Lake Powell in Rolling Stone

nzaugg

nzaugg

Escalante-Class Member
This article was really quite good: The Climate Crisis Could Mean the Twilight of the American West

It is always nice when an author cuts to the meat of the problem in the Colorado River system and doesn't ever mention draining our lake.

Hard choices need to be made. One of my clients in Arizona spent $400M in capital to reduce their water consumption to prevent them from facing shortages and to allow their business to grow. They spend $10M more a year to make sure the system works. Pain like that will be shared across the Colorado River Basin (though hopefully not to the same extent).
 
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Our resident water experts, including our distinguished nzaugg (what’s a nzaugg anyway?) can offer conclusions and insights from this fire hose of GCD, LP history beyond anything this geezer can contemplate. The banner photo shows why I have visited LP for 50 years, and that’s not the really magnificent canyons. Millions would not experience this but for GCD. What would be different if GCD were not there? The shortages this century would have happened sooner and the silt would be in Mead rather around Hite Landing. And the 1983 deluge? Dunno.
My take on the “historic drought” the past two decades is that we, humans, have a hard time contemplating that the past few decades, centuries, or millennia are an infinitesimal blip in time. We have to make decisions based on what we can comprehend, but to conclude the past two decades last forever is irrational. I’m so thankful that we idled our boats under Rainbow Bridge, I believe my grandkids will see those glory days too (won’t be allowed back there, but can boat into Coyote Gulch).
Ok, no more rambling, Dion just took off his sun glasses, let’s see if CSU can knock off the dream team.
 
A picture is worth a thousand words is not necessarily giving the real story. The picture of the people playing golf at Lake Powell National is misleading, due to the nature of the article, LPNGC has ALWAYS been watered with reclaimed water from Page's treatment plant. Designed and built from the beginning to Conserve water.

Paul B
 
Trix said:
Our resident water experts, including our distinguished nzaugg (what’s a nzaugg anyway?) can offer conclusions and insights from this fire hose of GCD, LP history beyond anything this geezer can contemplate. The banner photo shows why I have visited LP for 50 years, and that’s not the really magnificent canyons. Millions would not experience this but for GCD. What would be different if GCD were not there? The shortages this century would have happened sooner and the silt would be in Mead rather around Hite Landing. And the 1983 deluge? Dunno.
My take on the “historic drought” the past two decades is that we, humans, have a hard time contemplating that the past few decades, centuries, or millennia are an infinitesimal blip in time. We have to make decisions based on what we can comprehend, but to conclude the past two decades last forever is irrational. I’m so thankful that we idled our boats under Rainbow Bridge, I believe my grandkids will see those glory days too (won’t be allowed back there, but can boat into Coyote Gulch).
Ok, no more rambling, Dion just took off his sun glasses, let’s see if CSU can knock off the dream team.
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Just to clarify a nzaugg is an uncreative username created by combining a first initial with a last name. I usually give very little thought to usernames. I wish I had a cool username like so many others on here!

There are a couple issues I do have with the article, especially regarding assumptions on siltation along with the oft declared idea that once a reservoir hits dead pool it will no longer pass water and the river will go dry downstream of the dam.
  • Every reservoir experiences siltation to some degree. Of course, the Colorado River will present a massive siltation issue. Eventually the storage capacity of the reservoir is depleted by silt, but the silt should not ever plug up the dam outlets unless they are allowed to sit and become buried in the sediment, which cannot happen to a reservoir actively passing water. Eventually (hundreds of years from now), as the sediment marches down through the Maytag straights, active management of sediments in the reservoir will be necessary to pass additional sediment downstream to Mead, which will also eventually be buried in sediments. At no point will the dam stop passing water though. I have personally see a dam that consumed >90% of its storage capacity and still manage to deliver 100% of intended flow through a reservoir outlet.
  • Once a reservoir hits dead pool, it doesn't stop delivering flow downstream. It simply loses the ability to deliver controlled flow downstream greater than the influent. At that point, the most a reservoir can deliver downstream is influent-evaporation-infiltration/bypass+return flows from exfiltration. These doom and gloom statements about the downstream rivers running dry create a dire implication but will never be reality.
You are right about Lake Powell saving Mead. Historic droughts and historic wet periods happen in long cycles. Hopefully the wet period will return and we can all boat right up next to (but not under) Rainbow Bridge and perhaps I can show my kids or grandkids the finger canyon between Knowles and Forgotten that my wife and I once saw with a houseboat moored despite the approximately 20 foot width of the canyon.

CSU was way too close to a win. I am sure a few little decisions are haunting the team now!
 
A friend's grandfather built a golf course in the 30's in the piedmont of the Santa Cruz mountains in what is now Soquel.

To water the golf course in dry periods he built a 50ft high concrete dam on the nearest creek to store water.

Within a few years the reservoir silted up and each year he had to dredge the pond.

Over time it became to costly to maintain the dam and soon the golf course closed. Now its a neighborhood with street names like Putter Drive, Hazzard Way, Ball court etc.

But I digress. My point is the dam is still standing. Completely silted up. So the creek just flows over the dam as a waterfall
 
Canyon Glen said:
A friend's grandfather built a golf course in the 30's in the piedmont of the Santa Cruz mountains in what is now Soquel.

To water the golf course in dry periods he built a 50ft high concrete dam on the nearest creek to store water.

Within a few years the reservoir silted up and each year he had to dredge the pond.

Over time it became to costly to maintain the dam and soon the golf course closed. Now its a neighborhood with street names like Putter Drive, Hazzard Way, Ball court etc.

But I digress. My point is the dam is still standing. Completely silted up. So the creek just flows over the dam as a waterfall
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It looks like it's called "The Waterfall Spot" on google maps: The Waterfall Spot · Prescott Rd, Soquel, CA 95073
 
I finally got a chance to read the article, and although you can nit-pick some of the statistical data about the lake, on the whole it's a pretty accurate telling of the story, one of the better recent pieces of its kind. I do see the article must have been written back in the spring, because it reports the lake stands at 3522, or what it was in February. But whatever, a pretty good effort.

I share some of nzaugg's reservations about how the siltation issue is addressed, although I do like the image of silt as a "mud glacier", which is a fairly accurate way of imagining it, with the "glacier" growing and spreading downstream each year. The main difference is that with a growing ice glacier, the whole thing gets bigger, higher and moves forward. With the silt "glacier", when it grows, there is still always a river cutting through it, so there is no way water won't get through the dam unless it ceases to flow altogether.

But overall, I'm glad to see an article based on actual research rather than interviews with the nearest member of GCI...
 
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