The white horse lies on the hard-packed reddish earth. The black horse stands over her protectively, as if shielding her from the harsh sun or the stiff breeze, redolent of sagebrush. Maybe she is injured, maybe just resting. From my perch some 250 vertical feet above them I can’t tell, even with the help of my camera’s telephoto lens. Not that my assessment matters: The horses probably are wild, and it would be wrong for me to interfere, even if I could.

I return to my investigation of the shallow, circular depression on the summit of the small, but prominent, conical hill upon which I stand. The circle, constructed by ancestral Pueblo people many centuries ago, is about 30 feet in diameter, ringed by stones, with a single taller monolith jutting up from the eastern edge. There is not enough rubble nor is the depression concave enough for it to be a tower or kiva. It’s something my late father might have called architecture with unknown function: a shrine, perhaps, or some sort of celestial or solar observatory or calendar. Maybe it was just a place where one could sit and meditate on the surrounding landscape.

I’m here because last week, as I was poring over the Bureau of Land Management’s map of potentially available grazing allotments, I noticed that the contested Yellowjacket allotment included what’s known as “Jackson’s Castle,” a Puebloan complex of structures that W.H. Jackson photographed in 1874. I had wanted to take a closer look at the allotment, and this gave me the impetus to saddle up el Burro Blanco and head west and into Canyons of the Ancients National Monument.

As I hiked toward the pueblo, jumping from stone to stone so as not to trample any cryptobiotic crust, I noticed the hill and decided to climb it to get a better view. The shrine is a pleasant surprise, the horses below and their enigmatic actions a slightly unsettling one.

***

Anyone heading out behind the Slickrock Curtain in late April should be prepared to share the experience with many other sightseers, hikers, mountain bikers, or whatnot. Ski season is over, the mountains and midlands are too muddy, and the desert hasn’t yet reached inhospitable temperatures (well, okay, it did this March — for a while).

Still, I can’t help but be a little taken aback at the packed parking lot at Phil’s World mountain biking trails east of Cortez, or the massive cluster of cars at the Sand Canyon trail down in McElmo Canyon. As a teenager, back in the eighties, I spent summers in Cortez, riding my bike on the highways and county roads all over Montezuma County (and I’m pretty sure I was the only competitive cyclist in the entire county). Before that, my parents would take us camping up the Sand Canyon road, where even a mile in we’d see no one. (Yes, there used to be a rough public road across the canyon from the current trails).

That Cortez would one day become a magnet for mountain bikers and hikers and that it would have its own bike shop — not to mention a sushi joint — was certainly never on my radar.

***

Despite this winter’s dearth of snow, and the looming water crisis, McElmo Canyon has taken on its characteristic green hue. The cottonwood leaves are out, and dance in the sunlight against a backdrop of pink and beige sandstone, the hay is getting taller. But look closer and you can see symptoms of the drought. Ute Mountain is utterly snowless, even its north face. The fruit tree blossoms have already come and gone, fooled by the March heat wave to emerge early, only to be slain by the hard frost that followed. Pastures that haven’t received irrigation are plagued with dusty patches of bare dirt.

McElmo is a good place to see in one view the effects of private, irrigated land grazing versus arid public lands grazing. The irrigated pastures that line the creek retain a carpet of green, even after cattle have chomped up most of the grass. Meanwhile, on the slopes above the ditches — whether the land is private or managed by the BLM — it looks as if a wide-spectrum herbicide bomb has been detonated, leaving only bare dirt and cheatgrass behind. This year, even the cheatgrass appears to be struggling.

It’s a stark contrast with a few years back when even the most heavily grazed areas were covered with white sego lilies.

I turn off the McElmo asphalt onto a road graveled with fist sized cobblestones, making it a jarring ride, and slowly make my way through the mile or so of private land before entering BLM land and the national monument. On the way, I pass a pile of bones and crusty hides, where at least two cows must have perished sometime in the not-too-distant past.

***

As far as I can tell, there is no trail or established route from this rough gravel road to Jackson’s Castle, so I just find a place before crossing back onto private land to pull off the road and park. In the moon dust on the road is the shallow imprint of what appears to be a bear track, which is less scary than a mountain lion, but I do yell to whom or whatever might be listening that I probably don’t taste very good so please find someone else to eat. Then I leave the road and begin meandering toward my destination, careful to place my steps in the footprints of horses so as not to disturb the fragile soil.

The cacti are in garish bloom. The creamy little flowers of the cliff rose cling to every branch. Here the scarlet spears of the Indian paintbrush, there a daisy, and on a disturbed patch of ground a lone sego lily, its delicate petals fluttering in the breeze.

***

When I reach the pueblo I see why Jackson called it a castle: Though only a few standing walls remain, the amount of rubble indicates it was a substantial complex, with some two-story buildings, perched on a peninsula of sandstone above Yellowjacket Creek on one side, and a large flat area on the other that may have been agricultural fields.

Jackson’s Castle is believed to be from the Late Pueblo III period, meaning it was built about 800 years ago. In a 2014 paper1, Bob Bernhart and Scott Ortman point out the site’s architecture and interaction with the landscape are echoed in that of the Tewa Pueblo people in north-central New Mexico. And that supports Ortman’s theory that the Tewa language and culture originated in southwest Colorado, and “that the characteristic moiety or dual organization of present day Tewa communities was already in place when Tewa ancestors migrated from the Mesa Verde region to the Northern Rio Grande.”

There is, for example, a gap between room blocks in the center of Jackson’s Castle, which could indicate a “moiety-type” dual division of the village. Moiety refers to dualities or a division in half. Traditional Tewa ceremonial and subsistence cycles are divided into two complementary parts, according to the Ortman-Bernhart paper, a division that also shows up in architecture and village layouts.

Tewa cultural landscapes also are typically marked by earth-navel shrines on hills or mountains around a village or settlement — much like the hilltop feature east of Jackson’s Castle. And if you were to stand on one end of Jackson’s Castle on the dawn of autumn equinox, you’d see the sun rise directly over the top of the hill, the shrine, and the monolith on its eastern edge. Also, the village here is down near the canyon floor, from which views are limited. The shrine hill, however, affords a line of sight to more distant landmarks; it may have served as sort of an intermediary between the village and the larger world and surrounding landscape.

***

It appears from the BLM map that Jackson’s Castle is only barely within the Yellowjacket allotment, but that the flat farming area next to it is basically sliced in half by the allotment’s border. Which means that the cows I see off in the brush to the southeast of the site could be on an active, leased allotment, meaning they are “legal.” That said, there’s nothing to stop them from wandering onto the Yellowjacket allotment and the parts of Jackson’s Castle that aren’t atop the sandstone ridge.

Meanwhile, decades of previous cattle grazing — along with the wild horses now — have done quite the number on what were likely agricultural fields associated with the village, wiping out any physical evidence of what might have been there some 800 years ago.

Other sites nearby are surrounded by fences for that very reason, which may be necessary but it also feels like a sort of defacement of its own. Wouldn’t it be simpler and more effective just to keep the cattle out of the area entirely?

***

As I ponder my own relationship to the landscape, I catch a glimpse of movement in the distance. The two horses I had seen from up above are now standing up, and they have a youngster with them. I use my telephoto to get a closer look: the foal is gangly, clumsy on its feet, and something bloody and red hangs from the rear of the white horse.

After a moment of confusion, I understand: From the earth navel above, I had watched a wild horse in the throes of labor. And now she has just given birth.

The wind picks up and the clouds grow thicker. Feels like we might finally get a little rain. I smile a little and amble on back the way I came.

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📸 Parting Shots 🎞️

When Donald Trump was elected president for the second time, we all knew what was coming to the nation’s public lands: The administration would favor extractive uses by eviscerating environmental protections, rolling back regulations, and leasing out as much land as possible while handing out drilling permits like Shriners throwing candy at a parade.

Yet there was one realm where I figured the administration couldn’t bestow any more deregulatory gifts, namely public lands grazing. It’s not that I thought Trump would clamp down on the destructive practice, it’s just that I figured the status quo was about as permissive as it could get. Past administrations, be they Democratic or Republican, have generally shied away from updating or reforming public lands grazing policies out of fear of inflaming the West’s cowboy culture — even if it is based largely on myth.

