that are bumping up against limits.

⛏️ Mining Monitor ⛏️

The vultures didn’t wait long to feed on the carrion of shrunken national monuments. Within days of President Donald Trump’s order slashing nearly 3 million acres from Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments, mining claims were filed within the former boundaries of both monuments with San Juan County and Kane County, respectively.

While Trump’s shrinkage did reopen that land to new mining claims and mineral leasing, it does not go into effect until Sept. 11, 60 days after the proclamations were issued. The claims have not officially been recorded with the Bureau of Land Management.

On July 14, Kimmerle Mining LLC out of Moab filed seven claims just within the eastern border of what had been Bears Ears National Monument just two days earlier. A few weeks later, Charles Rosequist filed two claims in the southwest corner of the GSENM, near Kaibab Gulch and the Vermilion Cliffs.

Kimmerle Mining, its principal Kyle Kimmerle, and other family members hold dozens of mining claims across southern Utah and western Colorado uranium country. The family firm became known for staking claims in what would become Bears Ears National Monument leading up to its designation, and for locating more after Trump’s first national monument shrinkage in 2017.

Just before Biden restored the boundaries in 2021, Kimmerle Mining staked five new claims within the national monument and acquired additional claims from another firm in the historic White Canyon mining district. Kimmerle Mining promptly filed for a permit to do exploration work there, but the BLM said they had to demonstrate the claims’ “validity,” or show that they contained “valuable minerals.” The process for doing so would cost up to $100,000. Shortly thereafter, Kimmerle joined the state of Utah’s lawsuit seeking to eviscerate the national monument, claiming that its establishment had caused him to lose out on mining profits.

And, in 2018, the Kimmerle family staked the Easy Peasy claims in the Cottonwood Wash drainage in what had been Bears Ears National Monument. The new claims are adjacent to those, in the Cheese & Raisins Hills area, which was mined historically for vanadium and uranium. The Shumway brothers staked claims there back in the 1930s, including the Big Hole Mine, and the ruins of an old vanadium mill are still visible nearby.

Whether the firm plans to mine the claims, or is just looking for more grounds for a future lawsuit in the event that the next administration restores the boundaries isn’t clear. They have been known to use mining claims to make political points: Late last year, Kimmerle Mining staked four 20.66-acre lode claims on the east slope of the Henry Mountains, naming them Trump I, Trump 2, Trump 3, and Trump 4.

**

Also in the shady mining moves around national monument shrinkage: Less than a week before Trump issued the proclamations, Energy Fuels CEO Ross Bhappu purchased 74,000 shares of the uranium mining and milling firm’s stock, and the company’s chairman Bruce Hansen bought 4,000 shares. Democratic lawmakers on the House Natural Resources committee are now investigating the trade and the possibility that the executives received privileged, non-public information from the Trump administration in advance of the shrinkage.

Energy Fuels owns and operates the White Mesa uranium mill in San Juan County, Utah, east of Bears Ears National Monument. The company lobbied the Obama administration prior to its original 2016 designation. Though the administration ultimately excluded Energy Fuels’ Daneros mine from the monument, the firm lamented the fact that seven miles of the mine’s one access road still fell within the boundaries.

In 2017 Energy Fuels lobbyists, including former U.S. Rep. Mary Bono, R-Calif., met with Trump administration officials, and requested that it “reduce the size of the (Bears Ears National Monument) to only those specific resource areas or sites, if any, deemed to need additional protection beyond what is already available to Federal land management agencies.”

In 2021, IsoEnergy acquired the Daneros Mine and other mining properties from Energy Fuels. But any ore mined in the former Bears Ears is likely to be processed at Energy Fuels’ White Mesa mill, so they stand to benefit from the shrinkage.

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⛈️ Wacky Weather Watch⚡️

It wasn’t exactly a hurricane that hit Hurricane, but it was pretty darned destructive. This past weekend a huge storm pounded southwestern Utah, leading to arroyo-busting flash floods that turned the city’s streets into rivers of mud. The water gave a big boost to the Virgin River, which shot up from about 165 cubic feet per second to over 4,000 cfs in a matter of hours.

🐟 Colorado River Chronicles 💧

Lake Powell reached a grim benchmark this past weekend, when its surface elevation dropped to its lowest level since 1968, when the nation’s second largest reservoir was still filling up. In April of 2023, the level fell to 3,519.92 feet. On August 15 of this year, it reached 3,519.91 feet and is still falling at a rate of about two inches per day.

While not exactly surprising, the event launched many a news story in the mainstream media. And as is often the case with complicated issues like these — and the Glen Canyon Dam problem is not exactly simple or straightforward — some of the facts in these stories can be a little less than factual, and could use a bit of clarification.

