Messing w/ Maps: Colorado River Plumbing edition

Political Pondering: Lyman's back at it; What's up with Adam Frisch?

The Central Arizona Project canal passes alfalfa fields and feedlots in La Paz County, Arizona. The fields are irrigated with pumped groundwater, not CAP water. Source: Google Earth.

🗺️ Messing with Maps 🧭

Imagine that you’ve set off for a hike in the desert of western Arizona, hoping to get up high so you can get a view of the juxtaposition of alfalfa fields against the sere, rocky earth. But you somehow get disoriented, the sun reaches its apex and beats down on you, the temperature climbing into the triple digits. The ground temperature becomes so hot you can feel it through the soles of your Hoka running shoes. Your water bottle is empty. Feeling certain you are going to die you pick a direction and stagger in as straight a line as you can manage, rasping for help. And then, just when you’re about to curl up under a rock and surrender, you see, coming straight out of a hillside, a virtual river. It must be a mirage, you think, or a hallucination, you run toward it, climb the fence, and dive into the cool, deep water. 

This is not a fantasy scenario. There is, in fact, a place in the western Arizona desert where a lost traveler could stumble upon a giant canal emerging from the earth.

The Central Arizona Project’s Mark Wilmer pumping plant at Lake Havasu. The 14 plants on the CAP system push water across more than 300 miles with a vertical gain of 3,000 feet. Moving water requires enormous amounts of power, making the CAP the state’s largest single electricity user, with annual power bills totaling $60 million to $80 million. Source: Google Earth.

The Mark Wilmer plant uses six, 66,000-horsepower pumps to suck a bunch of Colorado River water out of Lake Havasu, push that water 800 vertical feet uphill and into Buckskin Mountain Tunnel, through which it travels about seven miles before emerging from the side of the mountain. This is the first section of the 336-mile-long Central Arizona Project canal, which carries the water to Phoenix and Tucson.

The Rio Blanco intake (left) for the San Juan-Chama Project, which takes water from three upper San Juan River tributaries and ships it across the Continental Divide to the Chama River watershed and, ultimately, the Rio Grande. The outlet (left) runs into Willow Creek west of Los Ojos before running into Heron Lake.

It’s just one of the crazy plumbing projects along the Colorado River and its tributaries. And they can look pretty weird when you stumble upon them in remote places. That’s what happened to me the other day — virtually. I was using Google Earth to chart the 1776 Escalante-Dominguez expedition’s path when, near Chama, I came across a large volume of water emanating from an arid meadow. After some thought I realized it was the outlet for the San Juan-Chama Project that diverts about 90,000 acre-feet of water annually from three tributaries of the San Juan River, sends it through the Continental Divide via a tunnel, and delivers it to Willow Creek and Heron Reservoir. From there it can be released into the Chama River, which runs into the Rio Grande, which is used by Albuquerque and Santa Fe to supplement groundwater and the shrinking Rio Grande.

The Big Thompson Project sucks water out of the Colorado River near its headwaters and siphons it through the mountains via the Alva Adams Tunnel. The water feeds reservoirs that feed Front Range cities and is used to generate hydropower. The photos show the Adams tunnel inlet at Grand Lake and the penstocks and powerplant at Flatiron reservoir on the right.

These things aren’t only unsettling in a visual way, but in a conceptual way as well. One would expect cities and agricultural zones to rise up around where the water is and to grow according to how much water is locally available. Instead, cities rise up in places of limited water and grow as if there were no limits, importing water (and power and other resources) from far away. 

The Julian Hinds pumping station (left), near Desert Center, California, lifts water from the Colorado River Aqueduct 441 feet as it makes its way toward Los Angeles. The Southern Nevada Water Authority was forced to build a third water intake from Lake Mead that was able to draw water as the reservoir continued to shrink. The pumping plant is pictured.

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Pondering Politics

Leave it to Utah to give us batshit politics. The state used to be somewhat normal, politically, with both Republicans and Democrats engaging in healthy debate and campaigns and folks from both parties getting elected to office (yes, Democrats used to win in Utah). And most of Utah’s GOP voters rejected Donald Trump in the 2016 primaries because the reality TV guy and real estate developer didn’t exactly jive with their values. 

But somewhere along the way, the state veered to the right, the Republican Party put a lock on nearly every region and election, and, contrary to common sense and their own interests, they went full in on Trump — with a few notable exceptions. 

Now, however, there are schisms opening within Utah’s Republican Party that could loosen their hold on power, at least in the gubernatorial race. And you can blame it on state Rep. Phil Lyman, who probably has made it into the Land Desk more often than any other local or state-level politician thanks to his extreme views on public lands. 

At the Utah Republican convention in April, a majority of delegates chose Lyman over Gov. Spencer Cox to represent the party in the gubernatorial election in November. But in the June primary, Cox received nearly 40,000 more votes than Lyman, making him the actual nominee. 

