The rains had no more mercy on the other side of the Great Divide, where the Rio Grande and its tributaries have also flooded communities and infrastructure. The South Fork of the Rio Grande rumbled through the Fun Valley RV resort before making its way into streets and homes of San Luis Valley communities such as Del Norte. On Monday, flows were still rising at the USGS gage near Cerro, New Mexico, upstream from the Taos Gorge, indicating that the brunt of the stream surge has not yet reached riverside communities such as Embudo, Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo, or Española.

National and regional news outlets — along with social media weather chasers — are all over the flooding and the damage it brought with it, although the bigger outlets haven’t deeply covered the widespread impacts on the Navajo Nation, where even heavy rains, without any actual flooding, can muck up roads and transportation for days, stranding people in remote areas. For that coverage, I’d urge you to check out the extensive reporting at the Navajo Times.

As for the Land Desk, I’m just trying to get a handle on how these high streamflows fit into the historical context. It’s not easy, in part because there’s a lot of erroneous information floating around, but also because a lot of the streamflow gages were knocked offline before their respective streams hit their peaks. And then there’s the lack of consistent measurements and record-keeping over time.

Even so, some of the numbers are just mind-blowing. Take the Piedra River, which runs into the San Juan on the north end of Navajo Reservoir. It reached 17,000 cfs at the USGS gage near its mouth at Arboles then went offline, though it appears that it didn’t rise much higher. Peak streamflow records on this gage only go back to 1964, but still, this year’s flow was more than twice that of the second highest, which came during the flood of September 1970.

The San Juan River in Pagosa flooded just over a year ago after a huge storm pounded the San Juan Mountains, setting the third highest streamflow on record (eclipsed by the 1911 flood). This year’s flows were even higher, and slipped into the third place spot.

Downstream from there, the San Juan River at Carracas (just upstream from Navajo Reservoir) was raging at 13,000 cfs when it went offline on Oct. 22 (compared to 9,750 cfs in 1970). Combine that with the Piedra flows, and you have at least 30,000 cfs pouring into the reservoir, causing its surface level to shoot up more than 20 feet. Luckily, the reservoir had plenty of room for the new water following the dry summer, meaning it could hold most of it back. Had the dam not been there, the downstream flows would have been far larger, and far more destructive.

I’ve heard a few news reports say that the San Juan River at Farmington reached the highest levels on record since 1909. I can’t find any evidence that that’s true. Although this gage went offline, a field measurement was taken on Oct. 23 at or near the peak when it was 33,100 cfs. This is still lower than was measured in 1927 and 1929. Estimates for the 1911 Flood are far higher than that (in 1916, USGS hydrologists roughly estimated a 150,000 cfs flow around Shiprock).

Had Navajo Dam not held back that 30,000+ cfs from the San Juan and the Piedra, the flow here very well could have been close to a record high.

Contributing to the Farmington gage’s flow is the Animas River, a San Juan Tributary. It got huge, but didn’t quite exceed the September 1970 flood’s streamflow. Measured flows in Oct. 1911 (water year 1912), 1927, and 1949 also exceeded this year’s flow.

After Farmington, the San Juan River continues to receive waters from multiple tributaries, including: La Plata River, Shumway Arroyo, Deadman’s Wash, Shiprock Wash, and the Mancos River — all swollen by rains. So by the time it reached the gage at Four Corners, it was running a whopping 54,100 cfs on the night of Oct. 24. Records on this gage only go back to 1988, so there’s not adequate historical context for a good comparison. But it’s indisputably a huge amount of water, and set off alarm bells downstream in Aneth, Montezuma Creek, Bluff, and Mexican Hat, Utah.

Past the Four Corners gage, this veritable wall of water was supplemented by McElmo Creek (which peaked during the storm at a very large 1,590 cfs), Montezuma Creek, and Recapture Creek before reaching Bluff. After breaching a wastewater storage pond for the town of Montezuma Creek, the waters continued onward, spreading out in the floodplain near St. Christopher’s Mission east of Bluff, inundating fields and homes, and then moving into Bluff’s fringe, where it also affected structures. In a Facebook post, Bluff Mayor Josh Ewing estimated that “17 homes and 3 businesses have extensive damage.”

Downstream from Bluff, more tributaries add even more to the San Juan monster: Cottonwood, Comb, and Chinle washes and Lime Creek. However, by the time that pulse of upstream flows had reached this area, the rains had subsided along with those arroyos’ flows. So the USGS gage “near Bluff,” which is actually located at Mexican Hat, ended up peaking at 38,000 cfs 41,600 cfs on Monday at about 10:30 a.m. That actually puts this year’s peak (WY 2027 in the graph below) at 5th place since 1915. There was no gauge here during the 1911 Flood, but a USGS paleo-flood investigation concluded that the river that year reached about 150,000 cfs.

All of this is good for Lake Powell, of course. After reaching a record low of about 3,516 feet in mid-September, the reservoir’s surface elevation has jumped up to 3,527 feet, and will surely rise more as this San Juan River pulse reaches it in a few days. Whether this is just a temporary respite, or a more long-term salve for the Colorado River crisis depends on whether this El Niño-influenced moisture burst will continue into winter and transform from rain into the mountain snowpack on which the rivers rely.

For an in-depth look at the region’s floods from ancient times to today, check out this (newly updated) longform Land Desk piece from the archives, available exclusively to paid subscribers. But don’t get mad at the paywall, break it down for less than a cup of coffee a month and …

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Yet another round of storms slammed the Southwest this week, wreaking havoc across the region and hitting the Four Corners Country hard. By Friday morning, the rain had let up in most places, but some rivers are continuing to rise toward flood levels. Here’s a quick rundown of some notable impacts, then on to the hydrographs:

• The Navajo Nation once again suffered major flash flooding that washed out roads or otherwise rendered them impassible. Perhaps the worst of it unfolded in Dennehetso, a low-lying community between Kayenta and Mexican Water, where the Navajo Department of Emergency Management and other agencies had to use a specialized vehicle to rescue 30 people from flooded homes.

• An emergency was declared in Hurricane, Utah, after a couple of inches of rain fell in the headwaters of Gould Wash, which then partially inundated the southwest Utah community.

• An evacuation order was issued for low lying areas along the San Juan River, as stream levels met and then exceeded last October’s high-water levels.

• The Colorado Department of Transportation closed a segment of Hwy 550 over Red Mountain Pass, CO 17 over Cumbres Pass, Hwy 160 over Wolf Creek Pass, CO 151 near Chimney Rock, and a section of Hwy 160 west of Pagosa Springs due to flooding, debris flows, and/or safety concerns. Those segments remained closed as of Friday morning at 8 a.m.

  

• And in Heber, Arizona, a possible tornado caused widespread damage.

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Now for a look at some streamflows.

While it’s been a bit too warm for this wet stuff to take the form of snow in the lowlands and midlands, it has left a good coating of wet, white stuff on the peaks. The Center for Snow and Avalanche Studies monitor at its Senator Beck Study Plot near Red Mountain Pass is recording 12.8 inches of snow, with about five inches of snow water equivalent. That’s significantly higher than what the nearby SNOTEL station is currently recording (2.8 inches of SWE).

🚙 NOTES FROM THE ROAD 🛻

It only now occurs to me, six years into my half century of life and of roaming around the Four Corners Country, that the predominant autumnal color of the high desert is yellow. At least this year, when wacky weather and an altered climate have shuffled the phenological calendar, that is the case. Chamisa blooming madly, wild sunflowers dancing by the roadside, once-dusty fields turned golden by hundreds of clusters of añil del muerto — indigo of the dead — which I am told usually bloom after the monsoons in July and August.

