⛈️ Wacky Weather Watch⚡️
Wow. Just wow. Huge flash floods in the Grand Canyon this past weekend, with the biggest damage along Bright Angel Creek and Phantom Ranch. Bridges were washed away, dozens of people were evacuated, the Trans Canyon Waterline was destroyed (forcing the closure of rim hotels), and there was so much debris in the river that National Park Service officials had to shut down the river to rafting — though it is now reopened. As of Tuesday morning, two fatalities had been confirmed and one person were still missing.
The storm cells plowed across the Colorado Plateau during the waning days of August, and of meteorological summer, dumping large volumes of rain in short periods of time, leading to hot-chocolate-hued waterfalls cascading off of cliffs and down canyons. In some cases, wildfire burn scars from last year or earlier this summer exacerbated the impacts. In the Grand Canyon it’s likely that the Dragon Bravo Fire scar contributed to the severity of the flooding.
The storms tended to be isolated, pounding one area, while leaving others just miles away virtually dry, as can be seen in wildly varying streamflows.
Video from the Grand Canyon shows that the storm and its impacts were widespread, but certainly the most significant flooding was on Bright Angel Creek, which joins the river at Phantom Ranch. The normally clear and burbling brook was flowing at about 14 cubic feet per second at 11:20 on the morning of August 29; at 12:50 p.m. the gage showed a flow of 347 cfs; then the readings vanished as the gage was overwhelmed by a torrent, disabling the gage. Witness accounts and videos show a wall of water that sounded like a freight train slamming into the Phantom Ranch area.
Always wanted to float one of those classic, usually un-runnable desert rivers but could never get big enough flows? Now’s the time to hit at least one of them, if you dare. The San Rafael River’s USGS gage near Green River was reading 800 cfs as of early Tuesday morning, which is runnable for the intrepid and skillful folks out there. But you’d better hurry: The forecast is calling for clear skies starting Wednesday. Meanwhile, flows on the Escalante River near Escalante, the Paria River near Kanab, and the Dirty Devil exceeded 2,000 cfs on Monday afternoon. But for these one’s it’s probably best just to sit on the canyon rim and watch the show, since American Whitewater recommends against running any of these rivers at these levels. But maybe this is just the dramatic ushering in of more gentle, widespread rains, and the flows will level out in the low-200s, making them quite floatable indeed.
The Big flows on three of the above mentioned rivers will give a bit of a boost to Lake Powell inflows, while the Paria will supplement the waters moving past Lee Ferry from the Colorado River’s Upper Basin to its Lower Basin. So far, however, the storms are too isolated and short-lived to significantly slow Lake Powell’s decline. The reservoir’s surface level is currently at about 3,517.6 feet.
Speaking of classic desert rivers, the sorrowful Lower Dolores River got a little bit of life back over the last few days as the storms moved into Western Colorado, pushing streamflows near its confluence with the Colorado above 600 cfs (after running below 30 cfs for the previous week). That’s good enough to float the lowest section of the river, which includes Stateline rapid, but the flows dropped back down below 100 cfs pretty quickly, which would leave anything but a SUP high and dry. What the rain gave to the river, it took from the roads: Highway 141 between Gateway and Whitewater was shut down Monday due to multiple debris flows; it had reopened as of Tuesday morning, according to the CDOT website.
Zion National Park was hit by the same wave of storms, leading to flash flooding and big water in the Virgin River. Rockslides shut down the Zion Mount Carmel Highway.
Note: I wrote the following essay for the Utah Monthly, an insightful newsletter that provides an inside look at the sometimes maddening, always spectacular, and often confounding state.
This historical piece jumps off from a feature story I wrote for High Country News back in 2012. The thesis behind that story was that even as Utah and the Mormon Church moved rightward politically with a full-throttle embrace of capitalism, they paradoxically held onto slivers of the collectivism espoused by Brigham Young. Since then, Utah has continued its rightward slide, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has continued to grow its corporate empire.