But Trump, his Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins are intrepidly going where previous administrations did not dare: grazing reform. Well, sort of, though maybe not in the way public lands lovers might have hoped. In fact, they are doing their best to make grazing policy even more lax with a goal of getting more cattle out there to trample public lands, cryptobiotic soils, and cultural sites.

Last month, Burgum and Rollins announced an MOU between the two agencies designed to “boost the supply of American born, raised, and harvested beef” by cutting “bureaucratic red tape” and giving the livestock industry more control. The MOU has a goal of “maintaining grazing capacity wherever possible, including no net loss of Animal Unit Months within allotments,” even if those allotments are degraded or in poor health. In Burgum’s words, one goal is to “preserve America’s ranching heritage for generations to come.” Forgive me for getting anxious whenever I see “heritage” used in conjunction with public lands.

“Today’s signing sends a clear message: the Trump administration is putting America’s farmers and ranchers first,” said Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins. Which brings up the question of what message the administration was sending in February when Trump signed an executive order to quadruple beef imports from Argentina in an effort to keep Big Macs affordable.

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🗺️ Messing with Maps 🧭

To help it carry out its mission, the Bureau of Land Management has released an interactive map aimed at putting more cattle and sheep back on public lands. The “federal grazing lands potentially available” map shows allotments that have been vacated, often as a result of deals brokered by environmentalists, with the intent of peddling the tracts to livestock operators. While there’s no guarantee that the BLM would lease out all of the vacant tracts, the presence on the map of the ones vacated for environmental purposes is enough to set off alarm bells.

For example, the map includes 10 allotments in the high country around Silverton, Colorado, totaling about 70,000 acres. In 2023, the National Wildlife Federation paid the Etchart Sheep Ranch to vacate five of these allotments in an effort to give Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep more breathing room and protect them from diseases transmitted by domestic sheep. The deal was made with the hope that the leases would be retired permanently. Yet the inclusion on the map indicates they could see domestic sheep once again, emphasizing the need for legislation that would make such retirements perpetual.

Also on the map are the Flodine Park and Yellowjacket allotments in Canyon of the Ancients National Monument near the Colorado-Utah border. In 2005, a rancher gave up the allotments, north and south of McElmo Canyon, respectively, and sold 4,500 acres of adjacent private land to the BLM to add to the national monument. Both allotments and the private land contain a number of intermittent streams, shallow canyons, and numerous cultural sites. They had been grazed relentlessly for decades prior, and showed the wear and tear—much of the cryptobiotic soil had long before been trampled and destroyed and invasive cheat grass had infiltrated the grazed areas. An archaeological assessment conducted later found grazing had damaged dozens of sensitive and cultural sites in the areas.

In 2010, the BLM, which manages the monument, issued a new resource management plan, which allowed for continued grazing, but also opened the door to permanently retiring vacant grazing allotments if they fail to meet BLM rangeland health standards or when grazing is negatively impacting cultural sites. Five of the 28 allotments in the most heavily visited areas—including Sand Canyon—were cancelled, but not the Flodine Park and Yellow Jacket allotments, which were still in retirement at the time.

Instead, the local county commissioners and a group of ranchers pressured the BLM to reauthorize grazing on both allotments—to bring them out of retirement, if you will. The BLM acquiesced, but environmentalists and tribes with roots in the area fought back, forcing the agency to do a more thorough environmental analysis of the proposal. The opposition was enough to prompt the agency at least to delay issuing any leases, and the allotments remain in limbo.

Meanwhile, a team of scientists assessed the healing process on the Flodine Park and Yellow Jacket allotments, which by then had been cow-free for 11 years (though feral horses had grazed there). They compared biocrusts on those allotments to a fenced enclosure that hadn’t seen grazing for 53 years and a plot that was being actively grazed. What they found was both predictable and remarkable: The longer a plot went without cows, the healthier it was, as summed up by these graphs.

While the natural landscape can eventually heal itself, livestock’s damage to the cultural landscape is irreversible. BLM surveys identified 266 cultural sites on the two allotments, including 35 with “standing architecture.” At least 43% of those had been damaged by livestock.

Now what’s left may be in danger, too, at least if those allotments’ presence on the new map is any indication. And guess what? Packing these allotments isn’t going to make that steak any cheaper. Only about 1% of American beef is grazed on public lands.

Check out the BLM Grazing availability map yourself: https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/0a208d6eac6144969213c68519a8cfdd

⛈️ Wacky Weather Watch ⚡️

If you were to get all of your information about the West’s climate from daily weather reports and road condition websites, you might think that April snow showers and deep freezes had ended the snow drought and would lead to big May streamflows. After all, it snowed enough in Colorado to turn roads to slip-and-slides and causing a 75-car pileup on I-70 near the Eisenhower Tunnel. The temperatures dropped low enough to wipe out most of the fruit blossoms the March heat wave tricked into blooming early. Only the farmers who used extraordinary measures — starting fires or smudge pots in the orchards, running wind machines, etc. — could save some of their summer harvest.

Sure, the snow that did fall in April helped, but only enough to elevate snowpack levels to, well, the lowest on record (only by a slightly smaller margin than before). And the freeze was deep, which helped extend the spring runoff in the few areas where there was any snow left. But even there, I suspect that peak runoff has already come and gone (though I’m not calling the Predict the Peak contest yet!).

I flew over Colorado’s mountains the other day and was rather shocked at the dearth of snow, even on the highest peaks. Mt. Blue Sky, formerly Mt. Evans, had only a few patches of white left — at 14,130 feet in elevation. Everything below 10,000 feet appeared to be snowless. While the San Juan Mountains appeared to be in slightly better shape, it was still looking pretty dry. The Animas River watershed’s snowpack remains lower than it was on 2002 on this date.

Since it’s springtime and all I figured I’d give you the chance to help the Land Desk bloom with your suggestions of what I should be covering (or not covering), your news tips, and your ideas for where the Land Desk should go next. Put your thoughts in the suggestion box, i.e. the comment section, which will be open on this post to paid and unpaid subscribers. Bonus points for pointing me towards good news, progress, solutions, and relief from all the doom and gloom and outrage.

And by the way: Thank you to all of you who have tipped me off to interesting stories and happenings around the West. If I haven’t written about your idea yet, it’s not because I didn’t appreciate it, but because I’m only one person — at least for now — and only have time to crank out so many words.

Now for a couple of quick notes:

• The Bureau of Reclamation on Friday released its April “24 Month Study” on the Colorado River and its reservoirs, along with its plan to keep Lake Powell’s surface level from shrinking below 3,500 feet (giving a 10-foot buffer zone above minimum power pool), or what I call “de facto dead pool.” The plan is nearly identical to what I reported in “Abysmal math on the Colorado River,” with one exception: While the Bureau will release an extra 660,000 to 1 million acre-feet from Flaming Gorge reservoir, it plans to leave Navajo and Blue Mesa reservoirs alone, at least for now. Will this be adequate? Will the releases from Flaming Gorge really make a difference? I’m not sure. The math is still tough and getting tougher as the Colorado River Basin Forecast Center downgrades its predicted Lake Powell inflows for the April-July period.

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• Diné CARE is alerting folks to the U.S. EPA’s public hearings on the Navajo Transitional Energy Company’s application for a New Source Review permit for its proposed 742-megawatt natural gas-fired power plant. The permit would clear the way for the tribe-owned company to build and operate the facility, which would be located nort southeast of the Four Corners coal power plant on reclaimed portions of the Navajo Mine. Sorry for the late notice, but the hearings are today (April 21) and tomorrow (April 22). More info.

Okay, now it’s your turn. Go for it!

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Sometimes it feels like there are two parallel Southwestern United States out there.

One is naturally arid, is getting hotter and hotter by the year and is gripped by the most severe drought of the last millennium or more. Its water lifeline, the Colorado River system, is on the brink of collapse, and communities and farmers from Wyoming to Calexico are facing painful mandatory water cutbacks this summer.