And there, almost as if leaping from the deep cut banks of the Rio Puerto, the dazzling shock of quivering turned leaves of a cottonwood.

I spend the night in a small BLM campground in the heart of the San Juan Basin gas field. The sites are nice, it has some of the most spectacular views of any campground, and it’s free — subsidized by royalties from the gas wells that surround it. I used to have the place mostly to myself, but on this Thursday night it fills up. A couple of loners, like me, one guy in a converted school bus who probably lives here, at least until he gets rousted, a family, a German couple in a vanlife van (with German plates), who talk loudly enough that I can hear every word, and even understand a few. They’re headed down to Carlsbad next.

A big yellow dump truck blazes across the gravel campground road ahead of me, trailing a cloud of dust, as it hauls a load from one side of Envirotech’s land farm to the other. A land farm is where hydrocarbon-contaminated soils, like those that have been soaked by an oil or produced water spill, are taken to be reclaimed and plowed back into the land farm’s “fields.” This one is special because Chaco’s Great North Road cuts right through the hydrocarbon-soaked fields. The owner of the facility apparently has some sensitivity and appreciation for archaeology and cultural sites, and left the “road” undisturbed, though it is abutted on both sides by the fields.

On this Friday morning the land farm is especially busy, my first indication that the oil and gas drilling boom in the Greater Chaco Region is back on, at least in a limited fashion. And given the number of trucks bringing in more crude-soaked soil, I’m guessing the number of spills is increasing, too.

The activity is heaviest between Nageezi and Counselors, where the highway suddenly gets busier and a higher percentage of the traffic is made up of large white trucks, tankers, and frack-sand haulers. A drilling rig juts out from behind a piñon and juniper studded hill near Twin Pines. A big orange sign: SAND TRUCKS.

I feel for the residents of the area, mostly Diné, who are forced to live with the noise, the dust, the danger, the pollution emanating from the wells and the rigs, and, sometimes, catastrophic “incidents” that light up the night with orange flames and sully the sky with billowing black clouds of smoke.

The renewed activity brings urgency to the fight to keep the Chaco Cultural Protection Zone intact. And yet, it offers no protection for the people who live in Nageezi, Lybrook, Counselors, Twin Pines, Ojo Encino …

Outside Cuba, four hikers. Walking sticks, nice backpacks, incongruent. Then I remember the sign back at the store: Welcome Continental Divide Trail Hikers. It makes sense.

Handwritten sign along the road to Pueblo Pintado: No Dumping Trash or Dogs.

A hundred yards later a herd of goats in tight formation, brilliant white fur, shiny black fur, munching roadside chamisa.

Further on, an array of solar panels splayed out across the landscape, black and glimmering.

The urban architecture of Grants and Milan, two central New Mexico towns separated only by a couple hundred yards of liminal space, seems haunted by ghosts. Not in the supernatural or the ghost town sort of way. No, these ghosts are more of an economic sort, ones that linger in the streetscapes and the towns’ strange layout.

Grants, especially, is imbued with the specter of Route 66, of the glorious time when people made their way slowly across the country in those big ol’ American cars, stopping every couple hundred miles to eat dinner, have a few cocktails, stay the night, maybe even get dressed up and going dancing.

But there’s also what came next: The three-decade-long uranium boom that was ignited when a Navajo man named Paddy Martinez found a chunk of uranium ore near his home out beyond Ambrosia Lake in 1953. Grants’ population jumped from about 2,200 in 1950, to over 10,000 in 1960, to more than 11,000 in 1980, the boom’s peak. That growth is apparent in the architecture and the layout of the town, especially in where and how it sprawled away from the Route 66 thoroughfare and the interstate in a northeasterly direction. That probably made some sort of sense when it happened, as that’s where there was room for the town to grow. But now it seems odd to have to drive out to the fringe, beyond the defunct carpet and furniture place, to go to the grocery store. The strip mall across the street seems especially out of place.

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Of course, there’s a much more consequential shadow from those times clouding the neighborhoods and residents of Grants and Milan, namely the toxic wraith of the uranium industry itself. Just outside Milan, 22 million tons of uranium mill tailings, remnants of Homestake’s operations that were shuttered in 1990, sit in a mesa-like pile amid the sage and chamisa. The groundwater is indelibly contaminated and, 36 years later, cleanup continues. When I visited heavy machinery working the top of the pile kicked up huge clouds of dust. The work is potentially endless, and in recent years Homestake has turned to purchasing homes in contaminated areas to try to get out of cleanup requirements.

If you’re wondering why Homestake doesn’t just go belly up and whither away like so many other mining companies have done over the past 150 years, it’s because somewhere along the line, Barrick Gold — a multinational firm with big mines in Nevada and elsewhere — acquired Homestake, along with its liabilities.

Homestake’s pile is just one of many toxic remnants of this area’s uranium boom. The Grants Mining District includes some 85 abandoned and defunct once-producing uranium mines, including the giant and notorious Jackpile-Paguate, and four mill sites, which are now marked by tomblike tailings depositories.

One might think Homestake’s long ordeal would serve as a warning to other firms looking to mine the Grants uranium belt: Best to just stay away. But no. High uranium prices and the promise of growing demand driven by a new generation of data center-powering reactors has sparked a slew of proposals for new mining projects around here. Laramide Resources is working on permitting for its La Jara Mesa underground mine on 156 mining claims, Energy Fuels Roca Honda underground mine is moving through Forest Service permitting process, and the Grants Energy in-situ extraction project is also progressing. All are being fast-tracked by the federal government.

The two conventional mines would sit on public lands on the lower slopes of Mt. Taylor, or K’aweshtima in Acoma Pueblo’s Keres language, a volcanic cone that juts up from the sandstone mesas on the southern end of the San Juan Basin. Its prominent position on the Four Corners Country’s southern horizon has given it a significant role in Indigenous cosmologies. Some Chacoan structures are aligned with the peak and contain timbers from the mountain’s slopes, it remains sacred to Acoma, Laguna, and Zuni Pueblos, and is one of the Diné’s four mountains that demarcate their homeland. The proposals will serve as a test of New Mexico’s designation of Mt. Taylor as a traditional cultural property. The Grants Energy ISR project is in a sage- and chamise-strewn basin near the base of Mt. Taylor.

If a triangle was drawn between the three projects, somewhere near the center would be the village of San Mateo, nestled against the lower basaltic slopes of Mt. Taylor. It was once known as the Uranium Capital of the World because of its proximity to so many mines, including the Mt. Taylor underground mine, which produced nearly 700,000 tons of uranium during its short life in the late 1980s, and for which Gulf Mineral Resources Corporation dewatered three aquifers to keep its thousands of feet of workings dry.

Other than the mine, which sits a half mile from the village, and any contamination or dry wells it may have left behind, the remnants of the uranium boom aren’t apparent in San Mateo, itself. The cluster of modest homes and gardens with a riot of pink cosmos and winter squash and dried out stalks of already harvested corn feel much like the northern New Mexico villages near Taos or in the Chama River Valley. Spanish colonial activity dates back to the late 1500s, though the San Mateo wasn’t settled until the mid-1800s. It houses a morada, or church for the Penitente Brotherhood.

I’m sure there are plenty of people here who are rooting for the mines and their promises of hundreds of jobs and the sort of economic boost that brings more people and more strip malls, that fills up the restaurants, hotels, and bars, and awakens the dormant glory of days gone by. And who can blame them? But there’s at least as many folks, the ones whose wells are contaminated or who are sick or lost a family member to cancer or kidney disease, who not only would like to see the mining companies go elsewhere, but who wish that the previous boom never had happened.

