“We are, in short, on an energy binge, which, like all binges, can only end in disaster.”

This warning was delivered to a congressional committee in 1971 by a man named Harvey Mudd, then director of a Santa Fe-based environmental group. The “we” on the energy binge was the growing population of the Western U.S., and their rapidly accumulating number of electrified gadgets — from air conditioners to stoves to can openers and toothbrushes. The resulting disaster was just getting underway: The Big Buildup of giant coal power plants and their mines across the Colorado Plateau, along with the resulting pollution. “An irony of this situation is that as more electricity is generated by the burning of fossil fuels,” Mudd continued, “there is more and more justification for an artificial environment, because the air outside is not fit to breathe.”

Mudd’s quote, and others from the hearing on “Problems of Electrical Power Production in the Southwest,” have come to mind frequently in recent weeks, for seemingly unrelated reasons: data centers and Trump’s national monument shrinkage.

America is once again on an energy binge, this one primarily driven by the Big Data Center Buildup. These facilities, cropping up everywhere from farmland outside of Cheyenne to a patch of desert near Page to industrial parks in Reno, guzzle up so much electricity that Southwestern utilities are expecting their overall power demand to double or even triple within the next decade. And even if these projections are overblown, the utilities are still using them to justify building new natural gas plants or even nuclear reactors and to keep old coal plants running, saying that solar and wind and geothermal can’t come online fast enough to meet the new load. It’s a sort of echo of the fossil-fuel-burning disaster Mudd spoke about.

And one of the proposed coal plants Mudd was worried about was slated to be built on the Kaiparowits Plateau in what would become Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in 1996. Meanwhile, that 1970s energy binge was also spurring nuclear reactor development. And for a time in the 1980s, the Gibson Dome in southeastern Utah was one of the prime candidates for the nation’s spent reactor fuel depository, i.e. a radioactive waste dump. When President Barack Obama established Bears Ears National Monument in 2016, he included the Gibson Dome site.

When Trump issued a proclamation this month shrinking both national monuments, he redrew the boundaries to exclude both the Kaiparowits Power Project site and the Gibson Dome site, opening those places back up to coal and oil and gas leasing, new mining claims, and potentially other developments — maybe even waste repositories, power plants, or, yes, data centers.

I’m not saying that Gibson Dome and the Kaiparowits project are going to be revived in any shape or form: Both were soundly rejected back in their day for a variety of reasons. These projects make even less sense now.

But it’s worth remembering that in the past, parts of these national monuments were drilled and mined — extensively in some places — and they were even targeted for large projects that would have industrialized large swaths of land. When the monuments were originally established, the lines were drawn to include these sites to fend off future development. And when the current administration redrew the lines, they intentionally left out those same sites in the hope of luring future development. Whether that actually happens will depend on economics, on how the legal battle over the shrinkage goes, whether Congress finally acts and makes these national monuments permanent and where they draw the boundaries, and on what a future administration decides to do.

To help you imagine what things could have looked like, here are summaries of the aforementioned projects.

Kaiparowits Power Project

In the early 1970s, as part of what the late scholar Charles Wilkinson called the Big Buildup, utilities Southern California Edison, San Diego Gas & Electric, Arizona Public Service, and Salt River Project proposed the Kaiparowits Power Project to help meet growing power demand in the urban Southwest.

The project would have included the largest coal plant in the world at the time, and would have been centered at the Fourmile Bench site, about 36 miles north of the community of Big Water, Utah, (née Glen Canyon City) and Highway 89. The coal mines would have been to the southeast of Fourmile Bench.

The project would have included (per the 1975 draft environmental impact statement):

• A 3,000-megawatt coal-fired generating station comprised of four 750-mw units, projected to burn about 9 million tons of coal per year and pull 41,400 acre-feet of water per year from the Colorado River via a pumping plant and pipeline out of Warm Creek Bay on Lake Powell. The four smokestacks would each be 600 feet high and emit an estimated 12 tons of particulates, 34 tons of sulfur dioxide, and 250 tons of nitrogen oxides — per day. Original designs called for a 6,000-mw plant, but they were eventually scaled back.

• Four underground coal mines projected to produce about 12 million tons of coal annually. The complex would also include a coal preparation plant, waste disposal areas, and a seven-mile-long conveyor belt to move coal to the plant. The mine complex would use about 3,100 acre-feet of water annually, also from the Lake Powell pipeline.

• Nearly 1,500 miles of new high-voltage transmission lines to move the power from the generating station to market, which would also include 1,900 miles of new permanent and temporary roads.

• A limestone quarry — for the smokestack scrubber systems and to treat water — would built about 16 miles northwest of Bryce Canyon National Park.

• A gravel mine for aggregate for roads and other construction purposes would be built in the upper Wahweap Creek stream bed near Fourmile Bench.

• A brand new town with a projected peak population of up to 15,000 to house temporary and permanent employees and their families on 3,000 to 4,000 acres on the East Clark Bench on Hwy. 89.

• A new, 67-mile highway which would stretch from the new company town (near Big Water/Glen Canyon City) to the power plant and on to the limestone quarry near Cannonville, where it would link up with Hwy 12. The highway would cut straight across the heart of what would become Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (though almost all of the acreage in question was removed by Trump).

The project was met, as one can imagine, with intense opposition from environmental groups and other residents of the Colorado Plateau. And over time, the projected cost kept ballooning upward, even as demand for electricity stopped growing so rapidly. In April 1976, the proponents cancelled the project, citing costs, lawsuits, bureaucracy, and environmental opposition.

The project’s demise, coming coincidentally at about the same time Congress passed the Federal Land Policy and Management Act and changed the government’s notion of public lands, added fuel to southern Utah’s budding Sagebrush Rebellion. Soon after the cancellation, hundreds of Kane County residents gathered in Kanab and burned an effigy of Robert Redford, who was probably the project’s most famous opponent.

Many years later, Andalex would lease land nearby and propose its own major coal mine, albeit without an accompanying power plant. When President Bill Clinton established Grand Staircase-Escalante in 1996, he included Andalex’s proposed project site in the national monument and the feds bought out the company’s leases, killing the already sketchy project for good. That land has now lost national monument status, meaning it could be leased out once again.

Gibson Dome Repository

In 1982, Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, requiring the Department of Energy to come up with a national repository for spent nuclear reactor fuel and other waste. This launched a search for a permanent, national repository. The long list of possible sites, included Yucca Mountain in Nevada, the Hanford Site in Washington, a couple of sites in Texas, and the Paradox Basin in southeastern Utah.

The Paradox possibilities included the uranium mining hub of Lisbon Valley, Elk Ridge—the home of the Bears Ears buttes, the Salt Valley north of Moab, and a place called Gibson Dome near the junction of Lavender and Davis Canyons and the Six-Shooter Peaks. Of these, only Gibson Dome made the short list, and an effort to establish America’s nuclear waste dump on Canyonlands’ doorstep commenced.

Many Utahns, having lived through decades of nuclear fallout from upwind weapons testing and suffering from illness due to the uranium mining and milling that had occurred in their backyards, were appalled. The commissioners of San Juan County, especially a former uranium miner named Cal Black—sometimes called the Original Sagebrush Rebel—were delighted.

The construction of the facility would employ over 1,000 people, and the operation nearly as many. Black believed that with a national waste dump in place for spent reactor fuel, the nuclear power industry—and therefore San Juan County’s uranium mining industry—would be revived. In an open letter published in the San Juan Record in March 1982, the San Juan County commissioners wrote: “We support such a facility and are opposed to Canyonlands National Park or archaeological sites in the area used to preclude the repository.”

Black then went on to tell a Salt Lake Tribune reporter that tourists would enjoy visiting a nuclear waste dump, just as they reveled in seeing the gargantuan Bingham Canyon open-pit copper mine and visiting the Mormon Temple in heavily polluted Salt Lake City: “If pollution hurt tourism, then Temple Square in the heart of the state’s worst pollution, and Kennecott, one of the worst blights on the environment, wouldn’t be the state’s number one and number two tourist attractions.”

Even with that kind of marketing, Black wasn’t able to enlist much support from outside the county. Former uranium boomtown Moab had by then grasped on to the tourism and recreation economy, motorized and unmotorized alike, and many of its citizens were not too psyched about having a nuke dump on their doorstep and waste-laden trucks or trains rolling through the center of town. It wasn’t just about the radioactivity, either: the facility likely would require its own coal-fired power plant and rail line from Moab, and would use as much as 1.5 million gallons of water per day.

The Sierra Club, Earth First!, no-nuke activists, and national park advocates launched a campaign, Don’t Waste Utah, to rally the public to oppose the plan. Utah governor Scott Matheson, a Democrat, went from being skeptical to outright opposed; his Republican successor ended up in opposition, as well.

Black and his colleagues were enraged, and the county staked 2,000 mining claims in the repository study area out of spite. It didn’t work. Opposition to the dump continued to grow, and in 1986 the final environmental assessment was released, relegating the Canyonlands site to near the bottom of the list (effectively killing it), with Yucca Mountain in Nevada rising to the top. The Chernobyl disaster and then the end of the Cold War further diminished Utah’s uranium mining industry. Cal Black, known for wearing a uranium-clasped bolo tie, died of lung cancer in 1990.

Congress designated Yucca Mountain as the nation’s nuclear waste repository in 1987 and the feds spent billions of dollars developing it. But in 2009, bowing to pressure from Sen. Harry Reid, the powerful Nevada Democrat, the Obama administration axed funding for the project, putting it into dormancy. Now the administration is reportedly planning to move away from a single repository like Yucca Mountain, and instead recruit willing states to store the nation’s nuclear waste. Utah’s current leadership, I’d guess, is willing to do whatever it can to boost nuclear power and kiss up to the Trump administration. And Trump just took away national monument protections from that old Gibson Dome site.

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🐓 Regulatory Capture Chronicles 🦊

REMINDER: You have until tomorrow (July 29) to comment on the Trump administration’s proposal to rescind ban on new oil and gas leases and mining claims within a 10-mile radius of Chaco Culture National Historical Park.

The area in question is often called a “buffer zone” for Chaco. I’m not a fan of the term, however, because I think it gives the wrong idea: A buffer zone merely would provide a buffer for the park, protecting its monumental structures from the noise, air, and light pollution emanating from a drill site. However, the more important intent is to protect the cultural sites within the zone itself, since they don’t have national park service status to shield them. Thus I like the term Chaco scholar Paul Reed of Archaeology Southwest uses: cultural protection zone.

There are thousands of cultural sites within this zone, many of which are part of and integral to the greater cultural landscape of the Chaco civilization. Without the cultural protection zone, the area just outside the park would be opened to oil and gas leasing and new mining claims and, potentially, hundreds of new oil and gas wells, each with new associated roads and other infrastructure. While there isn’t much oil in the zone, there is natural gas, and if prices were to increase it could spur more drilling.

The BLM is accepting public comment until July 29 on three alternatives: 1. keeping the ban in place; 2. shrinking the 10-mile buffer zone to just five miles (thereby leaving out significant sites such as Pierre’s Complex); 3. eliminating the ban altogether. To comment, click on this link and then click on the “Participate Now” button at the top of the page.