And then there’s the other one, a sort of fantasy world, or maybe just an oblivious one, in which new water diversion projects like the Lake Powell Pipeline remain on the table, state leaders prepare to go to legal war to protect their states’ profligate water consumption, and a developer is breaking ground on a 2,300-acre “city within a city” called Halo Vista in North Phoenix.

Halo Vista’s developers are billing it as a companion development to TSMC’s $165 billion semiconductor fabrication facility complex. It will wrap around the industrial campus (thus the “halo” in the name), and plans call for some 30 million square feet of industrial, retail, office, research, and healthcare spaces along with 9,000 or more residential units.

“You have to think about all the people at full build-out who’ll work in this area — about 60 to 80,000 people,” Greater Phoenix Economic Council President Christine Mackay told AZFamily. “They’ll work in the Halo Vista science and technology park. They need restaurants, hotels, places to live — and places to shop for what they need.”

Historically, Arizona’s economy was said to run on five Cs: copper, cotton, citrus, cattle, and climate. Copper is still going fairly strong, most of the citrus groves have given way to housing developments, alfalfa has surpassed cotton, and the beef-cattle have been replaced by dairy factories. Now another C — computer chips — is being added to the mix, as the Phoenix-area experiences a semiconductor manufacturing boom and a coinciding data-center buildup.

The tech industry’s expansion is adding economic diversity, making the city somewhat less vulnerable to 2008-like financial breakdowns. But as Halo Vista demonstrates, it is also feeding Phoenix’s dominant economic force, the Growth Machine. And both the Growth Machine and the data center/semiconductor boom need water, and quite a lot of it. This, in turn, increases Phoenix’s exposure to future water shortages, which seem more and more likely with each passing day.

According to TSMC’s draft environmental assessment, the first phase of its Phoenix fabrication plants will initially use about 4.75 million gallons of water per day, or 5,320 acre-feet per year, which would jump to about 19,400 acre-feet yearly if and when all three phases are built out. But the company says it will eventually install a recycling system that will bring that number down considerably. The 9,000 residential units in Halo Vista would use about 2,800 acre-feet per year (based on Phoenix’s current per-capita water consumption multiplied by a rough estimate of 20,000 people occupying those residences). Halo Vista’s other industrial and commercial properties will consume an unknown additional amount of water.

So let’s say the whole development, including the “fabs,” will use about 25,000 acre-feet per year — less if the water efficiencies are realized, more if Halo Vista’s tech district includes data centers or other water-intensive industries.

That’s a lot of water, or a drop in the bucket, depending on how you look at it.

On the one hand it is equal to about one-fourth of Nevada’s total consumptive use from the Colorado River. Yes, the city of sin and excess only uses about four times more water than the TSMC/Halo Vista “city” will use.

On the other, it’s far less than the alfalfa farms in Maricopa County — in which Halo Vista is located — use for irrigation each year, which totals something like 500,000 acre-feet.1 And yet, Halo Vista/TSMC, once all built out in 20 years or so, will have a significantly larger economic output than a bunch of hay fields (which isn’t the only measure of value or even the most important one, and yet, well, water does flow uphill to money).

So yes, it is possible to sidestep water concerns by pulling out the “what about alfalfa” comparison. But it’s also not all that productive.

Halo Vista, which is being built on a plot of uncultivated state land in the desert, is not displacing an alfalfa farm’s water use. Rather, it represents a new water use piled on top of existing consumption. The water will come out of Phoenix’s municipal system, and therefore officially has an “assured and adequate” 100-year water supply, which is necessary in Arizona for this sort of development.

Yet there’s nothing assured about Arizona’s water future. Phoenix’s water comes primarily from high priority rights on the Salt and Verde Rivers, and from the Colorado River via the Central Arizona Project. But those rights will hardly matter if the rivers dry up: This year’s Salt River Basin meagre snowpack had vanished by March 1, spring runoff peaked weeks ago, and flows are rapidly falling. Meanwhile, the Central Arizona Project has relatively low priority rights, meaning it will be the first to take cuts as the river shrinks.

In other words, aridification and the Colorado River crisis pose an existential threat to Phoenix’s tech boom and, well, Phoenix, itself, which is one of the reasons Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs is preparing for a bitter legal fight with the feds and the Upper Basin states over the Colorado River.

The good news for the developers and the semiconductor makers is that agriculture continues to use a lot of water in Arizona. And where there is large consumptive use, there is also more room for increased efficiencies and, if it comes to it, “buying and drying” the farms for their water — which has its own negative consequences. The bad news is that the shortages to come may very well exceed the amount that could be wrung out of the existing farms.

Halo Vista, which is on a 20-year buildout schedule, is far from the only major water- and energy-guzzling development on slate for the increasingly arid West. And maybe it’s not realistic to expect all such development to come to a screeching halt simply because the water may run out sometime in the future. After all, climate change could cause more precipitation; maybe in 20 years we’ll be worrying more about flooding than desiccation.

But you would think that planners and policymakers and the developers would at least act in line with our current reality, where resources, especially water, are limited. Halo Vista-esque projects should be required not just to certify an “assured” 100-year supply, but they also should have to offset new consumption with cuts somewhere else, whether it’s paying for farmers to install drip irrigation or funding treated wastewater recycling projects.

Continuing to consume water at current rates is one thing. Adding new uses on top of our current overconsumption is quite another.

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***

And so it begins. It looks like residents of the small Arizona community of Kearney may lose their water altogether later this summer, making developments like Halo Vista look even more surreal.

The town sent this emergency memo out to residents in April:

Based on current usage within the Kearny water distribution system, we WILL run out of water on or about July 15, 2026. When that happens there will be no water available to any of us for any purpose until we receive a new allotment from the Gila River Water Commissioner. You will turn on your faucet and there will be no water, that is the stark reality we face.

Kearney sits in Arizona’s “Copper Triangle” along the banks of Gila River and in the proverbial shadow of the Hayden copper smelter smokestack. The town was established by the Kennecott Mining Company in 1958 to house residents displaced from Ray, Sonora, and Barcelona as the mine’s gaping Ray mine pit gobbled up the communities. Resolution Copper’s proposed Oak Flat mine is also nearby, as is Faraday’s proposed Copper Creek project.

Kearney has a maximum allotment of 610 acre-feet of water from the Gila River. This year, however, extreme drought conditions have brought the allotment down to just .76 acre-feet, forcing the town to impose severe restrictions on use to try to make it last until the monsoon arrives.

As for all the mines surrounding Kearney? I’m guessing their dealing with their own water issues, but I’d also wager that they’re allowed a heck of a lot more than three-fourths of an acre-foot.

🐟 Colorado River Chronicles 💧

In the comment section on the last Land Desk dispatch, reader wkarls reported on the Colorado River’s flows during a recent raft trip on the Grand Canyon. It got me to thinking about how low those flows might go and what that could mean.

The first half of our trip was on 7-9k cfs, the second half on basically 8k constant. Though a ‘different experience’ than 20k cfs, it was a great trip as always, with some of the ‘bigs’ easier, some harder-but all very doable. Commercial operations (w/ their 30foot+ motor rigs) may have a different opinion when the summer starts. This is a multi-million dollar business. How low can the river get and still be run through the GC regularly? We shall see but probably 4k-maybe lower.

I’ve only boated down the Grand Canyon once, back in October and November of 1995 with a group of slightly crazy Salida rafting folks. It was a beautiful, terrifying, sublime — if somewhat debauched — experience. During the trip, releases from Glen Canyon Dam — which make up about 95% of the flow in the Grand Canyon — fluctuated between 11,000 and 16,000 cubic feet per second, a number that was bolstered downstream after a good rainstorm moved through, turning the river that intimidating blood-and-chocolate-milk color. That seemed like plenty of water to me; it was certainly enough to generate waves big enough to toss our little rafts about like toys (did I mention it was scary as hell?).

Somewhat surprisingly, the releases were about the same in September of last year, bouncing between 10,000 and 16,000 cfs, which appears to have been an effort to get the annual flows past Lees Ferry up to about 7.5 million acre-feet to keep the Upper Basin in compliance with the Colorado River Compact’s non-depletion obligation. Then, on Oct. 1, the beginning of the 2026 water year, releases plummeted. This spring they’ve been in that 7,000 to 9,000 cfs range that wkarls mentioned.