And then there are those who just want to move on into the future, who want Grants to thrive economically, but also as a community. I saw glimmers of this: The well-manicured parks and playgrounds lining Route 66, the busy farmer’s market in one of those parks on a Saturday morning, the hikers and bike packers stopping at local businesses that are helping to make Grants a stopping point along the Continental Divide Trail, and who are capitalizing on the community’s proximity to Mt. Taylor and El Malpais and El Morro national monuments.

These are the ones who don’t want to be beholden to the old extractive boom bust cycle because they know that no matter how good it gets, always, always ends in abuse and then abandonment.

***

When I want to understand what life was like during the uranium boom in the Grants area, I don’t look to history books or old newspapers. Rather, I read the poetry of Simon Ortiz, of Acoma Pueblo, in the Grants Mining District. Ortiz worked in the mines and mills as a young man, and many of the poems in Fight Back: For the Sake of the People, For the Sake of the Land are inspired or derived from his time in the industry and the people he worked alongside, people from Acoma, Laguna, the Navajo Nation, or white folks from Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, Colorado, or Montana, who had come to the area seeking jobs.

The poems are all insightful and give a visceral sense of the place and the time and what it was like to be an Indigenous person working in the uranium industry. Some pieces expose the ever present, underlying racism in the industry, while others indict the companies’ greed for profit and disregard for the workers and the land. Every one is moving and enlightening in its own way, but “To Change in a Good Way,” a narrative poem centered on the friendship between Bill and Ida, an Oklahoma couple, and Pete and Mary, from Laguna Pueblo, is, to me, perhaps the most stirring and also illuminating of the bunch. I urge you to find it and read it, along with the other poems in that collection. All of these pieces can be found in Woven Stone, which is even available as an ebook.

There’s another piece of his, “It Was That Indian,” that manages to concisely capture the whole arc of the uranium boom in just a couple dozen lines. I’ve included it in its entirety here:

It Was That Indian
by Simon Ortiz

Martinez
from over by Bluewater
was the one who discovered uranium
west of Grants. 
That's what they said. 
He brought that green stone
into town one afternoon in 1953,
said he found it by the railroad tracks
over by Haystack Butte.
tourist magazines did a couple spreads
on him, photographed him in kodak color,
and the Chamber of Commerce celebrated
that Navajo man, 
forgot for the time being that the brothers
from Aacqu east of Grants
had killed that state patrolman,
and never mind also
that the city had a jail full of Indians.
The city fathers named 
a city park after him
and some even wanted to put up a statue
of Martinez but others said
that was going too far for just an Indian
even if he was the one who started that area
into a boom

Well, later on,
when some folks began to complain
about chemical poisons flowing into the streams
from the processing mills, carwrecks on Highway 53,
lack of housing in Grants,
cave-ins at Section 33,
non-union support,
high cost of living,
and uranium radiation causing cancer,
they—the Chamber of Commerce—pointed out
that it was Martinez
that Navajo Indian from over by Bluewater
who discovered uranium,
it says so in this here brochure,
he found that green stone over by Haystack
out behind his hogan;
it was that Indian who started that boom. 

⛈️ WACKY WEATHER WATCH⚡️

Welcome to another totally human-curated (and a bit late) edition of the Land Desk’s Newswire, a weekly compendium of important news happening around the Four Corners Country and beyond. Once again, the big news is the weird weather, which includes soaking rain, snow, big rivers, and even a tornado.

The Paria River where it meets the Colorado swelled up to about 2,000 cubic feet per second two days ago, and had I stuck around Lees Ferry for an hour or so longer I might have witnessed it. Instead, I headed south and east under a constant gray sky and passing through squalls on the way.

“Forrest Gump Hill” in Monument Valley, the place to where people travel from far far away to take a photo of themselves in the middle of the road, was as crowded — and hazardous — as ever. The buttes and bluffs near Montezuma and Aneth were carpeted with such green that I was disoriented, and in McElmo Canyon, where it looks like farmers will easily get another cutting of hay, the vibe was much more August monsoon than October storm.

• Tropical Storm Rachel has brought significant moisture to a big swath of the Southwest and beyond over the last few days. Observers with the CoCoRaHS network reported 24-hour rainfall totals of as much as two inches (in the Hermosa area north of Durango), bringing the Animas River through Durango up to 2,380 cubic feet per second and rising, as of noon on Oct. 14. A bit to the east of there, the Piedra River near Arboles shot up to 2,190 cfs, and Vallecito Creek has topped 1,000 cfs as I write this around noon on Oct. 14.

• As of the morning of Oct. 14, very wet, slushy snow — or, as the Germans call it, Schneeregen — was falling on Dove Creek, Colorado, elevation 6,800 feet. It wasn’t sticking there, yet, but folks in Silverton (9,318 feet) woke up to a dusting on the ground, marking the first SNOTEL station-detected snowpack in the Animas River watershed (a .6” snow water equivalent).

• Southwest Colorado residents reported a tornado between Tiffany and Allison, near the New Mexico border on the afternoon of Oct. 13. One Facebook poster said it hit her dad’s property and damaged outbuildings, while others reported that it took out barns, ripped up fencing, and uprooted trees.

• Social media posts show that there’s enough snow on Grand Mesa in western Colorado for some ski touring.

• SNOTEL stations on the Upper Colorado River Basin are showing well above normal precipitation accumulation for the first two weeks of Water Year 2027.

And in other weather and climate related news …

• The heat has once again taken its toll in the Phoenix area. The city’s fire department recorded 1,744 heat-related calls — significantly more than last year — between May 1 and Aug. 31, including 98 rescues from mountain trails and 14 patients that had to be hoisted by helicopter. Maricopa County has recorded 389 confirmed heat-related fatalities this summer, with another 383 under investigation. (ABC15, Maricopa County)

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🛢️ FOSSIL FUEL FOLLIES 📈

• The Bureau of Land Management moves ahead with plans to lease 113 parcels covering 126,440 acres of public land in Colorado for oil and gas drilling, despite widespread opposition. Among the land to be on the auction block in December are 5,000 acres on the Roan Plateau and several parcels in the HD Mountains and near Chimney Rock National Monument just north of the Southern Ute Indian Reservation in southwestern Colorado. The protest period ends on Nov. 8. (Aspen Daily News, BLM)

• A New Mexico advocate laments Permian Basin oil and gas drilling’s effects on residents, the landscape, and the Pecos River, calling it a “beautiful river in the middle of a hellscape.” (Capital & Main)

• An analysis finds Arizona utility Salt River Project customers could pay up to eight times more to operate the Craig coal plant under the Trump administration’s emergency orders than for solar-plus-storage resources. The plant was scheduled to shut down at the end of last year. (Energy & Policy Institute)

• A coalition of environmental groups files a lawsuit seeking to block the Bureau of Land Management’s approval of a road construction project, aka hydrocarbon highway, in Gate Canyon in eastern Utah designed to expedite oil-hauling in the Uinta Basin. Gate Canyon feeds into the culturally significant Nine Mile Canyon. (SUWA, BLM)

🌵 PUBLIC LANDS 🌲

• A federal court temporarily blocks the Trump administration’s plans to reorganize — some would say dismantle — the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which included moving the Forest Service headquarters to Salt Lake City and shuttering multiple research facilities. “These forced moves were never about efficiency. They were about pushing experienced people out the door,” said American Federation of Government Employees President Everett Kelley in a statement. (Politico)