Today’s New York Times piece provides a couple of examples:

• The graphic showing reservoir levels at Lake Powell says that at 3,370 feet, known as dead pool, “Water no longer flows past the dam.” As Zak Podmore — who wrote the book on Lake Powell and deadpool — pointed out on X-Twitter, that is not quite right. What actually would happen is that the dam would become a run-of-the-river facility, meaning water released from the dam would be equal to water flowing into the reservoir (minus losses from seepage and evaporation). So the Grand Canyon would not go completely dry, though there would be times when flows are pretty darned low.

• The piece notes: “About 6 million people across the Southwest rely on electricity from the dams [both Glen Canyon and Hoover].” This isn’t wrong, it’s just worded in a way that overstates the importance of these generators’ energy output to the Western power grid. Combined, the dams produce enough electricity annually to power some 550,000 households for a year. That power is sold at cost to municipalities, cooperatives, tribal nations, irrigation districts, and utilities across the West, which include it as part of their larger portfolios. The 6 million figure probably refers to all of the customers all of those entities serve; if the dams go down, these folks most likely wouldn’t notice except for a small jump in their power bills.

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Protect the Grand Canyon’s Humpback Chub
A guest dispatch by Ron Rudolph

This month Lake Powell will shrink to a level last seen in 1968, a few months before the first astronauts orbited the Moon. The receding reservoir has forced the Bureau of Reclamation to abandon the practice of releasing cool water from the reservoir, a strategy used successfully to prevent smallmouth bass from becoming entrenched in Grand Canyon National Park below Glen Canyon Dam.1 The bass are an invasive species that can escape from Lake Powell and could imperil the Grand Canyon’s native humpback chub population, the most important remnant of a federally protected species that was once widespread throughout the Colorado River system.2 Scientists attribute steep declines in the humpback chub population in the upper Colorado River Basin largely to smallmouth bass predation.3

Sustaining the humpback chub population in the Grand Canyon is essential to prevent the species’ extinction. With cool water releases no longer feasible, protecting the humpback chub now requires a different approach. Increasing the delivery of sediment into the Grand Canyon may be the most effective remaining tool. Additional sediment transported from Lake Powell, either around or through Glen Canyon Dam, would increase turbidity, making it more difficult for smallmouth bass to establish a stable population.

The Bureau’s decision to halt cool water releases reflects the severity of the ongoing drought, which has reduced this year’s unregulated flow of the Colorado River to the second lowest since Glen Canyon Dam was completed 63 years ago.4 In April, the agency instituted unprecedented efforts to bolster Lake Powell, which were intended to preserve Glen Canyon Dam’s ability to generate hydropower.5 Despite those efforts, the Bureau’s July 24-month forecast of the minimum probable flow of water into Lake Powell anticipates Glen Canyon Dam will be unable to generate electricity from February 2027 through at least June 2028.6 In fiscal year 2025, Glen Canyon Dam generated enough electricity to supply the annual average needs of 269,000 U.S. households.7

Humpback chub evolved exclusively in the Colorado River system, the water often referred to as “too thick to drink and too thin to plow.” It developed exquisite adaptations to thrive in a volatile environment, driven by flash floods that can rapidly turn relatively clear water to an opaque reddish-brown, making it impossible to see one’s finger one inch below the surface. Its gills and mouth have protective flaps that prevent sediment from clogging them, its eyes are tailored to see in muddy water, and special sensory organs detect prey and plants, allowing the fish to breathe and eat in highly turbid conditions. In contrast, smallmouth bass evolved in clear lakes and streams, relying on their vision to obtain food.

Fortunately, the adult humpback chub population is flourishing in the western Grand Canyon where sediment from the annual monsoon season turns the river into a torrent of mud. From 2010 to 2024, the population grew about 160-fold, with the median population estimated at about 70,000.8 This resurgence caused the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to reclassify the species from being endangered — i.e., in imminent threat of extinction, under the Endangered Species Act — to a less serious status of threatened.9

Smallmouth bass were not present in the Grand Canyon prior to the construction of Glen Canyon Dam, but now occur occasionally in its western section. The largest smallmouth bass captured in the park - 15.2 inches - was found in the far western section of the Grand Canyon in 2006.10 The fact that humpback chub flourish in the western Grand Canyon while smallmouth bass do not underscores the importance of intense and sustained pulses of turbidity created by suspended particulates. These conditions appear to be a key factor in preventing smallmouth bass from becoming established.