Last week, the Land Desk reported on the Trump administration’s plan to gut Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act, which serves to protect historic, cultural, and archaeological sites from development. A few days later, the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation voted to advance its plan to weaken the law, while taking input away from the public and other stakeholders, including tribal nations.

This does not mean the rule change is final: The law requires the ACHP to open the proposal to tribal consultation and public comment prior to a final vote. I’ll keep an eye on the situation and let readers know when the public comment period commences.

Meanwhile, a reminder of what the government is planning to do from the National Association of Tribal Historic Preservation Officers:

“NATHPO supports thoughtful efforts to improve the clarity, consistency, and effectiveness of the Section 106 process. The current proposal, however, would substantially restructure the regulations implementing the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA), diminish the role of Indian Tribes and Tribal Historic Preservation Officers, narrow the places and effects considered, and concentrate greater authority within the federal agency responsible for advancing an undertaking … Taken together, these provisions would move Section 106 away from an informed and collaborative planning process and toward an agency-directed review followed by notification to interested parties.”

In other words, if a petroleum company wanted to build a new road, scrape and level an acre of earth, and drill an oil and gas well in the Greater Chaco landscape of the San Juan Basin on Bureau of Management Land, the BLM’s Farmington Field Office could issue a “memorandum of decision” — without consulting tribal nations, the relevant state, or the public — effectively allowing the project to skirt a Section 106 review.

I use Chaco as an example because that’s where the Trump administration is looking to rescind the drilling and mining ban in the 10-mile cultural resource protection zone around Chaco Culture National Historical Park. As things stand, Section 106 would offer at least some protection to the cultural sites there in the event of drilling. Yet if the changes go through, then it will make those sites — many of which have yet to be surveyed — even more vulnerable to development. The same is true for the lands taken out of the boundaries of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments.

📸 Parting Shot 🎞️

Dog Days Quote

Priam saw him first, with his old man’s eyes,
A single point of light on Troy’s dusty plain.
Sirius rises late in the dark, liquid sky
On summer nights, star of stars,
Orion’s Dog they call it, brightest
Of all, but an evil portent, bringing heat
And fevers to suffering humanity.
Achilles’ bronze gleamed like this as he ran.

— Homer’s Iliad

First they came for your electricity, then they came for your water, then they came for your brains, and now the AI data centers are coming for your public lands.

Okay, that’s a bit dramatic, but it is true, at least in one case. This summer, the Bureau of Land Management quietly approved a Texas natural gas and power market-focused hedge fund’s proposal to build a large data center on public land outside Boulder City, Nevada. The agency did not seek public input on the decision, nor did it subject the project to an environmental review, drawing pushback and criticism from Boulder City residents and officials as well as state and federal lawmakers.

This is the only known incidence of the BLM approving a data center on public land. But it may not be for long. Cities, towns, and counties are growing increasingly wary of the facilities, imposing stricter regulations and even outright bans that could push developers to seek cheaper, friendlier places to build. Under the Trump administration, which is looking to win the AI “war,” federal lands may be the cheapest and most regulation-free place to put a server farm. Both the Biden and Trump administrations invited data center developers to look to Department of Energy lands, but there hasn’t been an open call to do the same with BLM lands.

The Boulder City saga started years ago, when Skylar Energy Resources, a subsidiary of Skylar Capital Management, proposed the 19-megawatt Townsite Solar 2 facility on 76 acres of BLM land four miles southwest of Boulder City, the town created in the 1920s to house Hoover Dam construction workers. The project would have been adjacent to the existing Townsite solar facility, which was developed by Skylar but is now owned by Arevon Energy. In 2023 the BLM approved the project, though construction has yet to begin.

Late last year, Skylar — operating as Townsite Solar 2 (TS2) — proposed a 170 MW, “high-density,” AI data center campus on 88.5 acres of land owned by Boulder City that is also near the existing solar facilities. TS2 had previously planned to build a solar-plus-battery-storage installation on this parcel. That proposal was met with strong opposition from Boulder City residents, who worried about the facility’s outsized energy use and its potential water consumption. Following the backlash, developers said they would use a hybrid closed-loop “ultra-low or zero liquid discharge” cooling system, which would use treated effluent rather than potable water (also increasing energy consumption). The lease would generate approximately $1.47 million annually for the city, plus property taxes and permit fees.

At the same time that it applied to the city, however, Skylar also went to the BLM, requesting an amendment to its solar facility right-of-way so that it could build a data center on the public land, instead. In June the BLM granted its approval, sans environmental review or public input, and withdrew its application for the city-owned property.

I’ve written here frequently about the Big Data Center Buildup, as tech firms build bigger and bigger — and more and more water- and energy-intensive — server farms in Phoenix, Tucson, southeastern New Mexico, on the shores of the Great Salt Lake, outside Cheyenne, and even in Page, Arizona, and Alaska. Perhaps inevitably, the Big Buildup is now confronting an even bigger backlash.

People from across the political and demographic spectrum are rising up and opposing these facilities for a variety of reasons. All data centers use a lot of energy, with the newer “hyperscale” facilities gobbling up even more power. Some are purchasing solar, wind, or geothermal energy to power the facilities, but even many of the greenest-leaning ones rely on dirty natural gas generators for backup. Meanwhile, the natural gas and coal industries are licking their chops at the prospect of rising demand for fossil fuel-generated power, since renewables alone can’t keep up with the skyrocketing rise in demand. Also, data centers can exacerbate urban heat islands, which sucks if you happen to live next door to one.

Data centers also use quite a bit of water, but the amount varies depending on what type of cooling system is used. Closed-loop systems need to be filled up only occasionally, and are less water-intensive, while evaporative systems use far more water. The catch is that using less water for cooling often means using more energy for the same; if the energy comes from a thermal plant fired by gas or coal, power-generation can also use a lot of water. Still, the volumes pale compared to some other uses, most notably agriculture.

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🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫

When a region suffers through a hot and dry winter a quarter century into the worst megadrought to hit the area in 1,200 years, many of us will intuitively link it to climate change and global warming. But intuition is not science, and there may be other plausible explanations.

But now the science has spoken — in the form of a peer-reviewed paper* out of the Colorado School of Mines — and it has determined that this year’s snow drought was almost certainly the result of human-caused climate change.

The authors used a probabilistic approach to assessing climate change’s role in the West’s 2026 snow drought. And they found that across the West as a whole, the 2026 snow drought was about four times more likely to occur in the current climate than during the 1850-1900 comparison period. In the Upper Colorado River Basin, where the drought was most severe, this year’s dire conditions were about 14 times more likely in our current climate than in pre-industrial times, “with the uncertainty range reaching into conditions so extreme that probabilities are difficult to estimate with confidence.”

This isn’t just confirmation of what may seem obvious to long-time observers. More critically, it indicates that this year’s lack of snow is no longer just a once in a century event, and that if the climate continues to heat up, these dry spells may become more common.

*A.M. Marshall,M. Cowherd,S. Rahimi, & Y. Ye, The 2026 western US snow drought was about four times more likely due to climate change, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 123 (30) e2612961123, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2612961123 (2026).

🛢️ Hydrocarbon Hoedown 📈

The Navajo Methane Coalition has released an animated video explaining how methane emissions from oil and gas facilities can harm Diné communities, and detailing ways to tackle the problem. It’s an especially important issue now, as the Trump administration rolls back methane waste prevention rules. Check it out:

⛈️ Wacky Weather Watch⚡️

The monsoon is here and it is causing some serious mayhem in some places, especially in western New Mexico and in Arizona.

The Gallup area received at least two inches of rain in one day, causing the Rio Puerco to go from dry to raging river in a matter of hours. And it wasn’t just the Puerco. Several Gallup streets, including Route 66, turned into virtual rivers that were more than tire-deep in some places, causing hazards for motorists. Zuni Pueblo was also was inundated with water.

The Rio Puerco does not seem to have a working streamflow gage, so I checked out the Little Colorado River near Winslow, downstream from its confluence with the Puerco, and it got really, really big.

📸 Parting Shots 🎞️

🐓 Regulatory Capture Chronicles 🦊

President Donald Trump’s proclamations virtually eliminating Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments this month listed several arguments purportedly justifying the shrinkage. One of those was that national monument protections aren’t necessary, because the land and antiquities in question are already protected by various federal laws. The same argument is used to justify revoking the mining-claim and mineral-leasing ban around Chaco Culture National Historical Park.

There is some truth in this: There is a suite of federal laws, from the Federal Land Policy and Management Act to the Endangered Species Act, that are intended to protect environmental and cultural resources on all federal land, whether it’s in a national monument or not. But those laws aren’t always adequate, and now the administration is actually working to weaken Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act, which would be key to protecting the cultural sites in the former national monuments and the Chaco “buffer zone.”

When a mining or drilling company proposes a project on a mining claim or mineral lease on public land, the National Historic Preservation Act requires the jurisdictional agency to determine whether the proposed development might affect historic properties. If so, it triggers Section 106 of the law, which requires the agency to consult with tribal nations or other potential stakeholders, to identify potentially affected properties, and to work to avoid, minimize, or mitigate adverse effects on those properties.

Section 106, commonly referred to as “identify and avoid,” requires oil companies or other developers to conduct a cultural inventory of all land in the path of development. If the surveyors happen upon a “significant” site, the well pad, road, or pipeline must be relocated. This can prevent direct impacts to larger sites; you’re not likely to see a Chacoan great house bulldozed for a well pad, for example. But archaeological surveys can miss more subtle cultural features such as stone shrines, Chacoan “road” segments, or ancient cornfields. And the agencies aren’t likely to let a cultural landscape get in the way of the drill rigs or their “multiple use” mandate. Section 106 has not prevented gasfield roads from cutting across Chaco’s Great North Road in several places, nor has it kept several oil and gas wells from being drilled within a half mile of Pierre’s Site, a Chaco outlier within the 10-mile buffer zone.

Ruth Van Dyke, a professor of anthropology at Binghamton University cataloged the impacts of oil and gas development on the sound- and view-scapes at Pierre’s. “I found that, despite the due diligence agencies have exercised to protect the ground footprint of Pierre’s, there have been significant impacts,” she wrote. Twelve pumpjacks are visible from the Acropolis, and it’s likely that . When I visited a few years back, the whir-pop-pop-whir of the machines was irritatingly audible, affirming Van Dyke’s observation: “Rather than a sacred landscape and part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Pierre’s community had the feeling of an industrial park.” (While many people have pointed out that there’s scant recoverable oil within the buffer zone, there is plenty of natural gas, which could be targeted if and when commodity prices increase).

Given the inadequacies of Section 106 now, it has stunned historic preservation advocates to learn that the Trump administration’s Advisory Council on Historic Preservation is proposing to weaken the law even further by giving the agencies more power, while taking input away from the public and other stakeholders, including tribal nations.