• U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) introduces legislation that would require congressional approval for federal land withdrawals of more than 5,000 acres, including for presidential designations of national monuments under the Antiquities Act. (Navajo-Hopi Observer)

🦫 WILDLIFE WATCH 🦅

• The Preregrine Fund releases four more California condors into the wild at Marble Canyon in northern Arizona, bringing the area’s flock of the endangered birds up to 96. (Arizona Republic)

• Wyoming wildlife officials say 14% of the Sublette Pronghorn Herd died over six weeks this summer, and attribute the unusually high mortality rate to malnutrition resulting from drought-parched forage. (WyoFile)

🛻 TRANSPORTATION 🚂

• Len Necefer goes deep on the electric vehicle charging network — or lack thereof — on tribal nations’ land in Arizona. (All At Once by Dr. Len)

🤑 GENTRIFICATION JOURNAL💰

• Sublette County, Wyoming’s commissioners vote to eliminate a 2021 zoning change that cleared the way for billionaire Joe Rickett’s proposed upscale resort in the Upper Hoback River area. (WyoFile)

🌨️🦦🚣🏽 WATER WATCH 🌊

• Rural Arizonans in the Prescott area are forced to haul water as regional population growth and aridification draw down groundwater levels and dry out wells. (Cronkite News)

⛏️ MINING MONITOR ⛏️

• The Navajo Nation’s Coppermine Chapter passes a resolution “unequivocally” opposing Chakana Copper’s proposed Copper Mesa Project in a historically mined area near Page, Arizona; mining company executives say they won’t go forward unless the project is “wholeheartedly endorsed by the community.” (KJZZ, Essential Minerals)

• Hillsboro, New Mexico, residents push back on New Mexico Copper’s proposed Copper Flat mining project near the small community, with water consumption topping their list of concerns. (Searchlight New Mexico, New Mexico Copper)

🔭 OVERSIGHT (or lack thereof) 👮🏼

• Journalist and clean energy advocate Bill McKibben delves into the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, or permitting reform legislation, thoroughly exploring arguments for and agains. Though he is conflicted, and agrees on many points with proponents of the bill, he ultimately comes down in opposition to the legislation because it weakens bedrock environmental laws and would benefit fossil fuels. (The Crucial Years)

• An 18-year Interior Department veteran resigns to protest the Trump administration’s “deeply troubling assault on the rule of law” and its efforts to weaken or eviscerate environmental protections to benefit the fossil fuel industries. (Public Domain)

• Leaked data show the Interior Department has lost nearly 10,000 permanent staffers since the Trump administration took office, with the Bureau of Land Management staff down by 45% since 2024. (Wes Siler’s Newsletter)

📊 ECONOMIC INDICATORS 💸

• Page, Arizona’s economy shows signs of a shift as the lodging, retail, restaurant, and grocery sectors fade while the construction, remote seller, amusements, and commercial leasing areas surge. (Choose Page)

🤖 DATA CENTER DIGEST 👾

• An analysis finds about 100 data centers have driven nearly all of the increased demand on Arizona Public Service’s power grid, and the utility is charging its entire customer base to purchase outside power to meet the growing load, prompting state Attorney General Kris Mayes to call for an investigation. (KJZZ, Abhay Padgaonkar)

• Arizona data show that the state’s sales and use tax exemption for data centers’ computer equipment cost the state $38.5 million in fiscal year 2025, up from $19.4 million in 2024. (Good Jobs First)

• Federal data show proposals for grid-connected gas-fired power plants have nearly tripled over the last three years, largely due to data center-driven electricity demand growth. At least 12 of the facilities in the planning pipeline are in the Western U.S. (Environment America)

• Oracle considers trucking natural gas to its Project Jupiter data center complex under construction in southern New Mexico after the state denied its proposed gas pipeline, prompting Energy Transfer LP to reroute it. Oracle also trucks gas to one of its data centers in Salt Lake City, adding to the facility’s environmental impacts. (Searchlight New Mexico)

🌞 GOOD NEWS! 😎

• The MacArthur Foundation awards Chip Thomas, aka Jetsonorama, a genius grant for his large-scale murals with social justice themes that can be found across the Southwest and on the Navajo Nation. (NPR)

• The High Desert Museum is accepting nominations for the Jordan Schnitzer Prize of the West, a $50,000 philanthropic award for leaders tackling the American West’s most pressing environmental challenges, from water scarcity to wildfire, that is awarded annually to an individual or small group who has contributed in practice, scholarship, or policy to the region’s future, with emphasis on innovation, social impact, uncommon collaborations, and scalability. Nominations are open through Dec. 31. (High Desert Museum)

📖 READING LIST 📰

• Heads up Four Corners area folks: I’ll be giving a presentation on the Dolores River as part of a Dolores River Boating Advocates’ event on Friday, Nov. 6, from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. at the Powerhouse in Durango. Following a short film about Snaggletooth Rapid I’ll speak about my personal relationship with the Dolores River, its history, the way it is a sort of microcosm of the Colorado River as a whole, and about its potential futures. I’ll also throw in a funny little tale about the time I saw Ed Abbey go through Snaggletooth. Tickets are $10 — which will help DRBA defray costs — and seating is limited. There will also be a cash bar. Reserve your spot now: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/a-changing-dolores-river-a-conversation-with-drba-and-jonathan-thompson-tickets-2001390992334

POSTSCRIPT

I’m going to be out and about and on the road and often off grid for the next week, meaning these dispatches may come even more sporadically than this one! My apologies for any confusion or Land Desk withdrawal symptoms that may lead to.

10/11/2026

I woke up early this morning, before dawn, in my little tent in El Morro National Monument in west-central New Mexico. The skies, frogbelly gray the day before, had cleared up, the moon was new, and the stars and the milky way sprawled across the blue incomprehensibly. I crawled out before sunrise to see first light falling on the big bleached sandstone fin of A’ts’ina, aka El Morro, delighting as sunflowers and winterfat and daisies danced in the warm breeze.

Then, because I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed, I broke camp, loaded up El Burro Blanco, and headed west about five hours, across the Navajo Nation and the Hopi Mesas, through a quasi-haboob in Tuba City, to Lees Ferry — and right into the brunt of the remnants of Tropical Storm Rachel. Now it’s Sunday evening and I’m sitting in the cab of the truck, which shudders with each forceful gust of wind, waiting for the rain to stop long enough to set up my tent, which of course won’t do much good if it is shredded by another one of these 50-mph gales.

Yeah, the Southwest is getting battered again. So far, however, it hasn’t brought the expected abundance of moisture to Lees Ferry, which appears to be on the eastern fringe of the storm’s main path, which is veering diagonally in a northeasterly direction from San Diego. Presumably it’s raining harder to the west of here, in the Las Vegas-St. George area, and also north of here: The Moab 240 ultramarathon was cancelled Sunday due to heavy rain and flash floods, and about 70 runners and volunteers were stranded at an aid station near Bridger Jack Mesa and had to be evacuated.

The storm is not over, by any means. It’s supposed to keep up through Wednesday, at least, and may even bring substantial snow to the high country.

10/12/2026

The rain stopped long enough for me to set up the tent, though the wind continued howling into the night. But when I awoke around 2 a.m., the air was still, the only noise the gurgle of the Colorado River, and the stars were everywhere.

This morning’s flash flood alert has yet to materialize, but it has been raining on and off for a couple of hours, and the Paria River is substantially larger than it was yesterday, growing from about 20 cubic feet per second to nearly 500 cfs overnight. If I were to wait around, I might see it rage even more, since the USGS streamflow gage at Kanab is recording 2,000 cfs. But that might be a pretty long wait, and I want to go up to Page and get a gander at Glen Canyon Dam and the great big Lake Powell bathtub ring.