Because Glen Canyon Dam traps most sediment before it can reach the Grand Canyon, the Bureau should commission a study to evaluate options for increasing sediment delivery from Lake Powell. A sediment bypass system, such as a pipeline around or through the dam, could provide the turbidity needed to suppress smallmouth bass in the absence of cool water releases. Given current hydrologic realities, such an approach may be the most effective long‑term strategy for protecting the humpback chub and preserving the ecological integrity of the Grand Canyon.

Glen Canyon Dam truly is a monumental structure, a 726-foot tall, 5-million-cubic-yard concrete plug that attempts to control and harness the tempestuous waters of the mighty Colorado River. It and the reservoir behind it serve as a water savings account that helps the Upper Basin states comply with the Colorado River Compact during dry years; they capture millions of tons of silt each year that would otherwise flow downstream and fill up Lake Mead; they provide a surface on which boaters can play; and the dam’s hydroelectric turbines are among the West’s largest power plants.

Now climate change-induced aridification and overconsumption has muddled the dam’s ability to serve its intended purposes aside from silt capture. Its savings are depleted, many of the boat ramps are unusable, and hydropower production has declined along with reservoir water levels.

The Bureau of Reclamation is now struggling to keep the dam viable, sort of, by trying to keep Lake Powell’s surface level from falling below 3,500 feet. This avoids reliance on the lower river outlet works, which are not designed for sustained use. But it also allows the dam to continue producing electricity.

Keeping the turbines turning is one of the main reasons the feds give for not even considering the proposal to reengineer the dam — either by fixing the river outlet works or boring a bypass tunnel through the canyon walls — to allow water releases at low reservoir levels. While it would give a lot more flexibility to dam operators and give “life” to currently “dead” storage, it would also zero out the hydropower production upon which, according to the Bureau of Reclamation and media reports, some 5 million people rely. Maximizing hydropower production is also the Bureau’s justification for ending cool mix releases aimed at mitigating smallmouth bass infestations downstream. This imperils both stocked and native endangered fish in the Colorado River.

This raises the question: What is the deal with hydropower and Glen Canyon Dam? And is it really that important to the Western power grid?

Eight generators sit at the toe of the dam, fueled by water channeled from the reservoir through the dam’s eight penstocks. Each generator has a nameplate capacity, or maximum rated output, of 165,000 kW, or 165 MW, for a total generating capacity of 1,320 MW, on a par with a large coal power plant (the Four Corners plant has a 1,540-MW capacity). In other words Glen Canyon Dam is a big power plant.

But capacity is really just potential, and what really counts is how completely and in what manner the power plant lives up to its potential. In that respect, Glen Canyon Dam has been a bit of a slacker lately.

That 1,320 MW of capacity is only true when the reservoir is at full pool, or 3,700 feet, when the water pressure needed to turn the turbines is at its highest level. As Lake Powell’s water levels drop, so does the hydroelectric “head,” or the vertical distance that the water falls, along with the water pressure. When the reservoir is full, or the level is at 3,700 feet, it takes about 1.9 acre-feet of water to generate 1 megawatt-hour of energy. At 3,500 feet, it takes 2.9 acre-feet to generate the same amount of electricity. As a result, at the reservoir’s current level (approx. 3,520 feet), the dam’s power plant has a capacity of just about 730 MW.

Naturally, a power plant’s output is also going to be determined by how much fuel you feed it, which in this case is water run through the penstocks, or releases from the dam. Back in the 1980s, when the reservoir was full (and then some), Glen Canyon Dam’s annual output was nearly 9 million megawatt-hours, or enough to power about 869,000 average American households for one year. But in 2025, it only produced 2.75 million megawatt-hours, or enough to power 269,370 homes. This year’s output will be considerably lower, since both reservoir levels (and thus, generating capacity) and dam releases have dropped significantly.

It throws the claims that some 5 million people rely on the power plant into dubious light, but it is still a lot of energy: Last year, Glen Canyon Dam had the 15th largest output among the Southwest’s hundreds of utility-scale power plants. But its output is dwarfed by Palo Verde nuclear plant’s 31.2 million megawatt-hours annually. Even Four Corners coal plant, which shuttered two of its units a decade ago, still puts out more than 8 million megawatt-hours per year, three times that of Glen Canyon. (Hoover Dam has a higher nameplate capacity than Glen Canyon, but its 2025 output was about the same as Glen Canyon’s).

Glen Canyon Dam is the largest generator in the Colorado River Storage Project, which is a part of the federal Western Area Power Administration’s Salt Lake City Area/Integrated Projects. WAPA markets the power from these projects at relatively low rates to about 140 municipalities, cooperatives, tribal nations, irrigation districts, and utilities across the West. Last year’s power sale revenues from WAPA’s SLCA projects totaled almost $179 million, money that goes into the Basin Fund, and then is used to operate the dams and other infrastructure, to purchase replacement power, to pay off debt, and to fund endangered species programs.