In a statment titled “The End of Section 106 as We Know It?”, the National Conference of State Historic Preservation Officers writes:

Positioned to fundamentally change how Section 106 operates, the proposed rule shifts authority away from the collaborative consultation framework Congress established, in favor of unilateral federal agency control over nearly every stage of the process. That includes determining whether Section 106 applies, identifying historic properties, evaluating effects, deciding whether mitigation is appropriate, and ultimately determining whether preservation concerns are outweighed by other considerations.

That last clause is especially important when it comes to the lands cut out of the two Utah national monuments and the Chaco “buffer zone,” if it were to be rescinded as the administration proposes. We have seen that this for this administration, the quixotic quest for “energy dominance” outweighs nearly every other consideration, at least when it comes to public lands. That means that if the changes to Section 106 go through, we can no longer rely on that law to even partially protect the vast, numerous, and cultural sites and landscapes within Bears Ears, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, and the Greater Chacoan Landscape. It makes the mineral withdrawals more important than ever.

Several years back, when writing about the Greater Chacoan Landscape, I spoke with Theresa Pasqual, former director of Acoma Pueblo’s Historic Preservation Office, about Chaco, the landscape, and how federal laws weren’t enough. I’ll leave you with a sagacious quote from her:

“Even though agencies try to mitigate the impact, it isn’t enough, because you’ve literally destroyed the context in which those things exist,” says Theresa Pasqual, former director of Acoma Pueblo’s Historic Preservation Office, and a descendant of the Pueblo people who occupied the Four Corners 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.”

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⛈️ Wacky Weather Watch⚡️

It’s feeling downright apocalyptic lately. We’ve had crippling drought, hellish temperatures, locust plagues, cataclysmic fires, pestilence, and all that was just prelude to an especially sporadic and violent monsoon, so far, which helped some firefighting efforts, but also unleashed flash flooding in Arizona, Utah, and Colorado.

The most severe flooding generally occurred on burn scars left by this season’s wildfires, but the intensity of the downpours also wreaked havoc in unburned areas, including Telluride and, most tragically, outside Bicknell, Utah, where a family of five was killed by a flash flood.

Here’s a rundown of some of the most notable flooding:

• In Telluride, a downpour kicked off flash floods and debris flows that shut down the Tomboy Road (it remained closed as of Monday morning), temporarily closed Hwy 145, and inundated the Telluride Middle/High School, where three to four feet of mud and water blasted and oozed into the Palm Theatre.

• The Cottonwood Fire burned through more than 97,000 acres in southwestern Utah before being mostly contained. Over the past several days, it has been the recipient of heavy rainfall, which have turned area streams, including the Beaver River, into raging, slate-gray-colored, debris-clogged torrents. The flooding closed down I-15 for a period of time, and forced the evacuation of parts of Beaver City. I should make some crack here about semiaquatic rodents that build dams, but I will refrain.

• A cloudburst let loose on a year-old burn scar near the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, spurring major debris flows that covered roads with rocky detritus and forced the evacuation of about 20 people from a campground.

• I-70 in western Colorado was shut down when water and mud washed onto the highway between New Castle and, appropriately, Silt, on Monday evening.

• Flash flooding in the Prescott Valley in central Arizona was big enough to turn at least one large shipping container into, well, a ship floating down the road. The Prescott area remained under a flood watch on Tuesday and Tuesday night, while the Phoenix area was facing an extreme heat watch later this week.

Any amount of moisture is welcome on the drought-desiccated earth, but if the videos of raging rivers in what usually are nearly dry arroyos give you the idea that the water woes are alleviated, think again. So far these cloudbursts are just that: Short, intense, and isolated bursts of precipitation that get arroyos and debris flows running, but only cause quick spikes in nearby river streamflows. Yes, that’s better than nothing, but no, it’s not going to halt Lake Powell’s precipitous decline.

All of those Telluride-area storms, for example, only pushed the San Miguel River near Placerville to about 160 cubic feet per second for a few hours. That’s about double what it had been running at, but just over half of the median flow for this time of year.

We’re also seeing a lot of precipitation inequality. While Telluride and the surrounding mountains were hammered, locales to the southwest of there remained relatively dry. The Dolores River gage at Slick Rock (downstream from the burn area) remained at a steady and unblinking zero cfs, although just a little ways downstream the gage at Bedrock registered 100 cfs, which is pretty good for the Lower Dolores in July.

Still, this does appear to be only the beginning of the monsoon. If the past is any indication, then the storms are likely to become more frequent and more widespread, and hopefully a little less intense, in the coming weeks.

Meanwhile, in the Northwest, lightning has sparked dozens of blazes that are growing together into massive complexes. The Hay Creek Complex in Gilliam, Wasco, and Sherman counties in Oregon is up to 92,000 acres and the Rowe Creek Complex to the south of there is at about 143,000 acres with 0% containment as of Monday night. Further east, the Powder River Fire in Baker County near the Idaho border was up to 20,500 acres.

🦫 Wildlife Watch 🦅

The Trump administration’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service last week quietly downgraded Environmental Species Protections for the razorback sucker, a fish native only to the Colorado River Basin, from endangered to threatened.

“This remarkable fish is very abundant in the river channels of the Colorado Basin,” wrote David Starr Jordan in his 1889 report on the fish of Colorado and Utah. “It reaches a weight of 8 to 10 pounds and is largely used for food.” The razorback sucker, or Xyrauchen cypho, once thrived in the mid- and lower-elevation portions of the Colorado River and its tributaries. But human activities such as dumping mine waste into streams, irrigation diversions, dams, and stocking of non-native fish that prey on the sucker’s eggs and young diminished the population of razorback sucker and other native fish.

So in 1991, the USFWS listed the fish as endangered under the ESA, bringing it extra protections and resources toward its recovery. A propagation and stocking effort helped bring the population back, and fish stocked in the Colorado and Green Rivers have been found to be reproducing, according to Colorado River Endangered Fish Recovery Program. As a result, the USFWS determined that the species is “not currently in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of its range,” and in 2021 proposed “downlisting” it to “threatened” status. That action was finalized last week.

Advocates understandably question the timing of the move. One of the main threats to the sucker is low streamflows, and we’re seeing some of the lowest streamflows on record throughout the Colorado River Basin right now, and climate change is likely to make them worse. The non-native fish that prey on the sucker tend to thrive in warmer water, also a result of climate change (Colorado wildlife officials have enacted voluntary fishing closures on several rivers in the state due to high water temperatures).

“The razorback sucker’s outlook is no better today than when the fish was originally protected under the Endangered Species Act in 1991, so this move makes no sense,” said Taylor McKinnon, Southwest director at the Center for Biological Diversity, in a written statement. “It’s still in danger of extinction throughout its range, which should preclude this downlisting.”

📖 Reading (and watching) Room 🧐

If you happen to be anywhere near Mancos, Colorado, from mid-August to the end of September, I urge you to visit the Sundog Gallery to see the “Portal” exhibit, featuring oil paintings by the late Stanton Englehart. I consider Englehart to be the painter of the Four Corners Country — no one captures the light, and darkness, of the Great Sage Plain, the mesas, the canyons, and even the waters of Lake Powell quite like Englehart did.

The show opens Aug. 14 with a reception from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. at the Sundog Gallery on Grand Avenue in downtown Mancos and runs until Sept. 30.

THE NEWS: The Trump administration is moving forward with its bid to revoke a 20-year moratorium on federal oil and gas leasing around Chaco Culture National Historical Park in northwestern New Mexico. The Bureau of Land Management is giving the public just two weeks to comment.

THE CONTEXT: The GOP’s assault on public lands, cultural resources, and tribal nations is reaching a fevered pitch this week. The latest attack is on the 10-mile “buffer zone” around the park, where the Biden administration banned new drilling in an effort to protect a small part of the greater Chacoan cultural landscape.

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, which may have been a political empire, a religious or cultural society, a school of architecture, or all of the above. 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 what would become one of the nation’s most heavily drilled oil and gas fields.

It was with this 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.

But Project 2025 called for these kinds of withdrawals to be rescinded, and the Trump administration has begun the process of complying. Keep in mind that this does not directly affect the park or the cultural resources therein. Chaco is a national park, and oil and gas leasing and drilling and other development is prohibited; only Congress can change that. Drilling rigs won’t be going up next to Pueblo Bonito, but drilling just outside the park could affect the park’s viewsheds and soundsheds.

The BLM is now inviting public input, for a very limited time, on three alternatives: 1. keeping the ban in place; 2. shrinking the 10-mile buffer zone to just five miles; 3. eliminating the ban altogether. To comment, click on this link and then click on the “Participate Now” button at the top of the page.

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The maps illustrate the carnage of the Trump administration’s evisceration of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments better than mere numbers, and show exactly from where the 2.93 million acres of protections were rescinded. They also lay bare just how much Trump removed from the shrunken national monuments that remained after Trump I’s 2017 reduction.

I’ve turned to the maps for another reason these past few days: To try to discern some sort of pattern or logic in where the lines were drawn this time, and why they are so radically different than in 2017. I’ve found that looking at the lines on the maps is more like taking a Rorschach inkblot test: You can come up with some decent sounding explanations, but there’s not much to back them up with.

When the Trump administration rolls back limits on smokestack pollution from coal plants, lowers royalty and reclamation bonding rates for oil and gas facilities, or lower water quality standards, it’s clearly doing so to help their corporate buddies rake in even more profits. When they slash millions of acres from two national monuments, the intent is more ambiguous, perhaps even for the ones making the decisions.

Certainly shrinkage generally is motivated by Trump’s spite towards his more popular predecessors, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, the ones who originally established Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments, respectively. But beyond that Trump himself is in the dark: He actually believes that people are unable to hike, hunt, camp, or fish in these national monuments, which simply is not true. Not only are all of those things allowed, but so are motorized travel on hundreds of miles of designated roads, vegetation management, livestock grazing, and commercial activities.

The main activities these national monuments restricted were new mining claims and new oil and gas, coal, and other energy-related leases (existing active valid leases and claims are not affected by the designation). So, clearly, at least part of the motivation here is to reopen certain lands to the extractive industries. Trump’s proclamations affirm this: They say the land needs to be opened up to miners and drillers to extract “several resources that are vital to energy and resource independence” such as “silver, copper, molybdenum, lead, uranium, vanadium, and zinc.” And, of course, we all know by now that Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda includes leasing out as much land as possible — whether it contains oil and gas or not — to the petroleum companies.

The administration is also hoping to trigger a lawsuit that could make its way to the Supreme Court, where it would become a test of the Antiquities Act, itself. Plus it’s looking to open the door to allowing Utah or county governments have more control over federal land. That might be a gift to Sen. Mike Lee to show appreciation for his groveling sycophancy towards Trump, which has become more valuable with the death of Sen. Lindsey Graham.

In other words, the motivations are pretty similar to when Trump shrunk the monuments in 2017. It was clearly done in part to open up known reserves of oil and gas, uranium, coal, and potash. This is made obvious not only by communications between industry and the administration prior to the shrinkage, but also by the fact that Trump I’s shrinkage lines followed known resource reserves, not the boundaries proposed by local and state officials.