For more on what to call Lees Ferry … :

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Lake Powell, the nation’s second largest reservoir, serves as a sort of barometer of the Colorado River watershed’s overall health. The reservoir and river have been struggling since the great aridification’s grim onset in 2002. While the river continues to flow, barely, the 2026 Water Year, characterized by one of the worst snow droughts on record, nearly finished off the reservoir. But in the end, it was saved from dropping to “de facto deadpool” by heavy rain at the beginning and end of the water year, and by larger-than-normal releases from upstream reservoirs.

• 4.46 million acre-feet: Total Lake Powell inflow from the Colorado, Dirty Devil, Escalante, and San Juan rivers in water year 2026. That’s the third lowest on record, behind 2002 and 2021. This is in spite of the fact that the 2026 snowpack was far lower than those two years, and melting mountain snowpack provides about 80% of the river’s water.

• The Colorado River Basin experienced its warmest water year on record (in 131 years) in WY2026.

  

• 3.72 million acre-feet. Total Lake Powell unregulated inflow in water year 2026. This is the estimate of how much water would have flowed into the reservoir without any supplementary releases from upstream reservoirs. Which is to say, the feds robbed Flaming Gorge, Navajo, and Blue Mesa of about 750,000 acre-feet to save Powell from shrinking even more. That was bad for those upstream reservoirs and the irrigators, anglers, recreational users, and communities that rely on them, and there’s no way it can be repeated if this winter is below average.

• 6 million acre-feet: Total releases from Glen Canyon Dam in water year 2026. This is the lowest release since the very early days of the dam (in the 1960s). This means less water in the Grand Canyon and less water flowing into Lake Mead.

• 181,111 acre-feet: Estimated amount of water that evaporated from Lake Powell in water year 2026. This is equivalent to more than half of Nevada’s total annual allotment from the Colorado River.

• 1.72 million acre-feet: Lake Powell’s water deficit — or the difference between outflows (incl. evaporation) and inflows — for water year 2026.

• 27 feet: Amount the surface level of the reservoir fell in water year 2026, putting it within seven feet of the level the federal governnment has chosen to “defend,” meaning they’ll pull out all the stops to keep it from dropping below that (for reasons the Land Desk has gone over many times before). The late September storms brought the level back up a couple of feet.

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🛢️ FOSSIL FUEL FOLLIES 📈

THE NEWS: Not one, but two natural gas pipelines ruptured and erupted in flames at nearly the same time on opposite sides of New Mexico. One was in the Permian Basin in Lea County, where a gas line ruptured and caught fire, killing two people. Details of the incident have not been released, nor have the names of the victims. The other was near La Boca, New Mexico, just south of the Colorado line (and can be seen in the video above). It shot flames high into the sky and ignited a wildfire.

THE CONTEXT: Several years ago, as the oil boom in the Greater Chaco Region in northwestern New Mexico was nearing its peak, I sat down in the sleek, modern headquarters of the Bureau of Land Management’s Farmington field office with two BLM officials to talk about the oil boom. Before we got down to business, one of them asked: “Should we show him the scare map?”

The answer, I guess, was yes, because her colleague handed me the paper showing every well ever drilled in the San Juan Basin, with little red dots for gas, black ones for oil.

It was scary. The northern and central sections of the Basin were almost solid red; in the south and west, dense swarms of black dots strung out along the oil-bearing formations. Dark pinpricks surrounded Chaco Culture National Historical Park. Huerfano Mountain, or Dzil Na’oodilii, where First Woman and First Man and then Changing Woman lived — a sort of Garden of Eden in Navajo cosmology — was embroidered with red and black. The BLM office we sat in, on a fine piece of real estate in the upper-class part of town, has three wells within a quarter mile, and a pumpjack grinds away right next to a golf course green down the road.

To find a stretch of land anywhere in the core of the Basin that hasn’t been drilled or isn’t covered by roads, tanks, pipes or some other hydrocarbon-related infrastructure is nearly impossible — the infrastructure is the landscape. “We’ve got so much pipeline in the ground, it’s like rebar,” said the official, with a tinge of glee. “If you had an earthquake, the ground wouldn’t even shake.”

The official seemed less disturbed than simply fascinated by this fact, and also didn’t seem bothered that he and his colleagues were facilitating even more infrastructure by handing out drilling permits by the dozen and clearing the way for thousands of new wells and all the roads, gathering systems, and pipelines that go with it.

I happen to be writing this at a campsite in the heart of the San Juan Basin gas field. While I can gaze out across the landscape and see nothing but beauty, including the evening’s last light on Dzil Na’oodilii, I am constantly reminded of the ubiquity of the hydrocarbon infrastructure all around me. From just over a little rise comes a slightly squeaky and clanky sound of inadequately lubed bearings, and the low hum and whir of dozens of near and distant pumps and compressors and fans serenades me as I watch the stars unfurl across the big bowl of the sky.

There’s another map of this area that’s even scarier than the one those folks showed me. It includes oil and gas-related “incidents,” which is to say ruptures and spills and explosions and fires and major leaks. Those, too, are all over the map, and happen with disturbing frequency. Usually they’re not as dramatic as the two explosions, but they can be harmful: hundreds of gallons of crude oil sloshed onto the ground and into waterways or aquifers, thousands of cubic feet of methane wafting into the air and adding the potent greenhouse gas to the atmosphere.

When I watch the debate over permitting reform, or read the thoughts of the Abundance crowd, a part of me agrees with the credo of building more. The idea of a new New Deal appeals to me, if done right. Line the highways and interstates with high-voltage transmission lines to carry clean energy across the region, build utility-scale solar on reclaimed coal mines and next to old coal plants and on marginal farmland, build factories to manufacture solar panels and batteries. It would create jobs, revitalize economies, and put more clean energy onto the grid.

Then I hear news about these explosions, look at the oil and gas incident map, and come out here and find that I can’t take a picture of spectacular and sacred landscapes without a tank or well or road or drill pad showing up in it, somewhere. The Abundance folks and the proponents of the permitting reform legislation, or the Bipartisan Affordability and Jobs Act, want to cover the landscape and our communities with even more of this stuff. While many of them support the bill because it would expedite clean energy development, they don’t mind the fact that it would do the same for natural gas and oil and petroleum pipelines. And, in the social media wars raging over this bill, they discount the concerns of environmental groups worry about the cost we pay when blindly adhering to the credo of Build More Stuff.

It makes me want to bring these folks out here to the San Juan Basin and take a little walk across this landscape, which is so suffused with beauty, but also cluttered with the detritus of society’s urge for more, always more.

📸 PARTING SHOT 🎞️

Yeah, okay, it may be a little scary to be experiencing some record-breaking heat in early October, but it sure is nice in some places (L.A. might not be enjoying this so much). And so it’s a perfect day to take a break from all of the news, and for y’all to say your piece in the chat thread linked here or in the comments below.

This is an open thread, meaning you can talk about anything! But you can also use this space to give me some news tips or suggestions about things you’d like me to check out on the ground in the next few weeks, as I’ll be roaming around the greater Four Corners Country doing some reporting and getting my sagebrush and sandstone fix.

We’ll be back with the regular stuff on Friday.

A bipartisan group of federal lawmakers, including Sens. Martin Heinrich (D-NM) and Mike Lee (R-UT), introduced legislation aimed at streamlining and accelerating federal environmental reviews and permitting for major projects on Sept. 30. The Bipartisan Affordability and Jobs Act would lower or remove regulatory hurdles for large-scale renewable and transmission projects, fossil fuel pipelines, mining projects, and other industrial projects such as data centers and accompanying power facilities.