Instead of accepting reality and his loss, however, Lyman pulled a Trump and refused to concede, challenging the election results in court. That hasn’t worked out, so now he’s running for governor as a write-in candidate, which will likely take votes away from Cox, and may give the Democratic challenger, Brian King, a shot at the win. In fact, Lyman and King teamed up to do a campaign ad mocking Cox. 

Lyman has long attacked Cox as being inadequately right-wing, which is a bit absurd. Cox ain’t no moderate, policy-wise. In fact, in any other state he’d be considered an extremist. What distinguishes him from the MAGA crowd is that he believes in civility — or says he does. His policies, however, tell a different story: He’s signed into law hateful book-banning and anti-trans legislation. Oh, and he’s not voting for Trump, because Trump’s a convicted felon and narcissist with a broken moral compass. Oh, what’s that? Cox changed his mind? Yeah, now he’s voting for Trump because someone tried to assassinate the former president, but missed, which means Jesus saved Trump’s life so he could go on to be the great unifier of this divided nation. Well, I guess we now know that Cox may or may not be a conservative, but he sure the hell is gullible.

While we’re talking politics: What’s up with Adam Frisch? He’s the guy who ran against Rep. Lauren Boebert to represent Colorado’s third congressional district — call him the anti-Boebert, which, quite honestly, was enough for Frisch to get my vote, no matter what his policies might be. But then Boebert dropped out to run in a redder district, and Frisch’s policy positions rose to the surface.

While the district has leaned Republican in recent years, it has historically elected Democrats (Frank Evans, Ray Kogovsek, Ben Campbell, and John Salazar) as often as Republicans. So one might consider it a centrist district that favors centrist candidates. Frisch fits the bill. He’s a self-proclaimed pragmatist with progressive stances on abortion, social issues, labor, and — in many respects — corporate power. Meanwhile, he leans a bit more right on immigration (though not MAGA-right, by any means) and skews centrist on gun control. Surprisingly (to me, at least) he takes a Republicanesque stand on energy issues and public lands.

He’s repeated the tired old trope that Biden is hampering domestic energy production, ignoring the fact that the administration continues to issue drilling permits at a rapid clip and that U.S. oil production is at an all-time high under Biden. This July, Frisch told the Grand Junction Sentinel that he opposed the proposed establishment of a 400,000-acre national monument on the lower Dolores River, saying it was too big and indicating that he was leery of the powers granted the president under the 1906 Antiquities Act. He says he prefers a smaller national conservation area (that would have to be designated by Congress). It’s a prudent, middle-of-the-road approach, which I disagree with, but can understand. 

But his other stances? Not so much. 

Last October, when Boebert was still his opponent, he wrote an op-ed for the Grand Junction Sentinel purporting that the Biden administration’s new public lands rule would “seriously harm western Colorado’s economy and way of life.” He goes on to make a misguided, baseless, and spurious argument in a clear bid to pander to a certain type of voter, namely a misinformed one.

The rule is designed to follow the multiple-use mandate of the Federal Land Policy Management Act passed by Congress back in 1976 by putting conservation on a par with other uses of federal land, like grazing, oil and gas drilling, recreation, and mining. In other words, it treats conservation, restoration, and land-healing as just another one of the multiple uses of federal lands. Part of this would be accomplished via conservation leases, where an organization, developer, or government could lease a piece of public land to do a restoration project (either for its own sake or to offset damages it inflicted elsewhere). 

The rule would not allow someone to lease an active grazing allotment or oil and gas parcel in hopes of blocking the existing use. Nor does it impose extra regulations on grazing or mining or drilling. It merely opens a door for folks to restore long-abused sections of public land and could even expedite development as a mitigation tool. 

But Frisch seems more interested in pandering and fear-mongering than in the truth. He claims the rule abandons the multiple-use mandate and would result in most of Colorado’s Western Slope becoming “de facto wilderness areas,” where grazing, road-building, “or even hiking could therefore be prohibited.” 

That, quite simply, is bullshit, and I’m guessing Frisch knows this. 

The rule does make it easier for the BLM to designate areas of critical environmental concern, or ACECs, where drilling or mining might be banned or restricted (grazing is almost always allowed in ACECs). But these aren’t anywhere near de facto wilderness areas. And even if they were, Frisch is probably smart enough to know that both grazing and hiking and horseback riding and hunting are allowed in designated wilderness areas. 

I think it’s great that politicians stand up for their constituents, and the voters in Frisch’s district include farmers and ranchers and oil and gas workers. But when he attacks common-sense rules and regulations that merely seek to elevate conservation to an equal footing with other uses, he’s merely reinforcing misperception and misinformation (It would ban hiking? Come on, Adam!). If he truly cared about the voters — and not just their votes -- he would try to understand the rules (and the meaning of national monuments). Then he would work to educate his potential constituents and help them see the truth: Environmental protections will ultimately benefit the landscape and the livelihoods and communities that rely upon it.

📸 Parting Shot 🎞️ Photo Contest!

The first person to correctly identify — in the comments section only — the photo below (where and what is depicted) will get a special Land Desk gift. But it has to be in the comments, meaning only paid subscribers are eligible to play. Emails are welcome, but they don’t count.