Reporting from Bloomberg shows the Church and its real estate arms own some 2.4 million acres in the U.S. worth more than $20 billion, and that they are ramping up efforts to develop some of that land. Tributary is a planned community under development in Aurora, Colorado, south of Denver International Airport and adjacent to I-70. It covers about 960 acres of former farmland along a creek, and it is designed to eventually house some 12,000 people.
Where will the water come from? Given that this will be in Aurora, I’m guessing it will be from Aurora water, which is currently under stage 1 drought restrictions.
Anyway, on to a bit of Western history …
Mormonism’s Collectivist Roots
And what remains of it in our era of financialized capitalism
The curiously named community of Orderville sits in a narrow valley in southern Utah on the banks of the East Fork of the Virgin River. It is propitiously placed along the highway between Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks, yet it wasn’t until the last decade or so that businesses—a couple coffee shops, food trucks, and upscale glamping and vacation rentals—popped up to capitalize on the thousands of visitors passing through. But this isn’t just a modest farming community now taking up tourism. It was once the stronghold of the United Order communalist system, perhaps the most audacious economic experiment ever undertaken in the American West. Orderville, wrote historian Dean L. May, was for the Latter-day Saints a “near-successful effort to build the City of God on Earth.”
Over the last half-century, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has wholeheartedly embraced free-market capitalism, and not only in ideological terms. The church is decidedly corporate, and owns Utah’s second-biggest newspaper, a book publisher, dozens of radio stations, financial companies, hotels, and restaurants. It spearheaded the $2 billion redevelopment of its land comprising a major portion of downtown Salt Lake City, and is one of the nation’s largest landowners, with about 2 million acres of agricultural, residential, and commercial properties across the United States. Up until McCarthyism and the Red Scare of the 1950s, however, the church leaned strongly in the opposite direction, favoring a communal, even socialist approach to economics.
When Brigham Young led his followers into present-day Utah in 1847 to build a homeland, he championed industriousness combined with cooperation and central planning over the frontier individualism commonly associated with the western frontier at the time. The Mormons began with a cooperative effort to build an irrigation system that belonged to everyone, and then laid out the towns. “The towns and villages were not established inadvertently or by individual initiative … they were a result of very definite plans,” wrote Hamilton Gardner in Cooperation Among the Mormons in 1917.
This relatively loose-knit system worked to build communities, but it wasn’t clear that it could protect them from the Gentiles pouring into the region in search of land and wealth. In the 1860s, as the transcontinental railroad approached Utah from both sides, bringing with it an orgy of capitalism and greed, financed with credit that the banks handed out like lollypops, Young buckled down in an effort to protect his holy land from the invaders.
He formed the School of Prophets, which, writes Leonard J. Arrington, the late LDS church historian, “countered an energetic and powerful laissez-faire capitalism with a vigorous, well-organized, socially minded and theocratically directed program of economic action.”
That program included creating an organization to build the section of railroad that came closest to the capital, to keep out the riffraff that might otherwise do the work. It funded the creation of cooperative furniture and wool manufacturing along with other businesses, to reduce reliance on eastern imports. The School created the Zion’s Cooperative Mercantile Institution and instituted uniform pricing controls to minimize competition among Mormon merchants.
The Utah Territory successfully resisted becoming a mineral colony for the eastern industrialists, and the School disbanded in 1872. But Young, whose collectivist leanings grew as he aged, wanted yet more.
A chance for radical change emerged in September of 1873, when the Jay Cooke & Co. bank—one of the big railroad backers—collapsed. Other banks toppled like dominoes, foreclosures were rampant, and the Panic of 1873 swept the nation and the world, leading to one of the worst depressions in history.
Utah’s mining towns were hit hard. But Brigham City, a settlement of about 1,500 people, actually thrived. It had organized a mercantile cooperative in the pre-railroad days, and, by the time the panic hit, it had expanded into a major manufacturing enterprise mostly owned by the worker/shareholders. It built houses for the poor and widows and provided labor for jobless drifters, and its leaders instituted central economic and land-use planning and zoning, dictating where houses and factories and public transit should be built. Novelist Edward Bellamy, who visited Brigham City after the panic, reportedly drew inspiration for Looking Backward, his 1888 utopian novel set in a socialist Boston in the year 2000, when greed and capitalism are no more.