The push for faster permitting has been in the pipeline for years, and garnered the support of the renewable energy industries and climate advocates in more recent years, after seeing huge transmission projects such as SunZia and TransWest Express languish in red tape for nearly two decades due to potential impacts to wildlife and cultural sites. The lines were purportedly designed to carry renewable energy back and forth across the West to provide what’s known as “geographical smoothing” of variable solar and wind resources. These sorts of delays, according to permitting reformists, were stifling the energy transition.

Shortly after the bill’s details were made public, ecologically minded environmental groups raised red flags, warning that, as written, the legislation would weaken bedrock environmental laws, including the National Environmental Policy Act and Endangered Species Act, and take away the public’s power to block or force revisions to projects of all kinds, including ones that will lead to more fossil fuel burning and more greenhouse gas emissions. They pointed out that not only was the notoriously anti-environment Lee sponsoring the bill, but it also had a full-throated endorsement of the American Petroleum Institute.

This triggered a vehement, some might even say toxic, reaction from the climate hawks and Abundance adherents that support reform, and ignited a rhetorical civil war within the environmental movement on social media.

The Abundance movement supports the bill, allying itself with the petroleum and tech industries, because it would make it easier to build large clean energy facilities and the transmission needed to move it around. They are operating on the belief that building more and bigger clean energy projects is the only way to battle climate change — even if it also opens the door to more fossil fuel burning. This theory assumes that the market will favor clean energy projects, even if policy favors “all of the above.”

Marc Levitt, director of environmental regulatory reform for the Breakthrough Institute, called the bill a “heroic breakthrough for permitting reform” and “a massive down payment towards the energy abundant future that Americans deserve.”

Opponents, however, say that pushing energy development of all kinds will not only decimate cultural and natural resources and burden humans and wildlife, but it also will not do much to solve the climate crisis if every new solar array or transmission line is matched with a new natural gas pipeline or power plant.

“The permitting deal is a betrayal of public lands, water and wildlife, and environmental justice values that Westerners depend on for clean air and water, places to hike, hunt, and fish, and the inestimable sense of freedom the West provides us all,” said Erik Schlenker-Goodrich, executive director of the Western Environmental Law Center based in New Mexico.

The legislation also raises concerns that the Trump administration could use the legislation to further weaken environmental protections to benefit the fossil fuel, nuclear, mining, and data center industries, while still throwing up roadblocks to solar and wind development.

The Land Desk will have an analysis of the bill and how it might play out on the Land Desk’s beat in the coming days.

🔋ENERGY TRANSITION 🔌

• California Gov. Gavin Newsom signs legislation allowing residents to install plug-in or balcony solar without getting utility approval, along with a suite of other bills that should advance the energy transition. (Climate Colored Goggles)

🐓 REGULATORY CAPTURE CHRONICLES 🦊

• The developer of a proposed pumped hydropower storage project on Black Mesa on the Navajo Nation reportedly tried to pay off, coerce, and bully non-profit Tó Nizhoní Ání into dropping its opposition to the project. The group has stood its ground. (KNAU)

⛏️ MINING MONITOR ⛏️

• Advocacy groups file a lawsuit challenging the U.S. Forest Service’s and Fish and Wildlife Service’s approval of South32’s Hermosa mine expansion onto about 52,000 acres of federal land in the Patagonia Mountains of southern Arizona. The groups accuse the agencies of violating the Endangered Species Act by failing to adequately analyze the projects impacts on threatened wildlife. (Center for Biological Diversity)

🛢️ FOSSIL FUEL FOLLIES

• Arizona Public Service and the Navajo Transitional Energy Company sign an agreement that could allow the Four Corners coal-burning power plant in northwestern New Mexico to continue operating until 2038, seven years later than its scheduled retirement date. APS officials say they need the facility online to meet growing data center-driven energy demand and ensure reliability as grid-battering extreme weather events increase in frequency. (Arizona Republic)

• Tó Nizhoní Ání and San Juan Citizens Alliance file an appeal seeking to block the Interior Department’s approval for the expansion and 110-year life extension of the No Name area of the Navajo Mine in northwestern New Mexico. The mine feeds the Four Corners Power Plant, which is now slated to close in 2038. “It’s disturbing that a federal agency could fast-track a project of this size and scope with almost no credible review, analysis or public consultation,” said Nicole Horseherder, Tó Nizhóní Ání’s executive director. “This permit continues a legacy of corporate interests abusing our resources, tearing up our land, depleting our water and displacing Navajo citizens. Worse still, it’s being done by a Navajo enterprise.” (news release)

• State data show the West Elk coal mine near Somerset, Colorado, is emitting potent greenhouse gas methane and other harmful compounds at nearly four times the permitted rate, spurring environmental groups to call for the mine’s operator to be sanctioned and forced to use the best available technology to slow the leaks. (Colorado Sun)

  

• Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon (R) considers legally challenging a new California law that requires a contentious proposed coal export terminal in Oakland to go through a full environmental impact review prior to local agency approval, potentially stifling Wyoming’s effort to send Powder River Basin overseas via a West Coast port. (Cowboy State Daily)

⛈️ WACKY WEATHER WATCH⚡️

• The recent deluges have done a real number on the roads leading into Chaco Culture National Historical Park in northwestern New Mexico. The south road, according to the park’s Facebook page, “is still muddy and slick in places, with patches of deep standing water and wet clay.” Meanwhile, “the former north road (CR 7950) has sustained catastrophic damage at Escavada Wash. This road is completely inaccessible as an entry point to the park. We expect the repair will take a long time. Please do NOT attempt to enter Chaco from the north road.” (NPS)

• Flash flooding washes out sections of the BNSF Railway’s main line alongside the Rio Puerco near the Arizona-New Mexico border. The Rio Puerco lacks reliable streamflow gauges, but the Little Colorado River just downstream from its confluence with the Rio Puerco hit an astounding 6,800 cubic feet per second during the late-September storms in a place that is normally virtually dry. (Navajo Times)

🐟 COLORADO RIVER CHRONICLE 💧

• Reduced water releases from Glen Canyon Dam diminish the Colorado River’s flows in the Grand Canyon, which in turn affects recreation, river ecology, and tribal nations’ sacred places. (High Country News)

🦫 WILDLIFE WATCH 🦅

• A bear wanders into the Aspen farmers market and starts chowing down, apparently unfazed by the high prices. Things like this look cute, but it can end up being deadly for the bear.

🪦 OBITUARY 🏜️

• Ken Sleight, the inspiration for Seldom Seen Smith in Edward Abbey’s the Monkey Wrench Gang, died on Oct. 2 in Moab. Sleight was a river-runner, canyon lover, and lifelong protector of and advocate for Utah’s “Standing Up Country.” “We just lost such a wonderful person,” John Weisheit, director of Living Rivers and friend and mentee of Sleight’s, told The Salt Lake Tribune. “We need more Ken Sleights, not less.” (Salt Lake Tribune)

📖 READING ROOM 🧐

The New Yorker has again ventured into the Four Corners Country, this time with a story by Peter Hessler about the Million Dollar Highway between Silverton and Ouray, “one of America’s scariest roads.” I always enjoy Hessler’s writing, whether about Cairo or Nucla, and this story’s no exception. His descriptions of the many accidents and ensuing rescues on that stretch of road are vivid and, yes, scary. And his history of the area and Otto Mears, the road’s original builder, is compelling. But I have to take issue with the framing of the story, and the headline, which is: “Why doesn’t anyone want to fix one of America’s scariest roads?” To which I’d respond: Does it really need fixing?

