O.M.G.

 

Oh. My. Gosh. My wife and I were riding above the Deer Valley East Village on the Skyridge, Jordanelle trails the other day, and we saw the size, scope and scale of the Mayflower development.  It is not just the Extell and Deer Valley stuff but there are developments above and below the Jordanelle Parkway and housing all around that big, beautiful lake that are just getting started and won’t quit anytime soon.  This is not just 7 new chairlifts and a gondola, doubling the skiing at Deer Valley, but there are no less than 8 Linden Cranes over there, raising buildings that will make the new Hyatt appear miniscule.  My wife asked, ‘where will the deer go’ and I thought, ‘on the Logo’. 

There are already 4-5 holes built for the Tiger Woods golf course that will extend to the lake and be surrounded by golf trophy homes that make Glenwild and Promontory seem puny.   This golf course is supposed to save us water, like the new resort is going to help traffic, just like the copious snowmaking water for the low, southeast facing slopes, pumped from Jordanelle will save us electricity.  Not to worry, it was 70 degrees in mid-November and any successful snowmaking was at least two weeks away in our new climate of warmth and drought.

I was initially, reluctantly optimistic, making the best of this and looking forward to skiing the additional terrain at Deer Valley.  But I think the word is out and people will come in droves to explore this new skiing with the old Deer Valley experience.  There are parking lots there but they are full of extra chairlift parts and construction materials.  The classic DV parking lot shuttle will have to loop out to Heber and Midway to gather all the new millionaire customers.  I entertained visions of the Mayflower exit backup to Quinns Junction and the I-80 to U-40 exit ramp back up to Jeremy Ranch, making a perfect circle of gridlock in our precious valley.

But here I am again, fretting the hypotheticals when the resorts might entice us to carpool with cookies and coffee, or impose paid parking so expensive that all day users will park in Coalville, Morgan, Sandy and Bountiful for the bus trip up.  The local, satellite parking lot locations for day users start to make more sense with gondolas from Richardson’s Flat to Snow Park and Ecker Hill to 9990 to keep everyone but the residents and day workers off our roads.  This new development is all in Wasatch County, predicated originally on easy approval and 100 tax free rooms for military officers.   There must be a master plan and intense coordination and communication between all the regulating entities and stakeholders, as Tom Clyde continually espouses.   Otherwise, this is just insanity.

I fear that this is just another pivot point for the Park City area, like the opening of PC, DV, 2002 Olympics or the Vail buyout, one that will put us over the top and off the charts in attraction and popularity.  Couple this timing with the 2034 Olympic Feaver and we have an inflection on our development curve that looks more like a lightning bolt than a roller coaster.  We always said we didn’t want to become another Aspen but now we are becoming another Vail.  We are building another freeway ski resort and it is not Vail that is doing it.  It is the kinder and gentler DV.  It is us. 

I don’t pretend that I have all, or any, of the answers but we need to get ahead of this before it is too late.  The time for action is yesterday, the time for study and debate is long past.  We know what is happening and we know many of the solutions, low hanging fruit and easy fixes.  This has happened here and in other places before and we don’t need to reinvent the wheel to solve these issues.  Our enemy is delay, inaction or analysis paralysis.  Let’s do something, right or wrong.  We must discover, iteratively, erroneously and decorously, what works for us.  OMG, let’s do it now, before it is too late.

Bluff Utah, it’s not Moab.

 

Bluff Utah, It’s not Moab.

 

In attempt to do something ‘different’ in the middle of November, we went south to Bluff.  We are somewhat limited with ‘different’ in Utah, with only Moab and St George on the busy end, Fruita and Kanab in the obscure middle and Cisco and Grafton on the quiet side.  With only 200 people in Bluff, half of them Navajo, no place to eat or drink mid-week and a main street so empty that you could shoot a man, and no one would see, it is the essence of catatonic chill. 

After a round of golf with our dog in Price on the way down, and a harried pit stop in metropolitan Moab we were happy to leave the maddening throngs and huddled masses behind.  We made the mistake of going thru Provo City and Wasatch County where they tease you with reverse traffic light timing for more stopping and imitation freeway entrances to entice you behind the most trucks possible for the slog up Soldier Summit.  Indian Canyon was off limits and has been under construction for the past five decades to build two short passing lanes for the infinite oil trucks lining up at 5 mph over the 15% slope.  