Young didn’t need to wait another century for utopia to arrive. In the aftermath of the 1873 panic, he set about spreading the Brigham City model—combined with an element of Joseph Smith’s Order of Enoch wealth-redistribution plan—across Deseret. He started in St. George and worked his way northward, converting communities to the order as he went.
Each adopted the order in its own way, but the core principals were the same: communalism, cooperation, and equal distribution of wealth. That this occurred just after the Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engles, had been published in America bears noting, if nothing else. The language in the St. George United Order Constitution gives a sense of what Young was trying to do, mentioning the struggle between capital and labor, bemoaning the “oppression of monied monopolies” and railing against “a growing … spirit for extravagant speculation and over-reaching the legitimate bounds of the credit system; resulting in financial panic and bankruptcies.”
“It was clear to all that the United Order,” writes Arrington, in Great Basin Kingdom, “was an attempt to retard, and, if possible, to prevent the development of a market-oriented economy dependent on extensive importation and exportation.” About 200 communities implemented the Order. Some, like Brigham City, took a moderate approach. Others were quite radical.
Orderville fits into the latter category. The community was founded in the spring of 1875 by twenty-five families who had broken off from the Mount Carmel community a few miles down valley. The Orderville citizens pitched in to build houses surrounding a central plaza and common dining hall. All property was turned over to the community corporation, including land, livestock, and machinery. Decision-making was centralized. The population grew to 600, with around 200 acres of communal fields. The citizens built a sawmill, cabinet shop, woolen mill, shoe shop and tannery. Wealth was distributed evenly. Everyone ate together and wore locally made uniforms.
Orderville thrived in its collective state even as other southern Utah communities abandoned all or parts of the United Order. The community gained population and was able to quadruple its communal assets over just several years’ time.
Orderville’s successes, however, only highlighted the failures of the predominant, free-market system in use everywhere else, drawing resentment from the outside world. The timing wasn’t so great, either: In 1882, in a direct affront to the Utah Territory and the church, Congress passed the Edmunds Act, banning polygamy. A few years later, the feds rounded up and jailed hundreds of suspected polygamists, including in Orderville, leaving many communities leaderless. Church leaders, looking to remove yet another source of negative outside attention, urged Orderville to abandon its communal ways. The town’s leaders eventually complied—the central dining hall had been wiped out by a flood a few years earlier anyway—but kept the industries under communal ownership for another couple of decades.
By the early 1900s, the United Order had died in practice. For its part, the church continued to start its own businesses and to invest in other firms—sometimes to its own detriment. The aim, for the most part, was not to turn a profit, but to provide resources for its members. Still, the communalist spirit lived on, permeating the politics and the economics of the church for years afterward.
One of the embodiments of this spirit came in the form of a Utah Mormon banker and conservative Republican named Marriner S. Eccles. Eccles had long believed that hard work and thrift were all one needed to be successful. His father, David Eccles, had built up an empire on those principles, most famously owning the Utah Construction Company, one of six firms that built Hoover Dam and the largest company of its kind in the nation. The senior Eccles died in 1912, leaving everything to his children from two wives, one in Logan, one in Ogden. Though Marriner was in the lesser-endowed Logan branch, he ended up in Ogden, rose to the top of the bunch with his business acumen, and became president of Utah Construction Company, First Security Corporation, and several other interests. Then the Depression hit. Though Eccles’s wealth insulated him and his businesses, he noticed all around him people who had toiled and saved their whole lives, and who were now ruined, unemployed, even homeless.
“It is a national disgrace that such suffering should be permitted in this, the wealthiest country in the world,” he said. “The present condition is not the fault of the unemployed, but that of our business, financial, and political leadership.”
In 1933, Eccles and forty-five other citizens addressed Congress on ways to stop or slow the downward economic spiral. Most witnesses suggested that extravagance, nature, or God had caused the crash, and that balancing the federal budget was the only solution. Not Eccles. He said the root cause was maldistribution of wealth. There was plenty of money out there, it had just all ended up in the hands of a small group of the ultra-rich—the 1 percent, if you will—leaving the other 99 percent broke. That left the bulk of Americans not only hungry, but also without any of the purchasing power necessary to fuel the economy, and that’s what led to the crash.