Look, traversing Red Mountain Pass can be daunting, especially during the spring freeze-thaw cycle when rocks are dislodged from the cliffs and tumble down onto the asphalt and the Mother Cline’s human-sized icicles hang perilously over the pavement.Sometimes folks tragically go over the edge. Several plow drivers have perished on the road after getting pummeled by the Riverside Slide. In 1963, Reverend Marvin Hudson and his two teenaged daughters were hit by the Riverside, swept into the gorge, and buried (oddly, Hessler leaves this story, one of the most nerve-chilling, out of the story). This problem has been largely solved by simply shutting the road when danger is high.

So sure, the road can be dangerous and nerve-racking, but frankly, I can think of plenty of far scarier — and statistically more dangerous — stretches of road. Highway 550 between Albuquerque and Bloomfield is a virtual carnage factory, especially when the oil and gas fields are busy with water and oil-hauling trucks. Highway 191 between Monticello and Moab is super sketchy — and deadly. Or how about I-10 in the Phoenix area, I-40 just about anywhere, or I-70 dropping from the mountains into the Colorado’s Front Range on a weekend afternoon?

Back in the late 1980s, Colorado spent about a half-billion dollars to “fix” I-70 through Glenwood Canyon. Now it’s the site of multi-vehicle accidents, rockslides, debris flows, and not infrequent closures due to the above. So, yeah, Red Mountain Pass doesn’t need fixing. People just need to slow the hell down and pay attention.

🌵 PUBLIC LANDS 🌲

ALERT! Oct. 6 is the last day to comment on the Trump administration’s proposal to rescind the 2001 Roadless Rule. So so go here and say your piece.

☢️ NUKE NOTICE ⚛

NPR is reporting that Valar Atomics is looking to build a massive data center and nuclear reactor complex — complete with fuel production and radioactive waste dump facilities — on more than 9,000 acres of public land east of Price, Utah. The complex would be powered by 456 small modular reactors with a mind-boggling generation capacity of 9.6 gigawatts, nearly three times the capacity of Palo Verde nuclear plant near Phoenix.

Valar is one of several startups looking to advance a new generation of reactors that are smaller, portable, require less up-front capital, and supposedly not weighed down with all of the baggage of the old-school conventional reactors, which not only cost a lot to build, but also tend to evoke visions of Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, or Fukushima.

While these small modular reactors go by slick, newfangled names, they still rely on the same nuclear reaction as the old, conventional reactors. Meaning they are still expensive to build, require dangerous and damaging mining to extract uranium for fuel, produce toxic and radioactive waste, and could potentially melt down. Furthermore, none of these new reactors has been proven on a commercial scale.

To fuel a single reactor — small modular, advanced, or conventional — requires extracting hundreds of thousands of tons of ore from the earth, milling the ore to produce yellowcake (triuranium octoxide), converting the yellowcake to uranium hexafluoride gas, enriching it to concentrate the uranium-235, and fabricating the fuel pellets and rods.

Each of these steps generates ample volumes of toxic waste products. Mining leaves behind lightly radioactive waste rock; milling produces mill tailings containing radium, thorium, radon, lead, arsenic, and other nasty stuff; and enrichment and fabrication both produce liquid and solid waste. The reaction, itself, generates the most dangerous form of leftovers, containing radioactive fission products such as iodine, strontium, caesium, and transuranic elements, including plutonium.

If Valar is indeed looking to fabricate fuel on-site, as NPR is reporting, then it will also use that public land to store the fuel enrichment waste as well as the “spent nuclear fuel,” or radioactive waste, that is removed from the reactor during refueling. It would turn a large swath of public land not only into a high-tech industrial site and nuclear power plant, but also a radioactive waste depository.

“If we have facilities like this on public land for waste storage, for massive nuclear development, for data centers,” Lexi Tuddenham, HEAL Utah’s executive director told NPR, “that’s going to have tremendous implications for how public lands are used.”

The Bureau of Land Management told NPR that it was reviewing Valar’s application for “Project Beehive” and that as soon as the application is completed the agency would launch an environmental review that would include opportunities for public input. The project will also need Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing and permits from the state of Utah. Under a normal regime, this process for a project of this scope would take years to complete.

Under the Trump administration, almost anything could happen, even Valar’s wildly ambitious goal to bring the facility online in 2028. President Donald Trump, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, and Energy Secretary Chris Wright all are gung-ho for AI data centers and nuclear energy, as is Utah Gov. Spencer Cox. Just as the administration fast-tracked permitting for a Utah uranium mine, so could it invoke the Defense Production Act or the purported “energy emergency” to push this project through licensing and permitting — even if doing so would be illegal.

Valar, which has partnered with the Department of Energy to test its reactor, is a plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by Utah, Arizona lawmakers, and other parties seeking to weaken or remove federal licensing requirements for small reactors. The nascent firm’s CEO, Isaiah Taylor, has been linked to an Idaho Christian nationalist church, Russian oligarchs, and even Jeffrey Epstein.

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⛏️ MINING MONITOR ⛏️

I briefly mentioned last dispatch that Land Survey Advisors had staked an additional 36 mining claims in areas that President Donald Trump had removed from Bears Ears National Monument. At first glance, these new claims didn’t seem much different than the 30-something claims located in the former national monument by Kimmerle Mining.

But as I looked more closely, I noticed some curious details that may or may not mean anything at all. Still, I figured they were worth noting.

• The 36 claims located (that’s the agency’s term for “staked”) by Land Survey Advisors were not only filed with the San Juan County Recorder, like Kimmerle’s claims, but they were also filed with the Bureau of Land Management and are now in the federal agency’s system and database. Of the 72 claims filed in the former national monument since Sept. 11, Land Survey Advisors are the only ones on file with the BLM.

• Land Survey Advisors is not a mining company, it is a consulting firm, made up of landmen, who help clients stake mineral claims, acquire mineral rights, and conduct surveys. It is run by Michael Murphy out of Heber, Utah, and was incorporated in 2023. So even though Land Survey Advisors (LSA) is listed as the claimant, it is likely that they are acting on the behalf of a client, which could be a mining firm or an individual.

• Some news stories and advocates have portrayed the claimants as “hobbyists,” as opposed to serious mining firms. This may be the case: It’s absurdly easy to file a mining claim, and some folks do it just to “own” a little piece of a cherished landscape, or perhaps with thoughts of doing some gold panning when they retire. But keep in mind that it costs $200 to locate a claim and the same amount annually to keep it active. So this claimant forked out $7,200, plus the cost to hire a landman, to stake these claims. That’s an expensive hobby.

• The 36 claims are in nine separate clusters, spread out from lower White Canyon, to the Mormon Pasture area, with no discernible pattern except that they are all within the boundaries of the original BENM. Land Survey Advisors has not staked any claims in San Juan County outside those boundaries.

• Curiously, most of the clusters of claims include both placer and lode claims, usually overlapping each other. Lode claims are for classic hard rock mining, when you’re digging into rock and following a vein. Placer claims are typically for hydraulic or slurry mining, when you’re using water and gravity to extract minerals from gravel or sand. In southeastern Utah, nearly all uranium-targeting claims are lode. Placer claims in this area are typically for lithium or potash extraction (and historically were used for placer gold mining in creeks and riverbeds).