For example, the 2017 redraw cut out the Circle Cliffs historic uranium and copper mining district on the far northeast side of GSENM, probably to allow access to those reserves. And while it left part of the vast Kaiparowits coal field in the national monument, it made cutouts for the former Smoky Hollow coal lease, where Andalex had planned on building a gargantuan mine prior to the 1996 designation. At Bears Ears, the 2017 shrinkage cut out the White Canyon uranium mining district, where there’s also tar sand development potential.

This brings up a lot of questions. First off, why did Trump II go to the trouble of redrawing completely new boundaries this time around rather than just re-upping the 2017 lines? After all, they achieved all of the same goals as the bigger, current shrinkage, while also keeping a few more valued landmarks under monument status. The Six Shooter peaks and Bridger Jack Mesa were kept in the Indian Creek Unit of Bears Ears under the 2017 shrinkage, for example, but left out this time. Why?

The most dramatic change, even from Trump’s 2017 boundaries, is to what is now known as the Kaiparowits Horizons Unit of GSENM, where the national monument was eliminated save for a seemingly arbitrarily placed square on Long Flat and a rectangular strip on the East Clark Bench. The latter strip was kept intact because it is where anthropologists found the bones of Sarabosaurus dahli, a new taxon of sea-going dinosaur Turonian mosasaurid. But removed from monument status were hundreds of significant landmarks, from the Cockscomb to Grosvenor Arch to the entire Kaiparowits Plateau.

The 2026 shrinkage does open up the entire Kaiparowits coal field. But it also nixed the whole Grand Staircase Unit, where there are no known mineral reserves.

Perhaps trying to find logic somewhere in the collective brains of the Trump administration is a fool’s errand. I’m certainly not seeing it in these maps. But maybe you can? Check them out and let me know! As is always the case with this sort of detailed image, the best experience is had on the Land Desk website. So if you’re reading this in your email browser, you’d be best off clicking on the headline above, and it will take you straight to the site, where clicking on the images will give you a larger view.

🏠 Random Real Estate Room 🤑

Well, here’s some relatively affordable housing. Or something like that. I could see turning this thing into a giant art studio, event-space, and housing. And it’s in a lovely part of the world, too! The ad gives a Dolores, Colorado, address. But it’s actually in Arriola, which is about halfway between Cortez and Lewis.

THE NEWS: On Monday, President Donald Trump pulled out his figurative Sharpie pen — i.e. he issued two presidential proclamations —- and dramatically reduced the size of Bears Ears National Monument and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, both in southern Utah, thereby removing national monument protections from more than 2.9 million acres of public lands and the antiquities therein. He also disbanded and terminated the Intertribal Bears Ears Commission, a direct attack on the tribal nations that first proposed a national monument for their homelands and that have been co-managing it until now.

The move reopens huge swaths of Utah’s canyon country to new mining claims and mineral leasing, reviving the potential for oil and gas drilling, uranium mining, and potash, lithium, and coal extraction in previously protected areas. It also scraps the existing resource management plans for both national monuments, throwing even the remaining shards of protected areas into regulatory uncertainty.

Additionally, the proclamations order the managing agencies, the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service, to ease restrictions on motorized travel, vegetation management, and livestock grazing within the remaining national monuments.

THE SORDID DETAILS: The administration has not yet released a map of the shrunken boundaries, but from the proclamation’s description it would appear that at Bears Ears they roughly follow the same lines as those created in 2017 when Trump downsized the national monument the first time. The difference is that he cut an additional 100,000 acres from the national monument. At GSENM, however, he appears to have eliminated the former Grand Staircase Unit on the southwest side of the national monument, and slashed the Kaiparowits Unit to a fraction of its previous size.

For Bears Ears:

• Yesterday’s proclamation removed 1.24 million acres from national monument status, reducing the 1.36 million-acre monument to just 121,096 acres (91% reduction). When Trump shrunk it in 2017, there was more than 200,000 acres remaining.

• The reduced national monument includes two main units:

  • The 106,816-acre Shash Jaa Unit that contains the Bears Ears Buttes, Arch Canyon, Mule Canyon, Comb Ridge, and portions of the Butler Wash Archaeological District.

  • And the 14,279-acre Indian Creek Unit, which includes Newspaper Rock.

• Also included are small non-contiguous parcels that lie outside the two main units, such as:

  • Doll House Ruin (157 acres);

  • Scorup Cabin, which was used by the “Mormon Cowboy” J.A. Scorup when he ran cattle in the Bears Ears region in the late 1800s and early 1900s. This likely burned in the Babylon Fire. (314 acres)

  • The Rig Canyon Mining Exploration Site, an oil well from 1926. Yes, these knuckleheads are preserving a drilling site from mining claims and oil and gas development, while opening up thousands of Ancestral Puebloan sites to “multiple use,” including oil and gas drilling. This may be in the Babylon Fire burn zone as well. (693 acres)

  • Moon House, an Ancestral Puebloan cliff dwelling on Cedar Mesa. (318 acres).

  • The Citadel, an Ancestral Puebloan dwelling on Cedar Mesa. (88 acres).

This removed national monument status from huge swaths of spectacular and significant natural and cultural landscapes, including nearly all of Cedar Mesa, White Canyon and its tributaries, Cottonwood Wash, most of Butler Wash, Valley of the Gods, and Dark Canyon.

For Grand Staircase-Escalante:

• Trump’s proclamation removed 1.69 million acres from national monument status, reducing the formerly 1.87 million-acre monument to just 181,541 acres (90% reduction). When Trump shrunk it in 2017, there was more than 1 million acres remaining under national monument status.

• The reduced monument will consist of two main units:

  • The 172,641-acre Canyons of the Escalante Unit, which includes the Escalante River, the Escalante Natural Bridge, Calf Creek Canyon, the Hundred Hands pictograph panel, and the Boulder Mail Trail.

  • 8,900-acre Kaiparowits Horizon Unit. Yes, you read that right: This unit has been reduced to less than 9,000 acres, which is a tiny fraction of what it was after Trump shrunk it the first time. It appears that the entire post-2017-shrinkage Grand Staircase Unit is just gone. This makes available at least 11 billion tons of coal, some 10.5 trillion cubic feet of coalbed methane, and 550 million barrels of oil from tar sands.

For both national monuments:

• The proclamation orders the managing agencies (USFS and BLM) to consider livestock grazing lands to constitute a “traditional cultural place” and to “consider how proposed activities will impact” those lands. They also order the agencies to re-allocate voluntarily relinquished grazing allotments. Under the Biden proclamation, voluntarily relinquished allotments were permanently retired.

• The proclamations order new transportation plans that endeavor “to maximize public access” by “designating roads and trails on which motorized and non-motorized vehicle use will be allowed.

• The proclamations call on agencies to “consider the full range of vegetation management tools, including mechanical mastication, and grazing” and to authorize the use of mechanical, natural, and chemical tools, along with livestock grazing, to mitigate noxious weeds and fuel management.

WHAT’S NEXT: The lawsuits filed by tribal nations and advocates after Trump’s previous national monument shrinkage will be revived, and new ones likely filed, challenging the legality of proclamations (see below). However, unless a judge orders an injunction on the proclamations, the shrinkages will likely stand as the cases wind their way through the courts.

That means huge amounts of land once again will be open to new mining claims and oil and gas and coal leasing.

Shortly after Trump shrunk the national monuments in 2017, companies owned by the Kimmerle family of Moab staked a number of mining claims in the newly opened parts of Bears Ears National Monument, specifically in the White Canyon drainage and upper Cottonwood Creek. Whether they were actually interested in mining, were speculating, or merely trying to gain standing for a lawsuit when Biden restored the boundaries isn’t clear. In any event, Kyle Kimmerle did join Utah’s lawsuit challenging the Biden restoration, saying it blocked his ability to mine those claims.

While I doubt that any large mining companies will stake a lot of claims in the newly reopened areas, given the legal and regulatory uncertainty, smaller interests might come in and stake claims for uranium mining in the hopes of selling them if the shrinkage sticks.

Neither Bears Ears nor GSENM are exactly oil and gas drilling hotspots, but that won’t stop Trump’s BLM from putting up huge swaths of land on the auction block, in hopes of enticing some speculator to pay $2/acre for drilling rights on some of the most spectacular pieces of Canyon Country. Same goes for coal: Big firms are highly unlikely to bite on the Kaiparowits reserves, given sluggish demand, its remoteness, lack of transportation routes, and regulatory uncertainty. But then, who knows, maybe someone will decide to build a coal mine, power plant, and giant data center on the plateau; I bet the Trump’s BLM would permit it.

THE CONTEXT: We knew this was coming. After all, Trump radically shrunk the national monuments — mostly out of spite — during his first term. This time he also had orders from Project 2025 not only to shrink or eliminate these protections, but to destroy the Antiquities Act itself, the bedrock law that allows presidents to establish national monuments.

Yesterday’s move appears to be aimed at achieving both of Project 2025’s objectives. The proclamations will draw advocates’ and tribal nations’ lawsuits, which will eventually reach the Supreme Court. The justices — many of whom have proven hostile toward environmental protections — then will decide the fate not only of these national monuments, but of the Antiquities Act as a whole, thereby imperiling the future of public land conservation.

Any judge with integrity would block Trump’s proclamations. The Antiquities Act of 1906 gives a president the power to establish national monuments on federal land to protect landmarks, structures, and “other objects of historic or scientific interest.” However, it does not overtly give a president the power to rescind or reduce a national monument. The one time a president — Franklin D. Roosevelt, in 1938 — set out to abolish a national monument, his attorney general opined that the Antiquities Act gave him no such power. A May 2017 legal analysis by Mark Squillace, a law professor at the University of Colorado, and three other scholars, argues that the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 “makes it clear that the President does not have any implied authority to (abolish or modify monuments), but rather that Congress reserved for itself the power to modify or revoke monument designations.”

Trump, however, has never been too keen on the rule of law, and the current Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts has invited folks to bring an Antiquities Act case to him so he could eviscerate one of the nation’s bedrock conservation laws.

Trump’s proclamations are based on the theory that the two national monuments are simply too big. The Antiquities Act says the president may, at their discretion, reserve parcels of federal land, “the limits of which in all cases shall be confined to the smallest area compatible with the proper care and management of the objects to be protected.” Last year, Trump’s Deputy Assistant Attorney General Lanora C. Pettit argued that if another president decides the monument violates the “smallest area compatible” requirement, they can shrink it accordingly.

Of course, that’s not what the Antiquities Act says, nor is it what Congress intended when it wrote the law in the first place. It is the very permanence or irreversibility that makes the Antiquities Act special and distinguishes it from other types of public land withdrawals and executive orders. It’s what sets, say, Bears Ears National Monument apart from the 20-year oil and gas leasing bans around Chaco Culture National Historical Park and on the Thompson Divide. The former can’t be reversed by an executive order because it was established under the Antiquities Act; the latter two can because they were implemented by executive orders.