How to fix the problem? The federal government had to raise taxes on the rich, forget balancing the budget, and spend like crazy in order to redistribute the wealth. Eccles’s five-point plan included allocating $500 million for unemployment and poverty relief, increasing funding to state and local governments for public works and infrastructure projects, and refinancing farm mortgages.
The approach was both compassionate and coldly rational. It would feed the hungry with direct handouts. And it would push a little bit of the wealth back into the hands of the working class, restoring the purchasing power of the masses. That, in turn, would revive consumption and jump-start industry, creating more jobs and more wealth. For as Eccles often said, “Labor is our only source of wealth.” Meanwhile, it would bolster the infrastructure of the nation, providing a foundation for future economic growth.
Trickle-down economics simply wouldn’t work. “The orthodox capitalistic system of uncontrolled individualism … will no longer serve our purpose,” Eccles said, echoing Brigham Young and presaging John Maynard Keynes’s 1936 work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money—the basis for one of the principal schools of modern economic thought. “We must think in terms of the scientific, technological, interdependent machine age, which can only survive and function under a modified capitalistic system controlled and regulated from the top by government.”
Eccles, who was not a church leader but whose family remains powerful in Utah, became the chairman of the Federal Reserve, and his theories provided the seeds of the New Deal. In 1936, around the same time that the federal government was launching its wealth redistribution effort, the church created its Welfare Program, which today spans the globe, providing food, shelter, medical help, and emergency aid to those in need.
The church adhered to the collectivist values of Smith, Young, and Young’s successor, John Taylor (also a strong proponent of wealth redistribution) for the next couple of decades. But when McCarthyism infected the nation in the 1950s, the Church’s communalist ways once again put them at odds with the nation’s mainstream. Then, maybe fearing more persecution, church leaders started an effort—perhaps concerted, perhaps not—to change their public image from borderline theocratic communists to full-on capitalists.
The ideological leader of this new, free-market, staunchly conservative Mormonism was Ezra Taft Benson, whom the church named to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in 1943. He served as President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s secretary of agriculture from 1953 until 1961, during which he became more and more rabidly anti-communist. In 1961, he told the church’s general conference: “No true Latter-day Saint and no true American can be a socialist or a communist or support programs leading in that direction.”
Benson was a contemporary, friend, and ideological twin of W. Cleon Skousen, the ultra-conservative political theorist whose teachings would influence the Sagebrush Rebellion of the 1970s, the Wise Use and Patriot movements of the 1990s, and the violent right-wing uprisings of the mid-2010s, including the armed occupation led by Ammon and Ryan Bundy of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in 2016. Benson and Skousen both were strong supporters of the John Birch Society, which was considered extreme even by the likes of hardcore conservatives such as Barry Goldwater. The society’s founder, Robert Welch, derided Eisenhower as a communist and Benson concurred. And in 1963 Benson predicted that within the decade the United States would be ruled by a communist dictatorship, which would include military occupation, concentration camps, and the like.
Many church leaders considered Benson’s beliefs not only to be too radical, but also blatantly racist, and at times he was chided for being too political and too extreme—though his status as apostle was never threatened. Still, his beliefs trickled down into more tempered elements of the church. In 1966, Apostle Marion G. Romney, former Sen. Mitt Romney’s father’s cousin, felt compelled to use his entire speech to the annual LDS general conference to outline the differences between socialism and the United Order (distillation: the United Order has God, socialism doesn’t). And in 1999, Phillip J. Bryson, a professor at Brigham Young University, wrote a paper called “In Defense of Capitalism” to counter some LDS scholars’ anti-capitalist leanings.
These efforts served gradually to pull the church rightward politically, and in 1985, Benson was named the church’s thirteenth president, a position he held until his death in 1994.