• When I zoomed in on LSA’s new claims, I noticed that they all were located on previously mined or prospected areas, including on once-producing mines with associated waste rock piles. In most cases, the claims are named for the former mines: The new Ace claim sits atop the old Four Aces mine; the new PVQ claim is at the old Peavine Queen Mine1; the WDW claim is at the abandoned Widowmaker Mine, and so forth. One pair of claims, the FCL lode and placer, include on the old waste/tailings pile from the long-defunct ore upgrading mill and copper heap leaching operation. While old mines might be an obvious place to seek ore reserves, staking a claim on them risks assuming any liability for the mess left by the long-gone former owners and operators.

• So what does it all mean? Maybe nothing. Maybe someone was just jumping on the mining-claim-in-a-former-national-monument bandwagon. But I have another, wildly speculative, absolutely unconfirmed hypothesis: This claimant is not a hobbyist, but an emerging mining firm that is looking to use highly pressurized water to extract minerals from abandoned mine waste piles. This would explain the placer claims and the presence of waste dumps within all of the claims. I have an email into the company that I’m hypothesizing about, and will let you all know what they say or don’t say.

Regardless, one thing is clear: the people who said a national monument designation was unnecessary because no one is interested in staking mining claims in the area anymore were wrong.

🦫 WILDLIFE WATCH 🦅

Colorado Parks & Wildlife temporarily suspends its “chronic depredation directive,” which gives the agency guidance for killing gray wolves that prey on livestock, saying it plans on evaluating “additional requests for lethal removal on a more conservative basis” to address concerns the wolf population may not grow this biological year. The CPW has killed five wolves this year under the directive. (CPW news release)

📸 PARTING SHOT 🎞️

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It seems like only a few years ago that a PR person from the East Coast emailed me to tell me how surprised she was to read in the Land Desk that alfalfa and other livestock forage crops guzzled up a lot of the West’s water. “I didn’t even know they still grew alfalfa,” she wrote, incredulously. Actually, it was only a few years ago, but my how things have changed in the realm of alfalfa discourse. I’m guessing she and just about everyone else who pays attention has figured that one out by now, as it’s become vogue in certain circles to assert that the solution to the West’s water crisis is simply to stop growing alfalfa and other “low-value” agricultural crops and use the water for cities and data centers, instead. At the very least, they argue, we shouldn’t be exporting alfalfa overseas.

I’m not going to jump into that hornet’s nest again, at least not today. Instead, I dug up a bunch of data and used them to build a handful of graphs that will, hopefully, illuminate the situation a bit and give all parties — alfalfaphobes and alfalfaphiles alike — something to chew on. Call it statistical cud that I’ve gnawed on, masticated, partially digested, and now am handing over to you to derive some nutrients from. (Eww. That’s gross. Sorry.)

By now most Land Desk readers know that irrigated alfalfa and hay crops guzzle up more water in both the Upper and Lower Colorado River basins than cities, industry, and golf courses combined. This is partially because alfalfa is a fairly thirsty crop, though not as water-intensive as some. Mostly, however, it’s because farmers across the watershed and the West grow a lot of hay, and have been doing so for a long time. They grow it to meet the demand from the region’s many, many head of cattle. And they grow it because it’s drought tolerant, does not need to be replanted every year, is a nitrogen fixer, has relatively low input costs, can be harvested by machine, and stores well as long as it’s kept fairly dry.

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While hay and alfalfa are often maligned as “low-value” crops, farmers also grow it to make money. As you can see from the chart below, farmers in Colorado River Basin states harvested nearly $5 billion worth of hay in 2022. That’s on a par with the Colorado ski industry’s annual economic output.

Over the last two decades or so, Western state farmers have sold an increasing amount of hay, especially alfalfa, to overseas buyers. This is largely due to the growing global taste and demand for cow-milk products. Alfalfa is favored by dairy operations because its high protein content increases milk yield. So if you’re trying to reduce alfalfa demand by quitting beef, you’re barking up the wrong tree; you’ll have to ditch the ice cream and cheese, as well (or switch to goat or sheep milk products).

While hay exports are a billion-dollar-per-year industry, they are dropping off for a variety of reasons, from tariffs and trade wars to China’s shrinking dairy herds and gradually decreasing production here at home.

While the Western hay-export industry brought in over $1 billion in 2022, it’s not quite accurate to say that most of the region’s hay production is for export. Still, more than 20% is quite a lot of Western water to be sending overseas on giant container ships.

The largest hay exporter in the West is California, with Arizona and Utah trading second and third places. Other Colorado River Basin states export insignificant amounts of hay, according to the USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service.

So what’s the takeaway from all of this? Well, like I said, I’m just providing the fodder for you to ruminate on, so to speak.

But it does definitively show that alfalfa and hay aren’t just some kind of side gig for Western farmers. They are important crops. And trying to convince farmers to give them up — along with the nearly $5 billion per year they can generate — is going to be tough, even if it is necessary.

⛏️ MINING MONITOR ⛏️

In last week’s dispatch on more mining claims staked in the shrunken Bears Ears National Monument I mentioned a few dozen that appeared to have been located by Land Survey Advisors, including some in the former monument. I was able to finally get past the glitches in the San Juan County database and get confirmation that all 36 claims were, in fact, staked within Bears Ears’ pre-shrinkage boundaries. That brings the total number of new claims in Bears Ears to 72.

I’ll map all of the claims for a future dispatch and will continue to keep my eyes open for more new ones.

📖 READING (&LISTENING) ROOM 📰

• The Magic Southwest podcast has an insightful episode about the lost working-class neighborhoods that once lined the Animas River in Durango. Well, I shouldn’t say they’re “lost.” They were mostly destroyed by the city to make way for roads, sewage treatment plants, parks, or just as a form of urban renewal, if you will. Give it a listen below:

• Heads up Four Corners area folks: I’ll be giving a presentation on the Dolores River as part of a Dolores River Boating Advocates’ event on Friday, Nov. 6, from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. at the Powerhouse in Durango. Following a short film about Snaggletooth Rapid I’ll speak about my personal relationship with the Dolores River, its history, the way it is a sort of microcosm of the Colorado River as a whole, and about its potential futures. I’ll also throw in a funny little tale about the time I saw Ed Abbey go through Snaggletooth. Tickets are $10 — which will help DRBA defray costs — and seating is limited. There will also be a cash bar. Reserve your spot now.

⛈️ WACKY WEATHER WATCH⚡️

Things are getting crazy down in southern New Mexico, especially near Hatch, where the Rio Grande has jumped its banks and inundated fields, homes, and even I-25. Check out the video below for more. And stay tuned next week when I have a recap of the 2026 water year, which may have been the wackiest on record.

Welcome to another edition of the Land Desk’s NEWSWIRE, and yet another one in which the big news is the big, end-of-the-water-year rain. Yes, 88% of the Western U.S. is currently experiencing some level of drought — with the most severe impacts in the Four Corners Country. Yet these same areas have also been barraged with rain a…

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The mining claim game continues to heat up in the areas Trump illegally slashed from Bears Ears National Monument, and the top…

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Tropical disturbances have moved into the Four Corners Country in recent days, bringing massive amounts of moisture, raising river levels, and causing flash flooding. The pattern — and high danger of flooding — is expected to continue this week, with the highest rainfall fore…

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🤖 DATA CENTER DIGEST 👾

Admire, Levon, Alyssa-7, blacksheep31, Ed, Equinox, Axel, vex-27, Leigh Ibara, Ember, Steven, Sylus, Noah Alfredy, Curious, Song, Artemis, Kit, Sylari, Ashlyn, Maren, Lark, Kip, Calum, Kael, Kaelren, Spike, Willow, Elle, z…

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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 dispropor…

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🦫 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 A…

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