That’s in line with the Bureau of Reclamation’s plan to release just 6 million acre-feet from the dam this water year: 6 million acre-feet per year averages out to about 8,200 cfs. That’s also right in line with the Grand Canyon Protection Act’s operating criteria, which set a minimum allowable release during the day (between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m.) at 8,000 cfs, while the minimum nighttime release is 5,000 cfs.

So, given all of that, we can assume that the flows shouldn’t drop much below current levels this summer. Of course, if conditions are worse than expected, then the reservoir could drop to 3,500 feet earlier than anticipated, which could force dam operators to further curtail releases to “defend” minimum power pool. If so, then you might see nighttime releases drop as low as 5,000 cfs. If that’s not enough, then I suppose dam operators would have to go to a run-of-the-river scenario, where flows could plummet to 2,000 or 3,000 cfs, which would make rafting quite interesting.

📸 Parting Shot 🎞️

With each passing April day without major snowfall, we gain more clarity on the Colorado River situation and what things might look like this summer, which is, in a word, grim. Or, as Arizona’s top water officials put it: “The winter and spring snowpack and runoff projections in the upper basin are abysmal.”

The Colorado River Basin Forecast Center is putting a number to that term by predicting that the Colorado River system will deliver about 1.4 million acre-feet1 of water to Lake Powell from April 1 through July 31. That’s about 23% of the median for the spring runoff season, which is when flows are most abundant, and just over half of last year’s not so great figure of 2.6 MAF.

Believe it or not, that figure — the official 50% forecast, made by an actual person — may be optimistic. Over the last two weeks, the Ensemble Streamflow Prediction model (which is a constantly updating automated forecast) has come up with an even more dire outlook, downgrading the forecast to 1.16 MAF during that same time period.

Abysmal, indeed.

We’re also getting a little more information as to how the feds plan to address the crisis, at least in the near-term. Most significantly, they tentatively plan to “defend” minimum power pool at Glen Canyon Dam, which is to say they will do what it takes to keep the surface level of Lake Powell at or above 3,500 feet in elevation to avoid relying on the lower river outlets, which are not engineered for sustained use. The weapons they will use for this defense include:

• Reducing Lake Powell releases from the planned 7.48 million acre-feet to 6 million acre-feet.

• Releasing up to 1 MAF from the “Upper Initial Units,” which includes Flaming Gorge, Blue Mesa, and Navajo Reservoirs. Hydrology may make this impossible, however, meaning that these releases could be as low as 650 MAF .65 MAF (or 650,000 acre-feet).

• For now, Interior is not asking for larger cuts from the Lower Basin (beyond the 1.5 MAF cuts they’ve already taken), which presumably means the feds will not reduce Lake Mead releases through Hoover Dam.

But will it be enough to avoid dipping below what I call de facto deadpool at Lake Powell? We won’t really know until later this summer, but a fairly simple calculation can help predict that future. Keep in mind that I’m no hydrologist, I’m just working with the numbers that are available to see whether potential inputs (Lake Powell inflows) are at least equal to planned outputs (Glen Canyon Dam releases).

I put together this little diagram to help visualize things. I know the text is tough to read in the email version, and especially if you’re reading this on your phone. So I’d suggest clicking on the image (or the headline of this post) and viewing it in the web version.

Here are the figures for the equation.

Inflows:

• 1.5 MAF: Lake Powell Storage available above 3,500 feet.

• 1.1 MAF to 1.4 MAF: Forecast Lake Powell inflows April-July

• .65 MAF to 1 MAF: Planned releases from upper basin reservoirs.

TOTAL INFLOWS: 3.25 to 3.9 MAF

Outflows:

• 2.9 MAF: April 1 - Oct. 1 releases to reach 6 MAF for the water year (3.13 MAF has already been released)

• .3 MAF: Rough estimate of evaporation from Lake Powell for the remainder of the water year.

TOTAL OUTFLOWS: 3.2 MAF

That gives us a whopping .05 to .7 million acre-feet to spare. That is cutting it close, folks; a hot, dry summer could drive evaporation levels up, and/or bring inflows down, shaving off the sliver of breathing room this affords. But unless the outlook dims considerably, the BoR should be able to avoid a run-of-the-river situation this year, which is good news. And, since Arizona likely will not be required to take more cuts this year, the state will probably hold off on doing a compact call and dragging the Upper Basin to court.

These measures, however, will have a variety of consequences, including:

• The Upper Basin reservoirs (Flaming Gorge, Navajo, Blue Mesa) are also likely to see record low inflows this year. That, combined with up to 1 million acre-feet of additional releases to benefit Lake Powell, will draw them down considerably, affecting hydropower production, irrigation, and, especially, recreation.

• Non-native smallmouth bass are abundant in Lake Powell, but since they are warmer-water fish, they tend to stay near the surface of the reservoir, meaning under normal conditions they stay well above the penstocks, or the outlets in the dam that lead to the hydropower turbines. However, as the surface drops closer to the penstock openings, so do the fish, allowing them to get flushed through the dam into the Colorado River. And because the water released from the dam is warmer (since it’s nearer to the surface), that warms the river downstream, allowing the bass to thrive and compete with the endangered native fish downstream. This is likely to be exacerbated as the surface level nears 3,500 feet.

• This year’s 6 MAF release from Glen Canyon Dam will bring the ten-year aggregate flows at Lees Ferry down to about 79 million acre-feet. This potentially puts the Upper Basin in violation of Article III of the Colorado River Compact, which mandates that the Upper Basin “not cause the flow of the river at Lee Ferry to be depleted below an aggregate of 75 million acre-feet” for any 10-year period. A 1944 treaty added another 7.5 million acre-feet to this figure to cover half of Mexico’s allotment, making for a total of 82.5 MAF over ten years. Note: The interpretation of this provision is in dispute.

• The diminished reservoir levels, combined with the reduced releases, will lead to lower hydropower output from the dam. That will force tribes, communities, and utilities that buy the relatively cheap power to purchase it on the open market. And it will also cut into power-sale revenues, which help fund endangered fish recovery programs.

• Reduced dam releases will mean lower flows, on average, through the Grand Canyon, affecting riparian ecosystems and boating.

• Reduced dam releases equate to lower flows into Lake Mead. Since the BoR apparently does not plan to cut releases from Hoover Dam, that reservoir will likely see its levels drop considerably, diminishing hydropower output and affecting recreation. My rough calculation suggests Lake Mead’s surface level will drop from the current 1,060 feet to about 1,030 feet, which would be lower even than in 2022. The BoR has suggested it will “defend” a level of 1,000 feet. That would almost certainly lead to Lower Basin shortages.

There is potentially good news on the horizon. Conditions are ripening up for a “super” El Niño to begin forming this summer. It’s difficult to predict how that will affect the Upper Colorado River Basin, but for now, forecasts are calling for a strong monsoon in the Southwest, beginning in July. That probably would not do much to bring up Lake Powell’s levels, but it would provide relief to the many farmers who are almost certain to lose irrigation relatively early this summer and may help keep late-summer megafires at bay. And, you never know, El Niño might just bring a monster winter just when we need it most.

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⛏️ Mining Monitor ⛏️

The Trump administration has formally cancelled the proposed withdrawal of more than 160,000 acres in the Upper Pecos River Watershed from new mining claims and mineral leasing.

Prompted by local advocacy and New Mexico’s congressional delegation, the Biden administration began the process of protecting the watershed and surrounding mountains east of Santa Fe in 2024. But the Trump administration nipped the process in the bud shortly after taking office by cancelling scheduled public meetings. Now it has officially ended the withdrawal.

For the past several years, Comexico LLC, a subsidiary of Australia-based New World Resources, has been working its way through the permitting process to do exploratory drilling at what it calls its Tererro mining project on more than 200 active mining claims in the watershed. It has met with stiff resistance from locals and regional advocacy groups, partly because mining has a dark history in the Pecos River watershed. In 1991, a big spring runoff washed contaminated mine and mill waste from a long-defunct mine into the upper Pecos River, killing as many as 100,000 trout. That prompted a multi-year cleanup of various mining sites.