Utah’s politics have long been dominated by the church—nearly 90% of the state’s legislature identify as practicing Mormons. As a result, the state’s politics tend to reflect the church’s. Prior to 1980, for example, the state’s voters were as likely to elect a Democratic governor or federal or state lawmaker as they were a Republican one. But during the Reagan era and, for that matter, the Ezra Taft Benson era, the state has become bright red, only electing Democrats to represent isolated liberal strongholds such as Salt Lake City.
During the same time-frame, the church shifted economically, as well. In 1960, a Canadian oil company executive named N. Eldon Tanner was appointed by then–church president David O. McKay as an assistant to the twelve; two years later he became an apostle. He introduced corporate financing to the church and pointed it to not only achieve solvency, but to become a full-on business empire within a few decades.
It’s the latter, capitalist version of Mormon history that the modern media has glommed onto. And it’s not inaccurate—under Young’s leadership, the church had its hands in a number of business enterprises, just like today—but it’s also not complete. There still is a faint undercurrent of the old United Order beliefs. The church’s welfare program and Deseret Industries continue to be a significant part of its larger workings, providing humanitarian assistance across the globe as well as food and clothing and jobs to people closer to home. And it’s safe to say that the church’s current capitalist successes are rooted in, and wouldn’t be possible without, Brigham Young’s collectivist, quasi-communist experiment from the late 1800s that played out in a tiny town called Orderville.
📸 Parting Shot 🎞️
On Wednesday, a series of cells moved through the Grand Valley of western Colorado with unbelievable fury. It went from the dog sunbathing in the front yard to a whiteout of hail and sheets of rain in about four minutes. My weather gauge showed a peak rate of .94”/hr, but I doubt it had any chance to accurately record the volume and ferocity of the storm. It hit for just over 8 minutes and then cleared with sun out another five minutes later. In that short and violent period, my kitchen window was completely sluiced as if it was a windshield. And my kitchen window is under a 20’ back patio. Every depression had multiple inches of puddles. Trees stripped of leaves. I was worried the roof was going to come off.
This is our new reality. The feedback loop of our emissions are beginning to exert their influence. We are over the tipping point.
Your guess, as usual, is very correct. Yes, the Mormon owned Tributary development will be on the Aurora water system.
And thanks to your excellent piece today, I fell down a rabbit hole on Aurora's water situation, mostly because of how much building is happening east of the city near DIA, plus I live in Boulder, so Front Range water is of great interest to me.
Right now Aurora is in a Stage 1 drought and asking people to cut outdoor watering by 20%. The reservoirs are sitting around half full, something like 73,000 to 77,000 acre-feet out of roughly 156,000 acre-feet of capacity. Aurora's own line is that it could take several wet winters to get storage back to where they want it.
Meanwhile the city keeps approving growth to the east. Tributary by itself is about 960 acres and eventually around 12,000 residents. Then you've got Aurora Highlands, Painted Prairie, Windler, the Aerotropolis development around the airport, and more land beyond that already lined up.
Their long-range water plan puts numbers on it. Demand goes from about 63,300 acre-feet in 2025 to as much as 132,400 by 2070. Basically double.
To be fair, Aurora's water system is genuinely impressive. Supply comes out of three basins, roughly 50% South Platte, 25% Colorado River, 25% Arkansas, and they operate 12 reservoirs. Prairie Waters lets them pull legally reusable water back out downstream and run it again, which is why indoor use barely dents the supply compared to watering a lawn. It's also why they've gotten so strict about turf in new subdivisions.
Reuse still doesn't make water, though. Neither does storage. Whatever actually gets consumed has to be replaced, so Aurora keeps buying rights, keeps expanding reuse, and has projects like Wild Horse Reservoir in the pipeline.
Which is where it gets interesting to me. Aurora isn't running out of water. Not close. They've built one of the better municipal systems in the state. But they're under drought restrictions with half-empty reservoirs while signing off on an enormous amount of new rooftops, on the strength of a plan that assumes they can roughly double their water capacity.
Can Aurora serve Tributary? Yes. Easily. The harder question is whether they can double the whole system over the next few decades while the supplies underneath it, Colorado River included (a quarter of their surface water), keep getting shakier.
Thanks as always for the excellent writing Jonathan.
- Jason