If the courts — and ultimately the Supreme Court — were to fall for Pettit’s arguments, it would render impotent one of the nation’s foundational environmental and cultural protection laws. After all, the Grand Canyon, Zion, Chaco, Capitol Reef, Arches, and many more of America’s treasured national parks first were established as national monuments under the Antiquities Act. Imagine if a later president, out of spite for his predecessor, had decided to simply abolish with a stroke of a pen any of these designations and open these special places to drilling and mining before Congress gave them national park status.

In 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt used the Antiquities Act to establish the 800,000-acre Grand Canyon National Monument. If the Trump administration’s (and Utah’s and other national monument opponents’) logic were to be applied, the national monument would have been cut down to several thousand acres surrounding a handful of landmarks such as Havasu Falls, Mather Point, Vishnu Temple, and Bright Angel Point, and the rest of it would have been opened up to the extractive industries.

But what is Vishnu Temple without the rest of the Grand Canyon? What these folks are missing is that these discrete “objects” — whether they are landforms, dwellings, or other cultural sites — cannot be separated from the landscape itself, because to do so robs them of their meaning. So in order to protect them — as the Antiquities Act authorizes the President to do — one must protect the entire landscape. Therefore, the combined pre-shrinkage 3.2 million acres of both GSENM and Bears Ears National Monuments was, in fact, the “smallest area compatible with the proper care and management” of those landscapes. In fact, it may not be large enough.

I’ll leave you with what I find to be a powerful and succinct argument for landscape-scale preservation. It’s from a 1991 paper on Ancestral Puebloan culture in the Four Corners region co-written by the late Rina Swentzell, a scholar from Santa Clara Pueblo:

“Here, the human landscape is meaningless outside the natural context — human constructions are not considered out of their relationship to the hills, valleys and mountains. The material village is one of the concentric rings about the symbolic center of the world. It is not given more weight or focus than the area of the fields, hills, or mountains. It constitutes one place within the whole. The web of human existence is interlaced with what happens in the larger natural context and therefore flows into the adjacent spaces, hills, and mountains.”

Amen to that.

***

I’ve written about Bears Ears, Grand Staircase-Escalante, and the Antiquities Act many times in the past and won’t repeat it all here. Instead, I’ve removed the paywall from some of the most popular, notable dispatches from the archives, so anyone can read them for a limited time. If you like them, consider becoming a paid subscriber!

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The Colorado River watershed’s spring runoff — if you can call the measly increase in streamflows “runoff” — peaked in mid-May and was pretty much over by mid-June.

The variations in streamflow showed up as a little bump in Lake Powell’s total inflows, which were augmented by extra releases from Flaming Gorge reservoir on the Wyoming-Utah border, many miles upstream. That buoyed Lake Powell’s surface level to a high point of 3,528 feet in early June, before it began its long decline that’s likely to continue until next year’s runoff.

The reservoir’s surface level is currently at about 3,525 feet, the lowest it has been since 2023 and the lowest it has been on this date since it was filled. It’s also the level that would trigger a reduction in releases from Glen Canyon Dam to 7.48 million acre-feet per year. This year that’s not going to happen, because releases are already on track to be closer to 6 MAF.

The data show why, even with reduced releases, the surface level is falling at about two inches per day as of the beginning of July.

• 3,527.97; 3,524.99 feet above sea level: Surface elevation of Lake Powell on June 1 and July 6, respectively.

• 2.1 million acre-feet: Median total inflows into Lake Powell (1991-2020).

• 399,304 acre-feet: Total inflows into Lake Powell during the month of June 2026, or about 19% of “normal.” The “unregulated inflow,” which is what the inflow would be without augmentation from upstream reservoirs, was just 305,000 af.

• 507,747 acre-feet: Total releases from Glen Canyon Dam in June 2026. At this level, all releases go through the hydroelectric turbines and generate power.

• 20,475 acre-feet: Estimated amount of water lost to evaporation from Lake Powell in June 2026.

• 8,951 acre-feet: Inflow into Lake Powell on July 7, 2026.

• 15,546 acre-feet: Release from Glen Canyon Dam on July 7, 2026.

• 788 acre-feet: Estimated evaporation from Lake Powell on July 7, 2026.

• (7,383 acre-feet): Lake Powell’s daily water deficit on July 7, 2026.

In other words, as of early July the reservoir was losing nearly 7,400 acre-feet of water each day, or about 220,000 acre-feet per month. If this rate of decline continues or speeds up, then we can expect the reservoir to reach de facto deadpool — or 3,500 feet — before the end of the year.

If the level drops below 3,500 feet, dam operators will no longer be able to release water through the penstocks and hydroelectric turbines, meaning they must rely entirely on the river outlets lower on the dam for all releases. This would not only zero out the dam’s hydropower output, but could also damage the outlet tubes, since they aren’t engineered for long-term, sustained use.

One possible scenario: Dam operators switch to the river outlets for releases, the reservoir’s surface level is drawn down to, say, 3,475 feet, then the river outlet tubes begin deteriorating due to cavitation, forcing them to be shut down. This would then make it impossible to release any water from the dam until the outlets were repaired or the lake level rose back up to 3,500 feet, meaning the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon would effectively dry up completely.

That’s why the Bureau of Rec is so intent on “defending” that 3,500-foot level, presumably even if it means going to a run-of-the-river operation, in which water is released from the dam at the approximate rate that it is flowing into the reservoir, minus evaporation. On July 7, this would have amounted to about 2,800 cubic feet per second, or about one-third of current releases, diminishing hydropower output, and affecting downstream recreation and aquatic life.

If — or more likely, when — this occurs, it will render Lake Powell useless as a water savings account, and reduce it to a marginal power generator, silt collector, and evaporation pool. Boating will still be possible, but most existing boat ramps will no longer be usable. This will lend strength to calls to drain the reservoir, either by decommissioning the dam altogether, or by building bypass tunnels that can be shut down if climatic conditions change and aridification is reversed.

⛏️ Mining Monitor ⛏️

The U.S. Forest Service granted final approval to South32’s proposal to re-open and expand the Hermosa Mine in southern Arizona to extract battery materials such as manganese and zinc, along with silver and lead.

The mine is on patented claims (private land), but would be expanded onto unpatented claims in the Coronado National Forest in southern Arizona’s Patagonia Mountains, an area long inhabited by the Sobaipuri O’odham and Hohokam people. The mountains occupy the nexus of several different biological provinces and are home to hundreds of species of birds, bees, bats, and butterflies, as well as the unique Madrean Pine-Oak Woodlands.

The approved plan of operations includes:

• Disturbance of about 400 acres of Forest Service land, including 225 acres for tailings and waste storage.

• Mining will be done by the long-hole open stope method at a projected rate of about 4.7 million tons of ore per year.

• The Australian company has approval to discharge up to 4,500 gallons per minute of treated water into Harshaw Creek, Mowry Wash South, and Goldbaum Canyon.

• During operations the plan anticipates 169 heavy truck round trips per day and 76 light vehicle or bus round trips per day on the main access road, which will be constructed for the project.

The Biden administration expedited the environmental review for the proposed plan back in 2023 because the materials extracted are considered “critical.” Manganese is used in large capacity batteries; zinc is used to galvanize steel.

Area residents and advocates worry this sort of industrialization will harm the delicate and unique ecosystem and the diverse array of wildlife that depends on it. As is often the case with underground hardrock mining, a primary concern is for its effects on water quality and quantity. Groundwater pumping is expected to deplete area aquifers, which could affect springs and wells. Acid mine drainage is expected to occur in the sulfide ore body, which, if not treated properly, could contaminate groundwater or streams in the arid region.

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The West these days is teeming with so many fly-by-night mining companies and speculators staking claims on public lands and launching exploratory drilling projects that it’s hard to tell which ones to take seriously. Most of these bids will likely fizzle out as soon as commodity prices fall.

Faraday Copper’s Copper Creek Project, however, seems to be worth paying attention to, if only because they have some serious financial backing.

The Canada company just finalized its agreement to acquire the shuttered San Manuel copper mine in southern Arizona from BHP Group Limited. BHP, a global corporation and a co-proponent of the proposed Resolute copper mine at Oak Flat, will take a 30% equity interest in Faraday when the deal is completed later this year.

The San Manuel mine, just outside Mammoth, Arizona, was once the nation’s largest underground copper mine and a significant producer up to its closure in 1999. “The definitive agreement provides a pathway for the development by Faraday of a new copper hub in Arizona,” said a BHP press release, “combining existing infrastructure and mineral inventory at San Manuel with Faraday’s adjacent Copper Creek project.”

The proposed Copper Creek mine covers about 78 square kilometers in the Galiuro Mountains about nine miles east of Mammoth. Its open pit would likely be in the middle of Copper Creek, a tributary to the Lower San Pedro River. Last June, the Bureau of Land Management approved Faraday’s plan to construct 67 drill pads, along with associated roads and infrastructure, and the company recently completed the first round of water-intensive drilling. The firm reports that the drilling identified oxide mineralization that “supports potential open-pit resource expansion.”

For now, at least, Faraday is not really a mining company. It holds mining claims at the Copper Creek project in Arizona and another “pre-feasibility” project in Nevada, but it has yet to do any actual mining. It’s an exploratory company that last year posted a net loss of nearly $28 million.

Still, it’s getting some help from some very deep-pocketed interests. First off there’s BHP, assuming the San Manuel deal goes through. And then there’s the backing of the Lundin Group, which owns metal and diamond mining, petroleum, and renewable energy companies around the world. Lundin, which was founded in Sweden, is also known for human rights violations. Two executives of Lundin Oil (now Orrön Energy and owned by another company) allegedly aided and abetted war crimes in what is now South Sudan in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Their trial in Stockholm ended in late May and a verdict is expected later this year.

The development has sparked pushback from residents, advocates, and tribal nations, who worry about the drilling’s potential impacts to water quantity and quality in the Lower San Pedro River, which flows nearby, not to mention the prospect of a giant open pit mine in the biodiverse mountain range. The proposed mine site is also near the Aravaipa Wilderness Area, a stunning canyon and desert riparian zone.

There’s also an ironic twist to this situation. In order for Resolution Copper — a BHP/Rio Tinto partnership — to move forward on its Oak Flat mine near Superior, Arizona, about 40 miles northwest of the Copper Creek project, the company had to do a land exchange. It would take ownership of Oak Flat — USFS land that had been withdrawn from mineral entry in 1955 — in exchange for various private parcels in the region with environmental or recreational significance. One of those gained by the federal government is a 3,050-acre parcel along the Lower San Pedro just east of Mammoth; putting it in federal hands should have protected the stretch from development. But it also covers the Copper Creek-Lower San Pedro confluence, and lies between Faraday’s Copper Creek Project and BHP’s San Manuel Mine. In other words, it would potentially be affected, directly or indirectly, by Faraday’s project.

Actual mining isn’t going to happen anytime soon; Faraday has paused its drilling program for the summer and doesn’t plan to resume until the fall. But the deal with BHP and the funding from Lundin are reason enough to keep an eye on this one.

🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫

Speaking of the San Pedro River, one of southern Arizona’s iconic streams and biodiversity zones, it reportedly has gone dry for only the second time in the last century at its Charleston gage. To be clear, the San Pedro is not a huge river, and it has been reduced to a mere trickle at times. But for it to completely vanish at this particular gage — the last time it happened was in 2005 — is a sign that aridification and groundwater overpumping are coming together to destroy one of the last un-dammed desert rivers in the Southwest.

Of course, the San Pedro is not alone. Nearly every stream in the Interior West is running at below normal flows currently. The Dolores River below McPhee Dam is so depleted that a helicopter searching the stream for water to dump on the Ferris Fire came up empty. The San Miguel River at Uravan, Colorado, is flowing at just 6 cubic feet per second, which is about 2% of the median flow for this date. And the Animas River below Aztec, New Mexico, is running at a measly 16 cfs, which is far too low for Farmington’s surf wave.

And of course, we can’t forget about the beleaguered Rio Grande. Laura Paskus reports that 87 miles of the Middle Rio Grande have gone dry. She has a heartbreaking account of walking a stretch of the dry zone near Albuquerque at her Substack newsletter.

Unfortunately, conditions are likely only to get worse this weekend, as a heat wave moves in and scorches the West, especially parts of the central and northern Rocky Mountains. Temperatures are forecasted to reach the triple digits in places like Hotchkiss and Grand Junction, Colorado. And check out this weekend forecast (7/11-7/14) for Thermopolis, Wyoming.

🤯 Oh, the Humans! 😱

The San Miguel County Sheriff’s Office is a bit irritated, if their social media posts are any indication. This week they received a Garmin SOS signal from someone who had apparently fallen 150 to 200 feet in the Columbine Basin above Telluride, broken his leg, and needed search and rescue’s help.

Following an extensive rescue team deployment, which included a CARE Flight helicopter flying into the scene at 13,000 feet in elevation, the SAR team found the victim walking around. He told them he was BASE jumping on his own, his chute didn’t open, and he was injured in the fall. But the broken leg thing? Nope: He not only refused a helicopter flight, but any assistance at all. Adding to the annoyance: The purported victim had previously triggered a massive SAR operation while BASE jumping in the Swiss Alps that included a $175,000 air evacuation.

“Our SAR team consists of skilled professionals who risk their own lives to help others in need,” said Sheriff Dan Covault in a statement. “This individual chose to participate in an extremely dangerous activity alone, and particularly given his prior rescue history, his actions demonstrated a disregard for the risks involved and the resources required to rescue him. His decisions unnecessarily diverted emergency resources, including a Care Flight helicopter, that may have been needed for other emergencies. The fact that he was able to hike back down shows a profound lack of respect for the tremendous effort and resources devoted to this rescue.”

📸 Parting Shot 🎞️

Images from badlands in northwestern New Mexico that Georgia O’Keefe painted and called the “Black Place.”

The fire situation in the Four Corners area is not improving. The weather remains hot, dry, and windy, and this week’s forecast calls for more of the same. Next week may even be hotter, if longer-range models hold. Meanwhile, air quality has deteriorated in some places that previously seemed to avoid the worst of the smoke. The good news is that the Fourth of July weekend came and went without any new major fire starts in the region.

So far this year some 37,209 fires have burned through about 3.3 million acres, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. That’s the second highest acreage for the first half of the year in the last decade.

Here’s a rundown of some of the Four Corners area fires. By no means is this a complete list.

• The Babylon Fire, burning in the higher elevation parts of Bears Ears National Monument in southeastern Utah, had grown to over 96,000 acres by Monday night, making it the nation’s largest active blaze (the Cottonwood Fire in the western part of the state has gone through about the same amount of acreage, according to Watch Duty). The two are also tied for the fourth largest fires in the state’s recorded history. The Babylon Fire is at 0% containment, with the most active area moving up the west slope of the Abajo Mountains, between Shay Mountain and Mount Linnaeus. Air tankers are pulling water from Lake Powell, and officials are asking boaters to avoid the area between Dangling Rope and Rainbow Bridge.
  
  Closed public lands include: The Needles District of Canyonlands National Park, Manti-La Sal National Forest lands within the Monticello Ranger District, and BLM lands in the Indian Creek Corridor, Beef Basin, Dark Canyon, and the Sweet Alice Wilderness Study Area. Still Open: Natural Bridges National Monument, Cedar Mesa, Grand Gulch, and other lower elevation areas in the southern reaches of Bears Ears National Monument.

• The Ferris Fire along the Dolores-Montezuma County line in southwestern Colorado initially burned in a northeasterly direction toward the Disappointment Valley. Then the winds shifted and the most active front of the fire curved back to the northwest, crossing the Ponderosa Gorge of the Dolores River, and is within about 12 miles of the town of Dove Creek. As of Monday night the fire was at 51,622 acres and 22% containment.

• The Gold Mountain Fire north of Ouray, Colorado, has burned across almost 29,300 acres of San Juan Mountain high country and was 2% contained as of Monday night. Firefighters on Monday conducted strategic backfiring operations east of Ridgway to provide more protection for structures in that area. There is a chance of thunderstorms this afternoon and evening, which could bring dry lightning along with gusty and erratic winds, with high temperatures reaching the high 80s and low 90s.

• The Pocket Fire north of Sedona, Arizona, has reached 26,442 acres and was at 48% containment as of Monday night. Forecasters are predicting more hot and dry weather today, with the mercury topping out around 100° F and sub-20% relative humidity.

⛏️ Mining Monitor ⛏️

On July 6, the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality approved Energy Fuels’ request to amend its aquifer quality permit for a groundwater monitoring well at its Pinyon Plain Mine near the Grand Canyon. The change raises the allowable concentration of arsenic from .050 milligrams per liter to .055 milligrams per liter and the associated alert level from .040 to .050 mg/l.

The Havasupai Tribe strongly condemned the change in a written statement, calling the approval a “profound attack on the Tribe’s inherent responsibility to guard and protect the waters of the Grand Canyon.”

Energy Fuels asked for the revision — and ADEQ granted it — after finding that construction of the mine’s shaft had created a hydraulic sink that allowed naturally occurring arsenic — a known toxic substance — to move toward the facility’s perimeter wells, putting them in violation of their permit.

So, regulators simply altered the permit’s limits and, according to the tribal nation’s statement, “chosen to weaken environmental protections instead of strengthening them.”

Dr. Bradley K. Esser, a retired Lawrence Livermore Laboratory scientist, submitted technical comments on the proposed revision last year. He cast doubt on Energy Fuels’ hydraulic sink explanation, and demonstrated that the arsenic concentrations detected in the monitoring wells are far higher than regional natural background levels. He posited that it was far more likely the elevated arsenic concentrations came from sump water from the mine’s workings contaminating the groundwater.

Esser also writes:

The proposed AQL revision would set a regulatory precedent in which a facility can revise upward the compliance threshold based on a statistical representation of its own rising contamination data, effectively allowing the threshold to chase concentrations. The correct regulatory response to a documented increasing trend is intensified investigation, not threshold normalization.

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🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫

Monsoon season officially kicked off in the Southwest in the middle of last month, but it has yet to bring significant amounts of moisture. Earlier forecasts predicting higher than average precipitation beginning later this month are still in place for some parts of the West, but they likely will be accompanied by above-normal temperatures just about everywhere.

'As you might expect, the hot, dry weather is taking a toll on streams around the region. The Animas River through Durango is running at 190 cubic feet per-second; the median flow for this date is over 1,000 cfs.

📸 Parting Shot 🎞️

Last month, U.S. Agriculture Department Undersecretary Michael Boren issued a memo, with a preamble by Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, to Forest Service employees directing them on “advancing grazing on Forest Service” lands. It’s a curious, sometimes alarming memo. And, as is customary for the Trump administration, its authors are a bit confused about history.

While most public lands grazing occurs on Bureau of Land Management land, the memo reminds us that national forests also host more than 2 million cattle, sheep, and horses and burros. The current administration desperately wants more livestock on America’s forests, although it’s not clear why.

The memo directs the agency’s staff to streamline the permitting process, to treat public lands1 ranchers with deference and respect, and to bring more “flexibility” to prairie dog “management,” which I assume means they want more efficient ways to kill the animals. It also guides line officers to offer up unallocated forage “to the maximum extent possible” and work to “solicit interest/applications from the eligible ranching community” to occupy vacant and closed grazing allotments. The goal? To add 500,000 head months2 of cattle and other livestock to national forest lands over the next two years, purportedly in part to “maintain the fabric of rural America.”

The fabric of rural America very well may be frayed, but throwing a bunch of half-ton methane dispensers onto drought-addled national forests to gobble up what grass and wildflowers remain in high-country meadows, trample stream banks, sully trout habitat, and make a mess out of trails, isn’t going to repair it.

Boren acknowledges that grazing on national forests has declined over the last 60 years in part due to “changing rangeland conditions” and “catastrophic wildfire and variable moisture levels.” But he seems oblivious to the fact that in most of the West, moisture levels remain at an all time low, and putting livestock on that land would not only lead to some pretty skinny cows, but also would further decimate the drought-stressed soils and vegetation.

Ranchers nationwide are actually thinning their herds due to drought and rising overhead costs, and cattle numbers are at record lows this year despite high beef prices. That reduces the chances that Boren will actually have many takers for the vacant allotments.

Still, it’s concerning. With the top brass pressuring the entire agency to pull out all of the stops to get more livestock on the forests, it’s not hard to imagine a district ranger succumbing and permitting a vacant allotment — even one that a conservation organization bought out from a willing rancher to help wildlife or reduce conflicts.

Rollins, meanwhile, seems confused about the origins of the agency she oversees. She writes:

“Unlike the national parks, which were created primarily to preserve natural beauty and unique outdoor recreation opportunities, the founders of early national forests envisioned them as working with multiple objectives. The Organic Administration Act of 1897, under which most national forests were established, states: ‘No national forest shall be established, except to improve and protect the forest within the boundaries, and for the purpose of securing favorable conditions of water flows, and to furnish a continuous supply of timber for the use and necessities of citizens of the United States.’”

But she doesn’t seem to consider what Congress was trying to “protect” the forests from, because in the next paragraph she writes: “From those early beginnings, grazing has been an integral part of our nation’s national forests …” Yeah, not quite. Let’s step back a bit, shall we?

During the early and mid-1800s, the United States stole, conquered, purchased, or acquired by treaty hundreds of millions of acres of land in the West and declared it the “public domain.” The government then went about “disposing” of the land, giving it away or selling it for virtually nothing via the Homestead Act, the General Mining Act, the Pacific Railway Act, the Desert Land Act, and so forth. By the end of the 1880s, huge tracts of public land had been handed over to the railroads, to mining interests, to states, and to homesteaders, yet across the West hundreds of millions of acres still remained in the public domain, and nearly all of those lands were open to unrestricted grazing, timber-cutting, and the devastation that came with them.

Gifford Pinchot would later describe the period like this:

“Enormous areas of the Public Domain … were given ‘in aid’ to railroad and wagon road companies. … Thus natural resources were being developed and destroyed with the only objective being personal profit. For all intents and purposes, the Federal Government did nothing about it. At a time when, in the West, the penalty for stealing a horse was death … stealing the public land in open defiance of the law was generally regarded with tolerance or even approval.”