The withdrawal wouldn’t have stopped the project outright, because it doesn’t affect existing, active, valid claims. Yet it would have stopped the company from staking more claims and would make it more difficult to develop the existing ones (especially if they haven’t established validity).

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I have a saying I coined while writing River of Lost Souls that goes like this: Mining is hard. Putting the earth back together again afterwards is a hell of a lot harder. That’s probably especially true when it comes to mining and milling uranium, given that along with all the other nasty byproducts of mining, it also leaves behind radioactive material. The point was recently driven home by two events:

• Moab officials celebrated the removal of 16 million tons of uranium tailings from the Atlas mill site alongside the Colorado River following a decades-long cleanup effort. Remediation work continues.

• Meanwhile, over at the cleaned up Durango uranium mill site (now a dog park), the Department of Energy’s most recent verification monitoring report finds that natural uranium flushing in the groundwater beneath the site is happening slower than expected. There’s no reason for concern at this point: Researchers are still confident that uranium concentrations will drop below the compliance goal within the allotted 100-year time period.

I mention it here because of the time-scale involved: The Atlas mill in Moab stopped operating more than 40 years ago, and the cleanup has dragged on for close to two decades. The Durango mill shut down for good in 1963; the massive, years-long, multi-million-dollar cleanup was completed in 1991. And researchers expect it to take another 65 years for the groundwater contamination to finally get back to acceptable levels.

It’s just something to keep in mind when considering new uranium mines and mills.

🐟 Colorado River Chronicles 💧

One of the more frustrating things about the Colorado River crisis is that the federal government, which controls the big dams and most of the extensive plumbing system on the river, has hardly given even a clue as to what it might do when Glen Canyon Dam reaches the critical minimum power pool mark as early as this summer.

Will they shut down the hydropower turbines and route all releases through the river outlets, possibly compromising the outlet tubes’ — and the dam’s — structural integrity? Will they “defend” minimum power pool by cutting back releases, thereby putting the Upper Basin in violation of the Colorado River Compact? Or will they drain Upper Basin reservoirs in an effort to maintain minimum power pool while also keeping releases at a level that will keep Lake Mead from dropping too precipitously? Maybe they’ll use the bunker-busting bombs intended for Iran to very quickly blast bypass tunnels through the canyon walls to render the dam obsolete?

The answer is still a mystery, but Interior Secretary Doug Burgum finally hinted coyly about the government’s potential approach (Interior oversees the Bureau of Reclamation, which runs most dams). The Arizona Star’s venerable environmental reporter Tony Davis reports that Burgum told a Tucson roundtable this week:

“We and the Bureau of Reclamation have to announce this month operating plans for next year. We can’t have all these reservoirs and no operating plan. We have to tell them to do something that no one will like. There wasn’t enough water to start with and there’s still less water now. We’re in a super severe situation. For us to have a functioning, operating plan for 2026, decisions are going to have to be made this month. Under the current course we’re heading on, it’s unlikely there will be an agreement with the seven basin states, and the bureau is just going to have to make a decision — the best judgment it can make.

“We’re positive about one thing — no one will be satisfied. We’ll be balancing water rights, power generation and water supply.”

Okay, I don’t know what that means, exactly, but at least they’re planning to do something. The last statement hints at their intent to defend the minimum power pool on Glen Canyon Dam (lest they’ll lose power generation altogether). We’ll probably learn more during the Glen Canyon Monthly Operations Call in the coming week or two. So stay tuned.

As long as we’re on the subject of the federal government doing something about the Colorado River, when’s Trump going to order his people to open the giant faucet up in Canada and send water gushing down to the Southwest?

🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫

This won’t come as a surprise to many people, but it’s now official: March 2026 was the hottest March on record by a lot in the Southwest and beyond. The Upper Colorado River Basin’s average temperature for the month was 46.5° F, or more than 13° higher than the 1895-2026 median. The graph below makes it very clear that the place has been getting hotter over the past fifty years, with the only real break coming in March 2023, when snow was piling up in the mountains.

The March scorcher followed the warmest winter and first half of the water year (Oct-March) for most of the West.

The result is clear: Even though precipitation accumulation wasn’t terribly far below normal, the snowpack was. The April 1 snowpack across Colorado was at a record low level, according to this year’s snow course, which is done by manual measurement and so goes back much farther than SNOTEL measurements.

Early April storms have helped keep the snow around a bit longer in the mountains, but has done little to bolster the snowpack. It’s still at historically low levels.

🗺️ Messing with Maps 🧭

Maybe we’ll have a really wet spring and summer. If not, well, this is what the National Interagency Fire Center says we can expect. Not great.

Earlier this year, the Trump administration cancelled the timed-entry reservation system for Arches National Park. The move was inspired in part by complaints from some Moab and Grand County elected officials and business owners who claimed the system had hampered overall visitation to the area, thereby hurting businesses’ bottom lines and diminishing tax revenues.

A new analysis is throwing that reasoning into doubt. And it raises the question of whether visitation to Arches is fueling Moab’s tourism industry, or the community and its amenities are drawing folks to the national park, or something in between. But it also should spur a conversation on who or what a national park should be serving.

During the Cold War, when Moab was primarily a uranium mining and milling town, with a bit of sightseeing, jeep-riding, and river-floating tourism on the side, Arches National Park was relatively quiet, with an average annual visitation of about 250,000 between 1965 and 1986. Winters could be downright empty: During January 1979, the first year monthly counts were recorded, only 2,970 people — or less than 100 per day on average — entered the park.

Domestic uranium production peaked in 1980. In 1984, the massive Atlas uranium mill just down the road from the entrance to Arches National Park shut down, and the industry effectively perished, creating an economic vacuum into which outdoor recreation-oriented tourism could slide. The Groff brothers opened Rim Cyclery in 1983, began renting mountain bikes a year later, and hosted the first Canyonlands Fat Tire Festival and Moab Stage Race (for road bikes) in 1986. The latter included a race from Moab, into Arches National Park, and back, something that would not fly nowadays.

Arches annual visitation also exceeded the 400,000 mark for the first time that year and climbed swiftly thereafter. While it’s difficult to suss out the cause and effect here, it is pretty clear that Arches visitation did not drive Moab’s transformation into a mountain bike and outdoor recreation mecca. If anything, it was the other way around. Arches visitation plateaued in the early 2000s, but Moab and Grand County’s amenities and tourism related sectors — retail trade, real estate, and services — continued to add jobs and in-migration remained strong.

Arches visitation and Moab’s might as an amenities economy continued to mirror each other. Utah’s Mighty Five marketing campaign helped drive Arches visits from less than 1 million in 2009 to 1.7 million in 2018. This led to packed parking lots, trail traffic jams, interminable waits at the entrance gates as lines of cars spilled out onto the highway for a mile or more, and dozens of instances in which rangers had to turn visitors away because the park simply couldn’t handle any more.

In 2021, a post-Covid surge drove visitation up to 1.8 million, prompting park officials to finally pull the trigger on timed entry, an idea that had been floating around for years. Requiring visitors to reserve their spot would spread the crowds out, at least, while also giving them more predictability. It sucks to drive for hours or even fly across the world to see Delicate Arch, only to get turned away at the gate. The program was launched as a pilot in April 2022, and made permanent the following year. Arches visitation tumbled soon thereafter, dropping to 1.46 million in 2022 and 1.48 million in 2023.

Last spring, Moab resident Matt Hancock presented an analysis to the Grand County commissioners purportedly showing that timed-entry led to the visitation decline, which resulted in a decrease in transient room tax collections. And that decline, he argued, was costing Moab about $45 million annually in direct visitor spending, which then rippled out into the community in the form of lost tax revenue and the services they fund.

Grand County Commissioner Brian Martinez then formulated an “Access and Capacity Enhancement Alternative” plan for managing Arches National Park. It favored expanding infrastructure and packing more crowds into the park, and slammed any sort of “demand restrictions” such as timed-entry, saying Grand County “considers its impact on visitation, the local economy, and the community to be unacceptable.”

