Friday Fast Takes: Dust on snow, too many houses?, Trump ticker, more...

Dust is melting Colorado River snows

🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫

A new study finds that airborne dust deposited on snow in the Upper Colorado River Basin speeds up spring snowmelt. Regular readers of the Land Desk won’t be surprised by this conclusion, as there are regular mentions here regarding the effects of dust-on-snow in the San Juan Mountains. This study, however, is the first to quantify the effects across the entire Colorado River Basin.

When dust, lifted up from the lowlands by spring winds, falls on mountain snow, it decreases the snow’s albedo — the measure of a surface’s reflectivity — causing the snow to melt faster. That adds another variable into the water forecasting mix, since about 85% of the Colorado’s flow comes from snowmelt.

Dust events have been occurring for thousands of years on the Colorado Plateau and in the San Juan Mountains, but picked up significantly following the white settler-colonist influx of the mid-1800s, and peaking in the first few decades of the twentieth century, when volumes of dust were five times higher than they were prior to colonization.

The new study, “Dust on Snow Radiative Forcing and Contribution to Melt in the Colorado River Basin,” by Patrick Naple, S. McKenzie Skiles, et al, used daily remotely sensed images (MODIS) from 2001 to 2023 to observe dust-on-snow impacts. Findings include:

• The lowest dust-on-snow impacts occurred in the northern Uinta in Utah and the Wind River Range in Wyoming, while higher and more persistent effects were seen in the central and southern Rockies.

• Dust impacts tend to be largest in the lower alpine elevations (8,000 - 10,000 feet).

• The researchers observed greater dust effects in the first part of the observation period (2001 to 2014) and lesser after that, “producing a slight but statistically significant decreasing trend over the record.” And the patterns don’t necessarily align with drought intensity, “indicating that there is not a straightforward relationship between aridity and dust.”

• The reason for the decreasing trend aren’t clear, but researchers hypothesize that it relates to a combination of increasing surface roughness (vegetation) and decreasing wind speeds related to climate variability.

The good news for the San Juans is that dust events have been relatively mild this spring, according to the Center for Snow and Avalanche Studies’ April 29 report, which has helped keep the meagre snowpack around a while longer. At least for now: A storm is forecast to move into the San Juans this weekend and early next week, likely bringing both dust and snow to the high country, which could throw off some of our Predict the Peak guesses, for sure.

Dust, snow, and diminishing albedo

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Speaking of, you really should enter the Predict the Peak Contest. To get some help with your calculations, check out the CSAS’s assessment.

The Land Desk Predict the Peak Super-Contest

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Fire season has arrived in the Southwest. It feels early, but then, who the hell knows anymore? Maybe last year’s fire season is simply continuing on. The Stronghold Fire has scorched a little over 2,000 acres in the east edge of the Dragoon Mountains in southern Arizona, forcing evacuations in the rural sprawl. As of May 1, it was 62% contained and fire activity had ebbed. And the Otero Fire burned through 494 acres of the Rio Grande Bosque adjacent to Socorro, New Mexico.

The outlook is for a hot, dry, maybe smoky summer for a good swath of the West:

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🏠 Random Real Estate Room 🤑

I stumbled upon an unexpected headline in the Las Vegas Review-Journal today: “Inventory flooding Las Vegas Valley’s home market with no buyers in sight: Zillow.” Say what? For I don’t know how long, we’ve been hearing that Las Vegas was suffering a severe housing shortage — i.e. demand was far outstripping supply — and that the only solution was to sacrifice surrounding public lands to housing developers.

Freedom Cities are back!

Yet now Zillow is saying there are too many houses for sale? And what’s also interesting is that home prices continue to rise alongside inventory. That’s right: There are more homes available for sale, and yet the median sales price continues to increase, showing that the laws of supply and demand don’t always apply to housing (and showing that the push to bulldoze federal land for affordable housing is a sham).

I checked out Zillow for myself and found about 1,600 homes listed for less than $300,000 for sale in the greater Las Vegas area. I decided to look around the region a bit, too, and it actually seems like there are more sub-$300k homes/condos available now than during my previous scans over the past four years. Oh, and I found this tiny home in the sprawling metropolis of Ticaboo, Utah. A little overpriced, but the location? Heck yeah!

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🤯 Trump Ticker 😱

Sigh. That guy is still president, and continues to do his darnedest to wreck everything that makes America great. Wes Siler’s Newsletter is reporting that the National Park Service plans to fire another 1,500 employees in coming days, bringing total Park Service staffing losses through resignations, firings, and layoffs to 5,000 under Trump. Meanwhile, year-to-date visitation at Zion National Park is at near-record levels. The combination of more visitors and fewer staff could get messy.

And all Interior Department employees (which includes the Park Service, BLM, and so forth), have been ordered to submit their resumes — i.e. reapply for their existing jobs — in preparation for significant job cuts and an expected complete overhaul of the department and its agencies.

Firing thousands of people from what seemed like secure jobs will not be good for the economy, which is already struggling mightily due to Trump’s policies. And on that note, if you’re interested in tariffs and how they might affect things, I’d urge you to read this smart take from Aaron Smith at his Ag Data News:

My Answers to Some of Your Questions About Tariffs

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📈 Data Dump 📊

WildEarth Guardians just released their first quarter “Oil & Gas Waste Watch” report tallying up industry and regulatory failures in New Mexico. Findings include:

• 307/330 The number of oil and gas facility incidents/spills reported during the first three months of the year in New Mexico.

• 78,858 barrels Volume of liquid, including 22,927 barrels of wastewater in addition to crude oil, condensates, and other materials, spilled in those incidents. Some of the material was recovered.

• 118 Number of spills involving crude oil or condensates.

• 292/36 Number of spills in the Permian Basin/San Juan Basin, respectively.

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📖 Reading Room 🧐

Shaun Griswold has a great essay about the Cybertruck in the latest High Country News and on the website. Here’s a little outtake, but do go read the whole thing. You won’t regret it.

At perhaps any other time in U.S. history, you’d have fallen into obscurity as the not-truck you are, a silly thing promoted by an eccentric billionaire crypto bro with a predilection for ketamine. But that billionaire car dealer is currently running around the White House gutting federal agencies and throwing out Hitler salutes. Now every white supremacist or men’s rights advocate with a crypto exchange key wants a Cybertruck in their driveway. You’ve become a symbol, the dead end where bad men drive deeper into dysfunction, shallow masculinity and toxic American disposability.

And on that note …

📸 Parting Shot 🎞️

… a little reminder that I was knocking on Cybertrucks before it was cool!

The Silver Bullet goes head to head with a toaster … er, Cybertruck.

And ICYMI…

Longread: On wolves, wildness, and hope in trying times