Albert Potter, the USFS’s first chief of grazing, called the 1880s the era of “spoilation,” writing:

“The pioneer stock grower, eager to reap the fruits of his early efforts, increased his herds to the full limit of his ranges. Quick profits and swollen fortunes naturally led to speculation and companies were organized to place incredible numbers of stock upon the range. Multiple settlers appropriated the choicest lands and competed with prior occupants in the use of the unappropriated lands. The permanent good was sacrificed to individual greed. The grazing lands were stocked far beyond their capacity; vegetation was cropped by hungry animals before it had opportunity to reproduce; valuable forage plants gave way to worthless weeds and the productive capacity of the lands rapidly diminished.”

Unfettered livestock grazing wasn’t just diminishing the forage, but also wrecking watersheds. In southeastern Utah, the big livestock companies, notably the New Mexico and Kansas Land and Cattle Company, ran thousands of cattle and sheep across the once abundant grasslands on the slopes of the Abajo and La Sal Mountains, reducing them to denuded, dusty, gullied, flash-flood-prone wastelands. At one point, allegedly out of spite, the Carlisle livestock concern turned out thousands of sheep on the upper branches of Montezuma Creek, Monticello’s source for drinking water. Bacteria from the sheep feces contaminated the water, leading to a typhoid outbreak in Monticello that killed eleven people.

In hopes of mitigating the wreckage, in 1891 Congress passed the Forest Reserve Act, giving the president the authority to withdraw areas from the public domain3 as forest reserves, to be overseen by the Interior Department. Six years later Congress passed the Forest Management or Organic Administrative Act, which gave the previous law some teeth by providing a framework for managing the reserves. In 1905 President Theodore Roosevelt transferred management of the reserves to the Department of Agriculture and named the agency the Forest Service, appointing Gifford Pinchot as his chief forester.

Together, Pinchot and Roosevelt represented a major shift in the way the government managed and society perceived and treated the public lands. Roosevelt set aside some of the nation’s most cherished landmarks as national monuments. Pinchot believed that humans should utilize the forests and grasslands but that they should do so in a more sustainable manner so as to save some of the timber and forage for future generations. This conservationist ethos came to be known as Pinchotism, a term spit derogatorily by western politicians who were beholden to the extractive industries, such as Republican senator Weldon Heyburn from Idaho. Employing the same rhetoric that would later be used by the Sagebrush Rebels, Heyburn derided the forest reserve laws, suggesting that they amounted to theft of the “people’s forests.”

The question of livestock grazing on the forest lands was a contentious one for years. Under the Forest Reserve Act, grazing was effectively banned on the new reserves. After the Organic Act passed, the General Land Office began permitting grazing by cattle and horses, but not sheep — which were generally seen as far more destructive4 — on the condition that it didn’t harm the forests. Eventually, Pinchot succumbed to the sheep industry lobby and grudgingly allowed grazing on some forests, causing a schism between him and John Muir, who was strongly opposed to sheep in forests.

Over the ensuing years, the Forest Service developed a grazing policy, permitting system, and set fees — very low ones — based on the number of animals, much to livestock operators’ dismay. This was in stark contrast to the lands in the public domain, where grazing remained a free-for-all until Congress passed the Taylor Grazing Act in 1934.

These minimal restraints, however, were not enough to stop the destruction. In the years following World War I, Forest Service officials found that grazing was still wreaking havoc on vegetation and spawning more erosion. Yet every time they tried to reduce the number of livestock on the land, they were hit with legal challenges, lobbying campaigns, and political pressure.

Ultimately the backlash to Pinchotism elevated Warren G. Harding, a friend to the industries that wanted free rein over the public lands, to the presidency. Harding chose Albert Bacon Fall to be his interior secretary, who immediately went about rolling back regulations and doing his best to erase the legacy left by Pinchot and Roosevelt, including opening up the public domain and Indian land to coal mining and oil and gas drilling. While Trump and his minions like to compare themselves to Teddy Roosevelt, in reality they much more closely resemble Harding and Fall.

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🔥 Wildfire Lookout 🔥

A number of ferocious wildfires continue to rage across the Interior West. One of the largest is the Babylon Fire in Bears Ears National Monument, which had grown to over 81,000 acres as of Thursday night. It’s also on Forest Service land and is burning through some large, active grazing allotments, including the Babylon, Gooseberry, Twin Springs, and Cottonwood, and looks like it’s making its way onto some BLM allotments as well.

The Gold Mountain Fire near Ouray, Colorado, had grown to about 21,000 acres, with the Ferris Fire near Dove Creek reaching nearly 29,000 acres. Fire weather is expected to continue through the weekend.

🗺️ Messing with Maps 🧭

Note: On the occasion of America’s 250th birthday, I’m rerunning this piece from a couple of years ago on the July 1776 Escalante-Dominguez expedition that occurred even as the American Revolution was unfolding far to the east.

I’ve been fascinated by maps of all sorts for as long as I remember. Don Bernardo Miera y Pacheco’s map, drawn following the 1776 Escalante-Dominguez expedition, has intrigued me for nearly as long. And the more I look at old maps of the region, the more interesting this one becomes, in part because it’s far more accurate, especially in its depictions of the Four Corners Country, than maps made a century later by U.S. surveyors.

In July of 1776, Atanasio Dominguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante, a couple of Franciscan priests, headed out with a motley crew from Santa Fe in search of a route to California. Instead, they ended up going up what is now Colorado’s Western Slope and through the heart of Ute territory, across to the Great Salt Lake, dropping down through western Utah, and finally looping — somewhat erratically — back to Santa Fe. But if they didn’t find California, they did leave behind relatively detailed journals and maps that give us insight into what the region looked like prior to the Euro-American invasion, and into early European colonists’ perception of the region.

The party set out from the Pueblo of Santa Rosa de Abiquiu, on the first day of August, effectively leaving the Spanish Empire. The country beyond was the domain of the Weenuchiu, Tabeguache, Caputa, and Mouache bands of Ute. Not wanting to provoke the Ute people any more than necessary — they had made that mistake before — the Spanish Crown forbade settlers from wandering into the territory of or trading with the Utes.

Still, the path they followed was well-established. Juan Rivera had travelled it a decade earlier, and he had followed well-established routes through a land that had been inhabited for millennia, and that had been intimately mapped in the collective consciousness of oral histories. Rivera probably wasn’t even the first Spaniard to tread these paths; mavericks defied the travel and trade ban to acquire deerskins or to try their luck in the mineralized slopes of the high San Juan Mountains. The Spanish mavericks, in turn, were merely following paths already well trodden by Ute, Diné, Paiute, and Pueblo travelers long before.

So it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that current day routes more or less follow Escalante’s and Dominguez’s path. From Abiquiu the party traveled northwest, roughly following Hwy. 84 about to Los Ojos/Tierra Amarilla, which they described as:

“The river’s meadow is about a league (2.63 miles) long from north to south, good land for farming with the help of irrigation; it produces a great deal of good flax and abundant pasturage. There are also the other prospects which a settlement requires for its founding and maintenance. Here it has a good grove of white poplar.”

This sort of assessment of a site’s suitability for a settlement is common in Escalante’s journals. Most places he deemed good for a village now have a village on them, from Arboles to Ignacio to Dolores to Hotchkiss, though none would be established for another century or more after Escalante’s journey.

They then cut westward, meeting up with the Navajo River near Dulce, which originates in what they called the Sierra de la Grulla, or the Mountains of the Cranes — now known as the South San Juans. Later they note that the headwaters of the Rio de Los Pinos are in the Sierra de la Plata, indicating that the entirety of what we now think of as the Western San Juans were then called the La Plata Mountains. When they reach the confluence with the San Juan River near Carracas, they write:

“El Río de San Juan carries more water than the Navajo, and they say that farther north it has good and large meadows because it flows over more open country. Together they now form a river as plenteous as El Norte in the month of July, and it is called Río Grande de Navajo for separating the province of this name from the Yuta nation.”

They called their camp “Nuestra Señora de las Nieves,” or Our Lady of the Snows, because they could see snow-capped peaks from there. This seems odd given that it was early August and they would have been looking at the south faces of the San Juans, where the snow should have melted months earlier. Maybe 1776 was a cold year, because later, they describe the passage between Durango and Hesperus like this: “the terrain is very moist, since it rains very frequently because of its proximity to the Sierra; as a result, both in the mountain forest — which consist of very tall and straight pines, scrub oak, and several kinds of wild fruits — and in its narrow valleys there are the prettiest of pastures. The climate here is excessively cold even in the months of July and August.”

They make it to the Big Bend of the Dolores River and then do some bending of their own, deviating from their westward course by 90 degrees for reasons I can’t figure out. Were their guides trying to avoid the rugged Canyon Country of southern Utah? Were they blindly following the path of their predecessor, Rivera? For whatever reason, they ended up heading north, encountering the Dolores River a second time near Cahone and a third time near Slick Rock.

The party tried to follow the Dolores River downstream (north), but was stymied by the narrow, twisty gorge, writing: “The canyon we named El Laberinto de Miera because of the varied and pleasing scenery of rock cliffs which it has on either side and which, for being so lofty and craggy at the turns, makes the exit seem all the more difficult the farther one advances.” They turned eastward into the Big Gypsum valley, then toward Naturita and Nucla, before crossing the Uncompahgre Plateau where they found “deer and roe and other animals breed, and certain chicken fowl the size and shape of the common domestic ones, from which they differ in not having combs. Their flesh is very tasty.”

They dropped down to what they call the El Rio de San Francisco north of Montrose and that the “Yutas” call Ancapagri — i.e. Uncompahgre — or “Red Lake”, “because they say that near its source there is a spring of red-colored water, hot and ill-tasting.”

It seems that part of the reason Miera’s maps somewhat accurately depict areas the party never journeyed to is because they spoke with the Indigenous people who intimately knew the country. This is in sharp contrast to U.S. maps drawn a century later, which depict much of southeastern Utah as a big blank spot, with the San Juan River vanishing into the desert after passing the Four Corners. Miera y Pacheco’s map, meanwhile, accurately shows the stream meeting up with the Colorado in Glen Canyon.

That said, Miera y Pacheco does make some errors. He has the Gunnison River (San Xavier) running into the Dolores River near the present site of Gateway (passing through the Unaweap Gorge, perhaps?), and his maps appear to have the Green River (Rio San Buenaventura) flowing through the Wasatch Range and into Utah Lake.

At Montrose the party again took an odd route, going up the Gunnison River, in a northeasterly direction, rather than following it downstream to the northwest, up and over Sierra del Venado Alazan (Mountain of the Sorrel-Colored Deer), or Grand Mesa, before getting back on course (sort of) and making their way to the Great Salt Lake. It wasn’t until that point, when winter was starting to set in, that they realized maybe they should have taken a different route, and that Monterey, their final destination, was still a long ways off.