Martinez presented the plan to a group of state and federal officials at a closed State of Utah and National Park Service Workshop in Salt Lake City aimed at exploring ways to give local officials more control over public lands. A few months later, reservation systems were nixed at Arches, Yosemite, Glacier, and Rocky Mountain National Parks.

Will this boost visitation and Moab’s economy? Possibly, but not likely, according to yet another look, this one by Moab resident Emily Campbell. She also finds a correlation between Arches visitor number declines and timed entry, but points out that the corresponding transient room tax decreases could be attributed to other factors, such as a shift in visitors’ lodging choices. They may be camping on public lands, for example, or staying in neighboring counties, where hotels and such tend to be less expensive.

Meanwhile, other sectors of the economy have thrived, with food services, retail, and construction taxable sales shooting up even as Arches visitation has lagged. Perhaps it’s a sign that Moab’s economy is diversifying slightly, if only from relying heavily on tourism to also depending on folks that actually live there, but earn their incomes from outside the county.

Rather than trying to build on this diversification, however, Grand County is continuing to throw resources at yet another study aimed at determining the economic impact of timed entry — regardless of the fact that the reservation system has been suspended, at least for now.

Of course, all of this skirts around the deeper and bigger issue: the purpose of national parks. Is it really to bolster gateway communities’ tourism industries and enrich local business owners? Or is it, as the National Park Service’s mission states, to preserve “unimpaired the natural and cultural resources and values of the National Park System for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of this and future generations”?

That’s what parks officials should be thinking about, first and foremost. They should manage the park for the long-term benefit of the park and the resources there. Secondary to that is its effect on the visitors’ experience. Limiting the number of people traipsing around the park by whatever means will be better for the park (or at least not worse for it). And spreading out the crowds with a reservation system will not only make Arches more enjoyable to visit, but will also make it more predictable. That, in the long run, will be better for the park, for its visitors, and, yes, for the gateway communities, too.

Moab’s tourism industry might be wise to get outside the growth at all costs mindset as well. The place has been adding hotel rooms at an astounding rate, looking to capitalize on the Moab mystique. But there are limits to how much visitation can continue to increase without not only wrecking the surrounding public lands but also diminishing the experience and driving folks away. Who knows, the tourism industry could bust just as hard as uranium mining did 40 years ago.

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⛈️ Wacky Weather Watch⚡️

March certainly went out like a lion, though maybe not in the way that the saying is normally understood. It was hot. Damned hot. I’ll give a more thorough rundown on the heatwave and a final snowpack analysis in a later dispatch (after the next storm system moves through in hopes that it might improve the situation). But for now here’s a few stats from the heat wave.

204; 279: Number of monthly high-temperature records that were broken or tied in Arizona and Colorado, respectively, during the last two weeks of March.

102° F: Temperature at the Phoenix airport on March 18, setting a new monthly record and beating the earliest first 100-degree day by eight days.

105° F: The temperature in Phoenix on March 19, 20, and 21, breaking the March record yet again.

78.8° F: Average temperature in Phoenix for the month of March, 6.5° higher than the previous record high average temperature for the month.

109° F: Recorded temperature in Yuma, Arizona, on March 20.

78° F: Temperature in Del Norte, Colorado, on March 20, a new monthly record.

92° F: Temperature in Trinidad, Colorado, on March 21, smashing the previous monthly record high of 85° set … two days earlier.

📸 Parting Shot 🎞️

The News: The Trump administration is formally proposing to revoke the Biden-era ban on new oil and gas leases within the 10-mile buffer zone around Chaco Culture National Historical Park in northwestern New Mexico. The Bureau of Land Management is accepting public comments for just seven days, with the input period ending April 7.

The Context: When President Theodore Roosevelt wielded the brand new Antiquities Act in 1907 to create Chaco Canyon National Monument, he drew the boundaries around what is now known as “downtown Chaco,” a handful of structures including the 800-room Pueblo Bonito, constructed between the 9th and 12th centuries by ancestors of today’s Pueblo people.

That was merely the center of the Chacoan world, however, which extended over 100 miles outward into the Four Corners region. No one knows if this was a political empire, a religious or cultural society, or a school of architecture, but it is clear that the dozens of Chacoan outliers or “great houses,” along with thousands of smaller sites, shrines, and architectural features with unknown function, did not exist in isolation. They were part of a cultural tapestry woven into the natural landscape. The national monument, in other words, was vastly incomplete, which is especially concerning given that it lies in would become one of the nation’s most heavily drilled oil and gas fields.

That’s not to say that Chacoan sites are devoid of protections. The park itself is off-limits to all oil and gas development. Pierre’s Site and several other outliers are part of the Chaco Culture Archaeological Protection Sites Program, and all sites on federal land are shielded by the Archaeological Resources Protection Act and Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act, which requires oil companies to conduct a cultural inventory of all land in the path of development. If the surveyors happen upon a “significant” site, the well pad or road or pipeline must be relocated, if possible, at least 50 to 100 feet away, a process known as “identify and avoid.” Tribes are supposed to be consulted in these cases, as well, though their concerns aren’t always considered.

But “identify and avoid” misses a great deal.

“Even though agencies try to mitigate the impact, it isn’t enough because you’ve literally destroyed the context in which those things exist,” Theresa Pasqual told me several years ago when I was writing about Indigenous resistance to drilling around Chaco. She is the former director of Acoma Pueblo’s Historic Preservation Office, and a descendant of the Pueblo people who occupied the Four Corners region for thousands of years. “Most of our pueblos are still transmitting their migration history through oral means. So when you have development that begins to impact many of these sites — that range in size from the grandeur of Chaco Canyon or Mesa Verde to very small unknown sites that still remain un-surveyed and unknown to the public — they are literally destroying the pages of the history book of the Pueblo people.”

Pierre’s Site, a Chacoan great house about nine miles north of the park’s boundary, illustrates this concept. The site is made up of a collection of thick-walled stone structures built among and in harmony with distinctive shale and sandstone buttes and bluffs. That “page,” or the structures and their immediate surroundings, has been kept intact by the aforementioned protections. But a cluster of well pads, along with pumpjacks, tanks, and associated infrastructure sit less than a half-mile away, and they are visible — and their whir-pop-whir sounds audible — from the site. They not only affect the way one experiences Pierre’s, but also have surely erased some of the important context.

Pierre’s lies along the Great North Road—the most prominent and visible of several such “roads” in the region—an architectural feature that stretches directly north of Chaco Canyon for 30 miles or more. It may have been a symbolic path through time, connecting old worlds with new, or a reminder of the power Chaco-central wielded over its outliers, or a giant arrow pointing people to a holy place. Chaco scholar Paul Reed calls it “a landscape monument on a large scale.” Yet little effort has been made to protect it. Oil field roads and pipelines cross it in dozens of places, and workers have bulldozed well pads right on top of it, erasing the subtle signs that it was ever there. If something so significant can get plowed under, how many more subtle features—shrines, corn fields, plant-gathering sites, ceremonial areas, flint-knapping spots—have been destroyed indelibly?

It was with the greater context in mind that in 2023, after years of consideration, public meetings, and analysis, President Joe Biden signed Public Lands Order 7923, which withdrew about 336,000 acres of public land from oil and gas leasing for 20 years. Tribal nations with ties to the cultural landscape, environmental advocates, and archaeologists had sought the withdrawal to provide a buffer zone around the national historical park and to add a layer of protection to the associated sites within 10 miles of the park’s boundaries.

The withdrawal was incomplete, in that it still covered only a tiny slice of the greater Chaco landscape. Several significant outliers, along with about 20 miles of the Great North Road, remained unprotected. Chaco is also in the middle of what’s known as the Checkerboard, a hodgepodge of land ownership and jurisdictions, which complicates the withdrawal, since it only applies to BLM land. The Checkerboard lies within the Navajo Nation’s borders, but it is not reservation land, and it includes Bureau of Land Management land, state lands, private lands, and Indian allotments, which exist in a sort of limbo between private, tribal, and federal land.

The Navajo Nation initially supported the withdrawal, but when tribal leadership changed, so did its stance. In response to pressure from allotment owners within the buffer zone, who worried that their royalties from drilling would be threatened, the Buu Nygren administration turned against the buffer. While leasing is still allowed on those allotments within the withdrawal area, an oil and gas company is less likely to drill there because they can’t “pool” the allotment resources with those of neighboring federal parcels.