We arrived in Bluff under a spectacular purple setting sun and obscured rising Beaver Moon and quickly found our cabin since there was only one choice on Main Street.  The nights are 16 hours long this time of year and we couldn’t camp, read or play rummy for that long in our van so we treated ourselves to the lap of luxury in a comfortably complete pine box cabin with coffee, heat and a TV.  We are being kind to ourselves lately since our ‘Wealth Manager’ told us to spend more money, but we are cautious because we are Park City rich with nothing but house and you can’t eat equity.  

There are two resort hotels, one in East Bluff and one in West Bluff, and like America there was little middle class in between.  The parenthetical Pueblo type resorts on either end of town wouldn’t take dogs, and we don’t go anywhere without Eva, so we settled for something simple but new, compact and clean.  Centrally located across the street from the LDS Fort Bluff theme park and next to the river bike path entrance we were Downtown-Charlie Brown.

Surrounded by BLM land, Grand Staircase and Bears Ears National Monuments, there are purportedly over 100,000 Native American ruins and rock art installations in this area including Grand Gulch and the San Juan River, which was the Park Avenue for the Ancient Ones.  With the southern end of the prosaic Coxcomb dominating the landscape from Kanab to Lake Powell, there is a Native site of some sort up every canyon which lends itself to endless bike and hike adventures.  This feature may be an extension of the porno Cockscomb in Arizona because these formations sometimes dip underground and pop up in the strangest of places, if you look at it right, with the strangest of names, like Mollie’s Nipple, Brigham’s Unit or Cave 7. 

The point is that there is infinite geography to explore down there and a lifetime to do it.  In one canyon, there was an extravagant royal apartment complex perfectly intact in the middle of a 500 foot cliff and a Michelangelo museum quality petroglyph of Wilt Chamberlin, the Alta insignia and an upside-down chairlift going backwards, peppered by a few bullet holes.   The next canyon had several ground level rooms and granaries for the secure or lazy middle-class serfs and a couple of amateur handprints, spirals and chickens on the wall.  None of these are located on any map or indicated with any BLM signs, since they are doing more with less these days and want to protect these sights from rampant tourism and unethical collectors.

Some nice Nomad campers, who live in the canyons but move every 14 days, gave us the lay of the land and some good guidance that became confused or forgotten immediately but pointed us in the right direction.  From there on it was easy to make it up as we went along and find cool stuff.  My wife would explore several canyons each day while I would rest and relax with the dog after one or two ruins, in the cool van or cabin, taking notes and naps or reading books and maps in the solace that I had nothing to prove.  We seldom encountered any other hikers either in the cool of the morning or low winter sun of the afternoon.  I suspect I gets as hot as Moab here but there is no need for reservations or any effort to beat the rush or high season.

Bluff does not get a lot of traffic or business, and they don’t seem to care.  With a Chamber of Commerce or marketing manager they could turn this place into another red rock Disney land of conspicuous consumption, but I get the sense that they don’t want to.  There is an attempt at a river trail from town through the sandy bosque cottonwoods to the river raft boat launch area, but it is only rough graded and there is a large portion that fell off into the river.  While we were there they held a Marathon from Blanding that had more volunteers than runners and more cones than competitors, but they were nice people with free bananas and 80’s music there all day. 

We were so enchanted that we stayed an extra day into the weekend and a killer Coffee house, Navajo breakfast and Pork House rib place opened mostly for the locals.  They were mostly friendly folks except for some multigenerational natives that have perfected the one-word answer that almost sounds like another question.  None-the-less we had fun playing in the country and exploring the towns funky sandstone castles and modern palaces, with our dog, undeterred and undisturbed by other thrill seekers adrenaline hounds and athletic adventurists.  Go there soon, before it becomes another Moab. 

 

Groundwater Change

When you run out of surface water you stop farming and build a dam or a canal.  When you run out of groundwater you dig a deeper well and get a bigger pump.  Out of sight, out of mind.  There-in lies the problem.  Groundwater in the west, especially in the basin fill aquifers of Utah and the Great Basin, is generally on the decline.  Historically replenished by the deep snowpack high in the surrounding mountains, these aquifers are declining from over pumping beyond the sustainable yield of the natural snowmelt recharge.   As the water level in these underground sponges declines we start pumping ancient water from previous ice ages and from the ancestral Rockies 50-300 million years ago.  This is one time water that is not coming back.   This needs to change.

