A weird water year so far: Abundant rain, sparse snow
Plus: National park shenanigans in Utah
⛈️ Wacky Weather Watch⚡️
We are now two months into the water year — and a couple of days into meteorological winter — and so far both are pretty weird. On the one hand, much of the West is covered by one of the scantest snowpacks for early December in decades. On the other, it’s also been one of the wettest beginnings to the water year in recent memory.
Adding to the uncanniness has been the wave of generous storms that have dumped up to a foot of snow on Colorado ski areas and snarled traffic, leading to at least two multi-car pileups on I-70 and shutting down other arteries — yet still failing to bring snowpack levels to anywhere near “normal.”
It’s a big ol’ mixed bag, in other words. The big October deluges eased the drought in much of the region, but the warm temperatures and snow drought don’t bode well for next spring’s runoff. Meagre early winter snowpacks can make and have made dramatic comebacks (e.g. water year 2008 in southwestern Colorado), and another storm is moving into the region as I write this, yet the National Weather Service’s is predicting an abnormally warm and dry winter for much of the Southwest.
🌵 Public Lands 🌲
The Grand County commissioners’ “Access and Capacity Enhancement Alternative” plan aimed at increasing visitation at Arches National Park was just the tip of an iceberg, it seems. Yesterday (Dec. 1), Commissioner Brian Martinez presented the plan to a group of state and federal officials at a closed State of Utah and National Park Service Workshop in Salt Lake City.
The meeting’s purpose, according to the official agenda, is:
“To improve the coordination between the State of Utah and the National Parks Service regarding visitor use and management priorities. This discussion will provide valuable input for the future planning of our National Parks, ultimately charting a path forward that benefits local communities while also achieving the goals of the National Park Service, Department of the Interior, and President Trump’s agenda.”
This may sound fairly innocuous (and maybe it is). But given some of the players, it may also be the latest volley in Utah’s long-running effort to seize control of public lands. The meeting was run by the Interior Department’s associate deputy secretary, Karen Budd-Falen, and Redge Johnson, who leads Utah’s Public Lands Policy Coordinating Office.
Budd-Falen built her legal career on fighting federal agencies, including the Interior Department, and was part of the Sagebrush Rebellion and the Wise Use movements that endeavored to turn federal land over to states and counties and to weaken regulations on the extractive industries. Johnson, meanwhile, was a driving force behind the state’s effort to take control of 18.5 million acres of Bureau of Land Management land in the state.
It’s not clear what is meant when they say the meeting is aimed at achieving Trump’s agenda. As far as national parks go, the administration has been rather chaotic: Freezing hiring, laying off thousands of staff (only to rehire some of them), slashing budgets, and allowing visitors to run roughshod over the parks during the government shutdown.
It sure looks like they are trying to cause the parks to fail, which would give them an excuse to further privatize their functions. Private for-profit corporations already run the lodges, campgrounds, and other services inside many parks. That’s why, during the shutdown, concessionaire-run campgrounds within parks continued to operate, while all of the government-run functions, such as entrance-fee-collection, were shuttered. In this way a false contrast was created between the functional privately-run operations and the dysfunctional public ones; visitors during that time would be excused for preferring the former.
The timing of this meeting, purportedly to receive input from gateway communities, is kind of odd. I have to wonder whether the Interior Department consulted local elected officials before raising entry fees for foreign visitors to $100 at Zion and Bryce Canyon National Parks in Utah, along with Grand Canyon, Acadia, Everglades, Glacier, Grand Teton, Rocky Mountain, Sequoia & Kings Canyon, Yellowstone, and Yosemite National Parks.
The Southwest’s tourism industry is highly reliant on international visitors. Visitation from abroad is already down, thanks mostly to the Trump administration’s “America First” creed and its general hostility to the rest of the world. Singling out foreign travelers for these higher fees — even if only at the most popular parks — is likely to dampen visitation from abroad even more, which will ripple through Western economies.
Grand County’s bid to cram even more visitors into Arches National Park won’t be too effective if would be visitors don’t even make it to the United States …
🗺️ Messing with Maps 🧭
This is just another old map that caught my attention, in part because it’s a reminder of how extensive the railroad network was, even in the rugged parts of Colorado, back in the late 1800s and early 1900s. This one shows the Denver & Rio Grande rail lines in 1893.