Project 2025, the right wing’s playbook for the Trump administration, directly called for the Chaco buffer zone’s elimination, and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has been toying with the idea for the last year. Finally, on the last day of March, the administration opened a one-week public comment period, on the proposal to either revoke the buffer zone altogether, or to reduce it to a five-mile radius around the park, which would leave out Pierre’s and other significant sites.

The All Pueblo Council of Governors, Indigenous and environmental advocates, archaeology groups, and New Mexico’s congressional delegation all pushed back on the Trump administration’s move and called for the current buffer zone to be retained.

To give your two cents on the proposal, go to the BLM’s project page.

***

The Trump administration announced it will move the U.S. Forest Service headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Salt Lake City as part of a “sweeping restructuring of the agency to move leadership closer to the forests and communities it serves.” The shake-up includes:

• Moving about 260 employees from Washington HQ to Salt Lake City, and shuffling around another 2,600 staffers;

• Eliminating its region-based organizing structure and shifting it to one centered around 15 state-level offices. This will include shuttering regional offices, some of which will be retained for other purposes;

• Closing 57 research and development stations, while retaining 20, eight of which are in Western states;

• As for firefighting, a Forest Service press release noted:

  Under this reorganization, the agency’s Fire and Aviation Management program will retain its existing Geographic Area Coordination Center structure, which remains the backbone of national incident coordination. There will be no interruption or change to our field-based operational firefighters or their positions. The program will continue reporting to the Deputy Chief for Fire and Aviation Management at the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho.

Administration officials say the overhaul is aimed at making the agency, which is a branch of the U.S. Agriculture Department, more nimble and efficient. Yet it has not provided an analysis of how such a vast restructuring would accomplish those goals, or how much money it would save. It comes about a year after the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE, fired about 3,400 Forest Service employees, or more than 10% of the agency’s total workforce.

It’s all part of a larger departmental overhaul designed to “bring the USDA closer to its customers,” according to a USDA memorandum from last year. Customers? Do they mean the extractive industries? The American people? Or what? Either way, it seems like strange terminology for a government agency to be using.

In reality, as Christine Peterson reports in High Country News, the overhaul is doing little except sowing confusion and concern among agency staffers and observers.

As I’ve written here before, I don’t see moving public land agencies out of Washington to be an unmitigated disaster in and of itself. And contrary to some takes, it won’t automatically lead to wholesale clearcutting of the West’s forests. Forest Service and BLM higher-ups don’t need to be close to Capitol Hill or the White House to do their jobs, especially in the Zoom age. And it wouldn’t hurt to get the Forest Service Chief or the BLM Director out on the landscapes they oversee a bit more often, where perhaps they can see the consequences of projects or policies they may sign off on. Utah may be a questionable location, given the state’s leaders hostility toward public land management, but Salt Lake City is a fairly progressive place, and the likes of Sen. Mike Lee will have just as much access to agency leaders in D.C. as they would in SLC.

That said, if such a move is not done correctly, it can be disastrous. Take Trump’s first-term relocation of the Bureau of Land Management’s headquarters to Grand Junction, Colorado, in 2019. That led to a de facto agency housecleaning; many senior staffers chose to resign or move to other agencies rather than uproot their lives and families and move across the country, and only a handful of workers ended up in the Colorado office, which shared a building with oil and gas companies. A vast storehouse of institutional knowledge and expertise was lost, and virtually nothing was accomplished.

We’re likely to see the same sort of dynamic playing out with this move, even though SLC is larger, more cosmopolitan, and has a bigger airport than GJC. Plus, the USFS overhaul is far more than a mere HQ move. Shuttering nearly 60 research and development facilities, many of which are tied to universities or colleges, will have a major impact, even if their functions and staff are moved elsewhere. Ditto with the regional-to-state office shuffle (the point of which is what, exactly?).

And, this is all happening as the administration makes a push to return the Forest Service to its timber plantation era, which ran from the 1950s through the ’80s. During that time, logging companies harvested 10 billion to 12 billion board-feet per year from federal forests, while for the last 25 years, the annual number has hovered below 3 billion board-feet. Now, Trump, via his Immediate Expansion of American Timber Production order, plans to crank up the annual cut to 4 billion board-feet by 2028. How? By declaring an “emergency” that allows the agency and logging companies to bypass environmental laws. Never mind that the infrastructure and demand don’t necessarily exist to carry out this plan.

Rollins issued a memo last year declaring that the threat of wildfires, insects and disease, invasive species, overgrown forests, the growing number of homes in the wildland-urban interface, and more than a century of rigorous fire suppression have contributed to what is now “a full-blown wildfire and forest health crisis.” And she expanded the “emergency situation” acreage from 67 million acres under Biden, to almost 113 million acres, or 59% of all Forest Service lands, opening it up to streamlined forest “management,” aka timber operations.

🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫

I’m calling it: The Dolores River in Dolores reached peak spring runoff of 1,090 cubic feet per second on March 26. If this holds (and, yes, there is a chance that April showers will bring big May flows), then it will be the earliest peak on record by far. This is more an indication of how intense and unusual the end-of-March heat wave was than of how scant the snowpack was. It was the fourth lowest peak flow on record, behind 2002, 1977, and 2018.

Silverton, Colorado’s weather watcher Fred Canfield reports on a welcome burst of moisture at the high country burg in early April, writing:

We had a solid day and night soaker with .63 in the can followed by every size of snowflakes imaginable plus graupel for our April Fools Day Deliverance. 4.8 inches of white with .59 for water. 30.3 was bottom out overnight close to 7AM. We were melting out and flowing before Mr Sun made it over the tree tops on Kendall through the grey mids. Red Mountain gained 19 inches with 1.7 wc. Less in the gorge.

Hey, it’s not enough to pull the watershed out of a dire situation, but we’ll take anything we can get!

Parting Cheeseburger Query

Four years ago, I asked you kind readers (or at least the ones that were around back then), for your recommendations on the best independent bookstores and green chile cheeseburgers in the West so I could add them to the Land Desk Green Chile Atlas. I know, it’s kind of weird to combine the two, and I apologize to all vegan booksellers that this pairing may offend (but I will add that vegan burgers are included, too).

Now I figured I’d come back and not only remind you that the Atlas exists, but also ask for updates, new book or green chile-related finds. So fire away!

The so-called uranium mining renaissance mostly remains in the hype phase. There’s plenty of talk of acquisitions and exploratory drilling and purportedly spectacular finds, but — with a few exceptions — there’s very little action. Even existing mines that have been in “standby” mode for years, supposedly just waiting for market conditions to improve, still aren’t shipping any ore to the mill.

But that doesn’t dim the buzz any. Not only is it intensifying, but it’s spreading out geographically. Most of the drilling and speculative claim-staking is happening in the Lisbon Valley in southeastern Utah and surrounding areas, along with a handful of mining proposals in the Grants uranium belt in New Mexico. Now Gamma Resources is going a little further afield by collecting claims on U.S. Forest Service land in the Chama River watershed in northern New Mexico.

The Canadian firm’s 4,520-acre Mesa Arc Project lies about five miles south of the village of Canjilon. While this was never a uranium mining hot spot, the USGS mineral data system does include a uranium prospect here by the name of Horney Toad or Lucky Dog, though it doesn’t appear to have been a producer.

So far, the company has filed a notice of intent with the Carson National Forest proposing to drill 10 to 12 exploratory holes and construct drill pads and about 800 feet of new access road. But the forest has yet to formally launch the review process. Gamma also says it has hired SWCA Environmental Consultants to conduct an archaeological and cultural resources survey of the area.

Locals aren’t all that excited about the prospect of a uranium mine in their backyard. Source NM’s Patrick Lohmann reports that Moises Morales, a Rio Arriba County commissioner, Canjilon resident, and long-time land grant activist, is mobilizing opposition to the project.

It would behoove Gamma Resources to look into the history of the area to see what a formidable force they are up against. The Chama Valley is famous for its fierce resistance to outsiders trying to usurp their land — be it real estate developers, the federal government, or, I suppose, a mining company.