So they went south, all the way down to St. George, before turning back to the east, Santa Fe-bound. This is where it gets interesting, because their guides were not familiar with the country (what we would now call the Arizona strip) they were headed for. And yet, even though their route-finding was sometimes determined by drawing lots, they somehow managed to encounter the Colorado River at one of the few places they could get down to it, just downstream from the Paria River. Crossing the river, itself, wasn’t so easy.

“We were surrounded everywhere by plateaus and inaccessible peaks; therefore two of our men who were good swimmers entered the river naked, carrying their clothes on top of their heads. It was so deep and broad that the swimmers, in spite of their skill, were scarcely able to reach the opposite bank, abandoning in the middle of the river their clothing, which they never saw again.”

So they built a raft of logs, and “Father Fray Silvestre, accompanied by the servants, tried to cross the river; but although the poles they used to propel it were about five yards long, they did not touch bottom even a short distance from the bank.”

It was late October by then and, “Not knowing when we would be able to leave this place, and having already eaten up the meat of the first horse, the pine kernels and the other provisions we had bought, we ordered another horse killed.” Desperate, they hiked up the Paria until they were able to climb up to the plateau, then dropped back down to the Colorado River in Glen Canyon in a place they called San Diego. Finally they found a place where the canyon and river widened — now inundated by Lake Powell — and they were able to cross. After climbing out of the canyon: “We found today many Indian tracks, but saw no one. So many wild sheep flourish here that their tracks look like great herds of domestic sheep. They are smaller than the domestic variety, of the same shape but much swifter.”

The party finally reached Santa Fe and in the ensuing years Miera y Pacheco created at least two maps of the country they had traveled through.

Three federal firefighters were killed and two seriously injured when the Knowles and Gore fires overtook them southwest of Grand Junction near the Utah-Colorado line. The fires joined with others to become the Snyder Fire, which had grown to 30,000 acres as of Monday.

The fatalities were the tragic result of what has become a downright terrifying wildfire situation in the Interior West, with more than a dozen 1,000-acre-plus blazes tearing through forests in Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico during the last days of June. Without substantial and soaking rainfall soon, it’s likely to get even worse.

The fury of these conflagrations is evident in their rapid rate of growth.

The Babylon Fire within Bears Ears National Monument, for example, was first reported on the afternoon of June 26 on Elk Ridge north of the Bears Ears Buttes. By the evening of June 29 it was mapped at over 48,000 acres and was spreading northward. The National Park Service closed the Needles District of Canyonlands National Park as a result and the Manti-La Sal National Forest shut down the entire Elk Ridge area.

Further east, in Colorado, the Ferris Fire was first reported late on June 27 just north of the Dolores River along the Dolores and Montezuma county line. It quickly tore through piñon and juniper, then scrub oak and ponderosa forest toward the Disappointment Valley, and had reached about 20,600 acres as of Monday night.

The Gold Mountain Fire, apparently ignited when a tree fell on a powerline, was first reported Saturday afternoon near the Bachelor Syracuse Mine Tour north of Ouray. By Monday night it was over 8,300 acres and had forced evacuations and the closure of Highway 550.

On the eastern side of the Divide the Aspen Acres Fire grew to 23,000 acres in less than 24 hours, driven through a parched landscape by 100-mile-per-hour winds, and was threatening the towns of Beulah and Rye. The Willow Fire in Lake County is at a relatively small 1,900 acres, but is perilously close to Leadville.

Many factors contribute to the intensity, size, and frequency of the fires, from decades of fire suppression, to human encroachment in forests, to flammable noxious weed infestations. But the biggest driver of this regional calamity is clearly the hot, dry weather, which has been exacerbated by human-caused climate change.

Winter was an utter dud as far as the snowpack was concerned, in large part because of the unusually high temperatures. The hot, dry weather continued into the spring — with July-like temps at the end of March — sucking moisture from the soil and vegetation, and pushing huge swaths of the Interior West into severe to extreme drought conditions. Throw in gusty wind and a June heat wave — nearly 1,000 daily high temperature records were tied or broken in the West this month — and you’ve got a recipe for disaster.

There have been hot and dry years in the past, along with catastrophic wildfires: In 1879 the Lime Creek Burn charred 26,000 high-country acres south of Silverton, burning through what later became known as the “asbestos forest” due to its apparent blaze-resistance.

Back then, however, 1879-like dry and warm years were anomalous, as were mega fires. The Lime Creek Burn stood as the state’s largest blaze until 2002; now it’s not even in the top 20 for acreage burned. This year, while relatively extreme, is no outlier. The West’s temperatures have been trending upward since reliable record-keeping began some 130 years ago, and the Southwest is suffering through year 26 of an ongoing megadrought, the most severe in at least 1,200 years.

Nor is the phenomenon isolated to the arid West. A heat dome is on its way to the Midwest and East Coast. And a record-breaking heat wave has gripped much of western Europe. France has recorded over 1,000 heat-related fatalities in recent days, and was forced to shut down nuclear reactors because the rivers from which they pull their cooling waters are too warm (and the discharged water is even warmer, threatening river ecosystems).

So it’s utterly surreal to, on the one hand, breathe in the blanket of smoke that’s settling into the West’s valleys, to observe new flame icons popping up on the Watch Duty map, and see satellite imagery smoke plumes stretch across the region, and on the other to hear U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright downplay the deaths in Europe. Unlike his boss, President Trump, Wright acknowledges that human-related greenhouse gas emissions are heating the planet, but he says it’s not a crisis and that its effects are “manageable.”

Wright’s disrespect for the victims, including the injured and killed firefighters in Colorado, is dumbfounding. And his willful ignorance of the science and reality on the ground in order to perpetuate Trump’s drill-baby-drill agenda and bolster oil company profits is simply sickening. The same goes for Trump’s Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. His department now oversees the nation’s wildland firefighting force. And yet he is also leading the charge to deregulate the oil and gas industry and allow them to spew more planet-warming methane in order to spur more oil and gas drilling on public lands — ultimately leading to more fossil fuel burning, carbon emissions, warmer global temperatures, and more severe fires.

It reminds me a little bit of the story of the California firefighter who admitted setting dozens of fires as a job-creation scheme, allowing him and his colleagues to earn overtime pay. The difference here is that Burgum is not only playing his dangerous game with the lives of the firefighters under his command, but also with the planet as a whole.

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One of the many things I’m interested in is the water-energy nexus: The way a coal plant requires vast amounts of water to make steam to turn turbines to generate electricity to run the pumps on the Central Arizona Project canals, for example. Now, with dry times in full-swing and electricity prices on the rise almost everywhere, the spotlight is on the water-energy-agriculture/food nexus.

In the arid West, most agriculture is of the irrigated kind. In many cases, this means relying on pumps to move the water across the land, to bring groundwater up from a well, and to pressurize sprinkler systems. And pumps require energy, in the form of electricity from the grid, from distributed solar or wind systems, or from diesel or gasoline motors or generators.

During a dry year like this one, farmers need to start irrigating earlier in the season, meaning their pumps run more often and consume more energy, which costs more money. That’s the situation Wyoming farmers and ranchers Tim Teichert and Jason Thornock are up against this year, according to a June 11 WyoFile report by Dustin Bleizeffer. These guys fork out up to $150,000 annually for electricity, the drought is pushing that bill higher, and now Rocky Mountain Power — a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway — is looking for a 37.7% rate increase on irrigators. Ouch.

Here’s where the nexus comes in: If the rate hike goes through, it will make it prohibitively expensive for other farmers to switch from flood irrigation to more efficient sprinkler systems. While this would seem to be the perfect opportunity for farmers to go solar, that’s not so easy in Wyoming, either. State law caps the size of solar arrays eligible for net metering, or the system by which the utility credits a customer for exporting excess power into the grid, at 25 kilowatts, which is far smaller than most farmers would need to power their pumps.

Down in Arizona the stakes are even higher, according to a study by Andrew Berry and Mikhail V. Chester published in 2017 in Environmental Research Letters. They highlighted the fact that in Arizona, most irrigation is powered by electricity.

The Central Arizona Project’s 15 pumping stations guzzle 2.8 gigawatt-hours of electricity annually to move water more than 300 miles from the Colorado River to the middle of the state, with a total vertical climb of about 3,000 feet. Then the farmers have to pump it from the canal to their fields and rely on pumps to power sprinkler systems. Arizona farmers that don’t rely on the canals use groundwater, which also requires pumping.

When temperatures go up or precipitation decreases, the farmers need more water, which means they also use more energy, putting more strain on the electrical grid. And even without all of those irrigation pumps churning away, heat stresses the grid in other ways, primarily because power demand surges in the afternoons, when everyone cranks up their air conditioners. Also, hot power lines are less efficient, wildfires can take out transmission lines and other electricity infrastructure, smoke diminishes solar output, and low streamflows can deplete hydropower generation.

All of this has the potential to take down the power grid, which would cause the irrigation and water-movement systems to shut down, which would affect crops and food supplies.

Over the last century and a half, especially in the years following World War II, the federal and state governments, utilities, and private interests have created huge networks for generating and moving power and for diverting, storing, and delivering water. Research and stories like the ones mentioned here just go to show how inextricably intertwined the two systems have become, how important they both are to Western communities, and how fragile they can be. Climate change — along with increasing demand — is raising the risk of a catastrophic, cascading failure in these systems, which would be calamitous for the entire region.

While the Trump administration 2.0 has so far refrained from trying to shrink or eliminate national monuments, its non-executive-branch proxies just keep on trying. This week the 10th Circuit federal appeals court issued a decision keeping alive Utah’…

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What in the holy gentrification hell is this news?! The median price for a single-family in-town home in Durango, Colorado, surpassed $1 million this month. Yes, a million buckaroos.

Sure, Aspen and Jackson and Park City and T…

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🌞 Good News! 😎

THE NEWS: Sen. Mike Lee, the ultra-MAGA Utah Republican, failed once again to diminish public lands protections when his bid to use the Congressional Review Act to revoke Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument’s management plan expired before getting a vote.

THE CONTEXT: This spring, Lee and Rep. Celeste Maloy, also a Utah Republica…

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Recently, my colleagues at High Country News and I had a bit of a kerfuffle over whether the place on the Colorado River that divides the Upper Basin from the Lower Basin was called Lee Ferry, Lee’s Ferry, or …

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The San Juan Basin in northwestern New Mexico was once one of the bus…

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🤖 Data Center Watch 👾

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🌵 Public Lands 🌲

The Trump administration is attacking public lands again, this time in an apparent effort to open more special places to off-road vehicles. Late last Friday, Trump issued an executive order revoking a Nixon-e…

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Blue Castle Holdings is proposing to build a nuclear power plant in Green River, Utah. You have not gone through a time warp, nor is this a “this date in history” sorta thing, though it could be. The same company tried to build a reactor in Green River a couple o…

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🌵 Public Lands 🌲

One good thing the Trump administration’s and the GOP’s attack on public lands has brought about is more attention to public lands and the sometimes arcane policies governing them. When I started …

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Maybe sitting next to the wall of plate glass windows was not the smartest move, I thought, as a sienna-colored cloud of sand l…

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