Runoff Watch: It has begun

Plus: A subscriber's only teaser from Snow Screen: Part II of the Project Petrichor Environmental Thriller Series

What promises to be the West’s biggest spring runoff in years has begun. A relentless parade of precipitation and cool weather was broken by blue skies and warm temperatures, sending snowpack levels plummeting and causing stream flows to spike. Some areas in the Four Corners Country had even more snow in early April than they did in the whopper, dam-threatening year of 1983. But 1983’s big runoff was due in part to a lot of snow, generally, but also to unusually wet April and May storms and a rapid, late May warming spell combined with heavy rains. All of which still could occur this year.

Here’s the story in a series of SNOTEL snowpack and USGS river flow charts.

The La Sal Mountain SNOTEL station is one of the few that goes back to 1983, allowing us to compare this year’s snowpack to that epic year’s.

The lower Lower Dolores is running big, thanks in part to that La Sal Mountain runoff. It will just keep getting bigger.

The Columbus Basin SNOTEL site, high in the La Plata Mountains of Southwest Colorado, is still not melting off in any noticeable way. That bodes well for the La Plata and Mancos Rivers. Note how much more snow is in the La Platas now than in 2021.

Weminuche Creek, a tributary to the Piedra River, has the highest levels of snow water equivalent on record (but the record only goes back about 15 years).

The Piedra River is big and will only get bigger!

Just wanted to put this up there to show that Wolf Creek Ski Area wasn’t exaggerating when they said they had a huge snowpack this winter.

I like to include the Animas River in Durango because it’s not affected by dams and only minimally by upstream diversions. It’s looking like it will be an over-the-banks runoff.

Those big snows on Wolf Creek are helping flows in the beleaguered Rio Grande.

With big water like this it might be a while before the Narrows in Zion National Park are open to visitors.

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And now for a sneak preview of my upcoming novel, Snow Screen: Part II of the Project Petrichor Environmental Thriller Series. This is the prologue or maybe Chapter I (I’m not sure what the difference is, really). I’ll be running chapter drafts sporadically — for paid subscribers only — over the next several months and will hopefully have a finished product sometime late this year. Your feedback is welcome. If you wanna take part, upgrade to a paid subscription.