***

One company, Disa, is looking to produce uranium not by digging up ore, but by using something called high-pressure slurry ablation (HPSA) to extract the mineral from historic mine waste rock piles. Only it appears their attempts to get the novel technology off the ground is facing some hurdles.

In March, Aura Grit LLC filed an application with the BLM to use Disa’s HPSA process on the October pile, an abandoned mine located south of Gateway, Colorado, on a mesa above John Brown Canyon. But shortly after the agency began reviewing the proposal, Disa backed out, at least temporarily, and decided to make the technology’s debut at the smaller Mary Ann uranium mine waste pile in Montrose County. The plan of operations is not yet available.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s environmental review of the Disa’s proposal to remediate abandoned mine dumps with HPSA describes the technology as involving …“… mobile units that use high-pressure water streams to remove source material from the mine waste, resulting in coarse material and fines concentrates. Disa expects that the coarse material would meet NRC requirements for release and would be reintegrated into the mine site soils. The fines concentrates would be transported to licensed low-level radioactive waste or uranium recovery facilities for disposal or recycling.”

Because the process is separating uranium and thorium fines from ore, it is considered a form of milling, not mining. And that’s an important distinction, because when you mill uranium ore, you leave behind mill tailings, which must be disposed of according to NRC and Environmental Protection Agency standards. Instead, the “coarse material,” as the waste is described, would be reintegrated into the mine site — even though it may contain radioactive and other harmful materials.

In its plan of operations for the October pile, Aura Grit said the process would require trucking in about 5,000 gallons of water per day (or 108,000 gallons per month) from a commercial well near Gateway.

If you’re looking to find these locations on a map, check out the Land Desk’s Mining Monitor Map, which is updated frequently.

Also, for an interactive map of all kinds of uranium prospects, mines, and mills, there’s Land Desk’s Uranium Mining in the Four Corners Country map derived from USGS data.

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🌵 Public Lands 🌲

Over the last year or so, there have been some bad faith attempts — most orchestrated by Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah — to take public lands out of the public hands and turn them over to developers. Amid all of the brouhaha over that, it can be easy to forget that a mechanism already exists for this sort of transfer, and it’s not always a terrible thing.

The Bureau of Land Management, for example, is looking to sell about 19 acres of land on the southern fringe of the Las Vegas metro area to the city of Henderson for affordable housing. The sale would occur under the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act, which Congress passed in 1998 to allow the feds to dispose of isolated, hard-to-manage tracts within the urban area, and to acquire private inholdings. The idea was to give Las Vegas more room to grow, while also protecting more remote, environmentally sensitive lands by transferring them into the public’s hands.

The process makes a lot of sense in southern Nevada, generally speaking, because there are so many disparate chunks of BLM land scattered throughout the city’s streetscape. While they do provide a sort of open space, they also can exacerbate “leapfrog” sprawl and essentially end up being vast vacant lots sandwiched between housing developments. And every city, including greater Las Vegas, is gripped by an affordable housing shortage.

That said, I’m curious about the choice of this particular parcel, more from an urban planning perspective than a public-land-transfer one. This is not one of those tracts surrounded by suburbia, but lies on the suburban fringe. It’s not in an existing neighborhood or even all that close to one and is beyond the reach of the bus line. It’s across the street from Combat Zone Paintball and a huge RV sales center and just up the road from Dig This Vegas, a “heavy equipment playground.”

It seems like it will not only encourage more physical sprawl, but will also amplify the disconnection and lack of community that sprawl fosters. Kids would have to walk at least two miles, across a pedestrian-unfriendly landscape, to get to the nearest school. Workers will have a long walk to the bus, or traffic-heavy driving commutes. And the only local neighborhood will be the housing complex, itself.

My take is that this sale should go forward and Henderson should build a multi-family, affordable complex here. But in the future I would hope that they’d focus on parcels that are actually within the city’s existing footprint. Because the last thing southern Nevada needs is more sprawl.

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🗺️ Messing with Maps 🧭

Last week I did the NASA Worldview satellite snowpack comparison, this time it’s Copernicus. The big difference is that you can zoom out more with Worldview, and zoom in for higher resolution looks with Copernicus. So here I went and found imagery from the San Juan Mountains in late February of this year, which is when snowpack levels peaked in the Animas River watershed, and another one from late March, following the big fat melt out.

📸 Parting Shot 🎞️

And for another mind-blowing look at just how little snow there is, Land Desk reader and snow-guy Andy Gleason sent in some shots from Animas Forks, at 11,185 feet in elevation. That is some thin snow for late March. Heck, it’s thin snow for late May.

There is a little bit of good news, though. First off, take a close look at the satellite images above and the photos below. Notice that the snow is pretty white, and there’s not much visible dust. Usually the spring melt reveals layer after layer of dust on the snow’s surface, that then decreases the albedo — or reflectivity — and hastens the snow melt. There appears to be less dust this year, so far, meaning maybe what’s left of the snow won’t melt quite as fast.

Oh, and also: Even though the snowpack is ultra-thin, at least it’s not gone at these high altitudes, providing a base for the snow that this week’s forecasted storm should bring. There may still be some powder skiing to be had this season after all! (Scroll down for a weather forecast).

🚣🏽 Predict the Peak! 🌊

Don’t forget to submit your entry for the Predict the Peak spring runoff streamflow contest! The deadline for prize eligibility is April 3, so hurry up. Also, if you already submitted an entry, but you realized that your prediction might be thrown askew by this week’s snowy forecast? You have until April 3 to resubmit. Just keep in mind that only your most recent entry for each gauge will count.

Tell me about your yukigata! No, this isn’t some weird crowdsourced kink, I’m asking you to tell me about patterns formed by melting snow …

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⛏️ Mining Monitor ⛏️

Pinto Creek used to run year-round. Bubbling up from springs and occasional snowmelt in the Pinal Mountains of central Arizona, it nourished a riparian ribbon of green throug…

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It was early June, and we sat out in the shade in our backyard in Silverton, Colorado, wearing short-sleeves and shorts and drinking cold beverages under a cloudless blue sky. That, in itself, made the day memorable. Blizzards are as likely on Memorial Day as barbecues in this mountain town, elevation 9,318 feet, and sweater-fre…

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⛏️ Mining Monitor ⛏️

The U.S. Forest Service late last week completed the transfer of 2,422 acres of emory oak-studded and boulder strewn public land in central Arizona to Resolution Copper, a subsidiary of global mining corpora…

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⛏️ Mining Monitor ⛏️

While the Four Corners Country uranium mining “renaissance” advances in starts and fits and hyped up press releases, copper and critical mineral extraction in southern Arizona moves forward in more substantial ways.

Last week, the U.S. Forest Service publ…

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🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫

Oh dear. You’d best get your skiing in now, because it looks like the spring melt will hit a lot earlier than usual. A big heat wave is on its way to the West, with the most unseasonably warm temperatures occurring in the Southwest and Four Corners regio…

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🌵 Public Lands 🌲

Sen. Mike Lee and Rep. Celeste Maloy, both MAGA Republicans from Utah, have formally introduced legislation to use the Congressional Review Act to revoke the Biden-era management plan for Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. If successful, the move would also bar the feds from developing a new management plan that resembles the…

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The Bureau of Land Management’s Mineral & Land Records System seems like a strange place to get trolled. But I think it just happened. I was looking through the MLRS to try to get an idea of whe…

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Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when I lived in Silverton, Colorado, elevation 9,318 feet, we often experienced a “January thaw.” It was a period of a few sunny, warm days between storms that usually fell in January but could also occur in February. If you could find a south-facing deck that was protected from the wind a…

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Just when you thought the GOP’s assaults on public lands couldn’t get any worse, the Trump administration launched a new blitzkrieg on environmental protections. That includes eviscerating the National Environmental Policy Act, the federal law requiring agencies to analyze, mitigate, and avoid impacts of major federal projects and proj…

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The bad news: The new snow piled on top of the thin layer of old, weak snow led to avalanches, including one near Donner Pass in California that took nine lives, ano…

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