We complain about all the change in Park City but what if we didn’t change.  Cities and economies are like swimming sharks, if they stop swimming they die.  We don’t want to go backwards.  It is easier to balance a glass of wine on a bowling bowl than it is for a place to remain the same, stationary, or sustainable.   So, we take all the change and growth, development and upgrades, as we morph into something new, and hopefully better. Unfortunately, that takes water.  Even though we have money and pump half of our water over Promontory, from the Weber river, we are still mining local groundwater that was snow 500 years ago on the Wasatch and 16,000 years ago on the Uintas.  We are deficit spending, and we just can’t print more water like we do money and keep the change.

The more than 1000 miles of mine tunnels under our town, longer than the NYC subway system, acts as a huge underdrain, further lowering the historical ground water levels.  With the modern change from mining and agricultural water use to municipal use by people, the changing demand has warranted a new 100 million dollar mine-water treatment plant to augment the exaction of our regional groundwater by wells. Municipal wells in the Park City area therefore withdraw water from consolidated rocks, such as the fractured and faulted, Keetley volcanics, Weber quartzite, Park City limestone and Navajo/Nugget sandstone.  These rock formations are locally broken into separate block formations that can inhibit or isolate water flow and withdrawal, which can make finding reliable water difficult.  Park City’s ground water is geologically compartmentalized and better on the east side, but recharge is not meeting demand for a sustainable yield.  Because of the low capacity for bedrock ground water storage, the hydrological system is very dependent on the amount of annual precipitation and is therefore sensitive to prolonged drought and climate change.  Less than normal precipitation, or overuse, can result in substantial groundwater level decline, both in the bedrock (affecting municipal wells), and in the basin fill (affecting stream flow), producing anecdotal and visible change. 

The Colorado River and the Great Salt Lake are suffering likewise, partially because of our inability to limit groundwater usage in these basins that have a conjugate effect on surface water deliveries.  Both The Lake and The River are shrinking from overuse of surface and ground water.  Many agricultural water users in Utah have Supplemental Water Rights that allow them to take surface or groundwater, whichever is more prevalent or convenient.  The State of Utah has regulated surface water use since 1903 and groundwater use since 1935, but both have been systematically overallocated on paper, relying on priority dates rather than regulatory restraint.  The Sate Engineer tried to rescue the worst over-pumped and overallocated groundwater basins in Utah, back to sustainability, at the turn of this century but the legislature, in their infinite wisdom, insisted that we give water users 100 years to comply with reductions.  California has only been regulating groundwater since it got scarce 10 years ago, but they give their water users a similar ridiculous time frame to achieve compliance and sustainability.  In Texas, the biggest pump wins and they won’t change.  They are not thinking of the future and the children, land subsidence or aquifer health, it is just mindless “Drill Baby Drill.”

Over pumping can cause the collapse of the aquifer and subsidence of surrounding surface lands but the practice is relatively new and is not confined locally.  Since the development of submersible well pumps for oil in the 1920’s and perfection of their application for water in the 1960’s these aquifer wells, and their surface telltale crop circles, have proliferated across the western United States.  The Ogallala aquifer is 175,000 square miles and 500 feet thick and extends from South Dakota to New Mexico and from Texas to Wyoming.  It is being depleted 2-3 times as fast as it is recharging and could be gone by 2100.  By then agriculture in the Great Plains could be radically changed with the old, imported cattle that require imported feed and water, replaced by the historical residents, the American Buffalo, Bison-Bison.  These Bison are the only living creature uniquely suited to live in that harsh climate, that spans 150 degrees F, and the limited surface water vegetation complex.  That might be a welcomed change.

We cannot continue this selfish mining of historical, ancient groundwater. which can be a metaphor for how we treat all of our Natural Resources, using them up until they are gone.  To leave it up to the private sector, the profit motive, or human nature does not work in maintaining a sustainable yield and public welfare.  Locally we need to empower the State Engineer to step in and regulate this public resource for the common good.  She (Tereasa Wilhelmsen, PE) is doing her job, for she would be blamed if we run out of water, but her hands are tied by the shortsighted capitalistic, male, Mormon, developer dominated legislature.  This is not socialism, it is the law, written to promote fair, sustainable growth and wise, conservative use for the public benefit.  What is out of sight cannot be out of mind.  Nationally and globally, we need to see our shortsighted abuse of water and our natural resources and change our ways.  Think globally, conserve locally.