A hydropower dam’s value goes beyond its ability to produce a steady stream of energy and revenue. The power grid must stay in balance at all times, meaning that supply — or generation — must always be equal to demand. Throw off the balance and you risk a cascading failure that can lead to wide scale outages. Hydropower is super flexible, meaning a turbine’s output can be ramped up or down quickly by simply changing the amount of water entering the penstock. As more and more solar and wind, or variable renewable resources, are added to the grid, balancing the ups and downs becomes more challenging, making flexible tools like hydropower more critical.

In theory, Glen Canyon Dam’s operators could hold back water throughout the middle of the day, when electricity demand is lower and solar output is highest, and then open up the penstocks full blast in the late afternoon and evening, when solar drops off and the air-conditioners come on, driving up electricity demand, or load. Similarly, they could fire up the turbines, so to speak, if another power plant on the grid malfunctioned.

For the first 30 years of its existence, Glen Canyon Dam’s operators were fairly free to operate the power plant as a sort of grid-balancing peaker plant. On one July day in 1989, for example, the operators choked off flows to the turbines in the early morning hours when power demand was low, so that about 3,471 cubic feet of water per second was running through the dam at 5 a.m., a virtual trickle for the Colorado. As the day heated up and power demand climbed (there was barely any solar on the grid back then), they cranked up the amount of water flowing through the turbines and into the river to a monstrous 29,000 cfs—the maximum possible flow through the turbines—to inject a bunch of juice into the grid.

This was good for the grid, and good for revenues from power sales, since energy costs more during peak demand. It wasn’t so good for the river downstream or the folks who were using it, however. Imagine being a rafter on the Grand Canyon and watching the mighty Colorado shrink to less than 4,000 cfs, before growing more than eight times that in just 12 hours. That could wreak some serious havoc on one’s trip and, I imagine, a fish’s mojo.

Dam operators at the time wanted to further optimize this grid-balancing ability by installing turbines in the river outlet works so they could release more water and generate more power (and create even greater flow fluctuations downstream). The proposal was not only shot down, but also set off a string of events that ultimately led to the 1992 Grand Canyon Protection Act and the dam’s adaptive management program, which mandate minimum and maximum release rates and limit release fluctuation rates to protect Colorado River recreation and ecosystems downstream of the dam. The dam still serves as a grid-balancing tool, with releases and power generation peaking in the afternoon and reaching their low point in the early morning hours. But its effectiveness has been eroded by both the restrictions and by reduced capacity resulting from lower water levels.

Glen Canyon Dam is less and less critical to the Southwestern power grid with each passing year, and its importance is likely to continue to decline as aridification continues to rob it of its ability to produce power, and as more battery storage comes online to take up its grid-balancing role.

If and when Glen Canyon Dam loses its ability to produce power, it won’t result in millions of people sitting around in the dark with non-functioning air-conditioners. Nor will it bring back shuttered coal plants. The coal-fired Navajo Generating Station just up the road from Glen Canyon Dam put out more than 17 million MWh annually; it shut down in 2019 without crashing the grid or even causing noticeable strain. Same goes for the San Juan and Cholla coal plants.

Back in 2013 the San Onofre nuclear plant near San Diego shut down with little warning due to safety concerns. In the immediate aftermath, natural gas generation spiked as grid operators scrambled to replace the lost generation. But over time, as solar and wind and battery storage capacity was added to the state’s grid, the surge in gas generation subsided. Something similar — although at a much smaller scale — is likely to happen when Glen Canyon goes offline.

Which makes one wonder: Is it really worth it for the feds to expend so much energy and resources, to imperil downstream recreation and endangered fish, and cause so much Lower Basin gnashing of teeth and wringing of hands and possibly filing of lawsuits, to preserve a dam that just isn’t doing what it was intended to?

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As long as we’re talking energy generation, I figured I’d give a little bit of a wider — and not quite as positive — view of the West’s energy generation and the transition. You may remember that last week I delivered the good news about solar taking over the grid — for the month of May. When you look at the same stats over the entire year of 2025, it doesn’t look quite so rosy, since natural gas generation clearly dominates the grid, at least for now.

In search of some salvation, I went back to 2007 to make a comparison. Back then coal was king of the Western grid (with natural gas as queen), and solar was basically non-existent.

These graphics are available as interactive visualizations with a lot more information on every generator at Tableau. Unfortunately, I still don’t know how to embed them into Substack so that you can view them in situ. For a better view, click on the image or link in each caption.

💀 Deadpool Data Dump 🌊

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