Bad News - Good News

1    The 2025 water year, ending October 1, was the driest in 85 years in Park City with only 13 inches of precipitation or 60% of average and nothing all summer. Then we had 7 inches of rain by New Years so the Calander year looks average and we forgot the drought.    This has been predicted by me and Brian McInerney of the NWS for the last 30 years.

2    Average Park City temperatures are up 3-5 degrees over 100 years and Summer morning low average temperatures are up 10 degrees over the past 50 years.  Normal weather changes are being compounded by climate change and are exponential and not linear.

3    The last three months were 10 degrees above average.  We were breaking some daily temperature records by 5 degrees.  We are losing as much as a month on either end of the ski season.  Even a blind man knows when it is not snowing.  

4    Statewide snowpack is less than 50% of average.  Same for the Colorado River basin and most of the west.  This is a regional weather pattern that was predicted 20 years ago by the Dr Simon Wang of the State Climatologist office.  

5     The Great Salt Lake should expect much less than 50% of average runoff and should hit its historical low next fall and could see ecosystem collapse within 5 years.  That is not to mention the toxic dust clouds in the Wasatch that kill people and compound early and less runoff.  This was Ai predicted 30 years ago by Dr. Upman Lall of USU.

 

6    The legislature is fasting and praying for another big runoff year like 2023 and proposing authority and funding for more water use development.  They propose to remove from Water Right approval criterion; the affects to the natural steam, recreation and Public Welfare clauses.

7    The State needs to buy 8-million-acre feet of water from farmers at a cost of 2-3 billion dollars to fix The Lake.  The State allocated only 50 million dollars to save the lake.  There are 150 terminal lakes in the world experiencing collapse.  None have been saved.

8    The Colorado River is expecting less than half the average runoff while Lake Powell and Mead are only 25% full.  Lake Powell is looking at Minimum Power pool in 1-2 years and Dead Pool in 5-10, where they lose control of flows for the Grand Canyon and Compact deliveries. 

9    Western Governors are now meeting in DC with the Feds and their lawyers to renegotiate the Colorado Compact of 1922 and devise a plan, by the end of the year, since the state's reps could not do it on time.  The Colorado compact was created to avoid the Feds and lawyers.

10    GOOD NEWS.   There is some snow in the forecast for next week and more changes for next month.  Our climate is now dominated by extreme events, like 2023 snow and last October's rain, so we could expect at least one big storm cycle this year, on average.  Pray that it is snow!

 

Rojo

 “Rojo the Rindian boy

Loves all the animals in The Woods...”

 

Like most kids, I had an alter ego when I was young.  His name was Rojo and he was an Indian boy.   He ran thru The Woods, singing his Rojo song, loving nature and relishing the freedom of being an Indian and young boy in Massapequa, Long Island, a suburban Indian village, near the shopping mall. The Woods was very small and silent but it was Rojo’s world.  

Unofficially named by my mentor, older brother, The Woods was really just a clump of ten or twelve trees at the back of a school yard that had recently replaced a potato field in the post war sprawl.  It was surrounded by tiny little houses, built in the Levittown assembly line style to house the returning veterans from Korea who were escaping dirty Brooklyn and hot Queens. Fifteen thousand GI Bill dollars, mortgaged over 30 years at 3%, would get you a 1/8-acre lot with a 900 square foot house with one bathroom, an unfinished basement and a garage and, for open space, every home was allocated a front yard and a back yard that we thought was our field of dreams.  

I had no idea of the megalopolis, chaos and confusion that surrounded me, the trains full of worker commuters heading to The City or the planes above bringing people from all over the world to Idlewild airport, located just down the road at the end of the beaches.  This was before it was renamed after JFK, assassinated for trying to take care of poor people and treat all people equally.

I may have made Rojo up or I may have seen him on a black and white TV, but I ran around the only woods near my house, jumping over logs and streams, clubbing trees in vicious battles or throwing sticks at imaginary enemies, saving the day for my family and tribe.  One day Rojo threw a big stick at a small bird on the ground and killed it.  He spent the rest of the day crying and burying the bird and resolved then to be a friend of all the animals in the Woods.  When he went home for his nap his dad asked him what he was crying about he just shook his head silently.  Rojo thought he wouldn't understand. Dad just rubbed his head and said it would be ok.  Rojo's dad was right.

Late one night after bringing home a few fish in a bucket that Rojo had caught in a pond, he went out to inspect his fish friends in his PJs.  Under a half-moon light he saw that one was belly up and the other did not look so good. He woke his mom up and got her to drive him and his fish back to the pond to set them free, no questions asked.  She understood.  She was Rojo's mom.  

Rojo also had an imaginary, invisible companion dog - Woody. There were dog prints ensconced in our driveway, placed by a stray dog when the concrete was freshly poured and Rojo saw them as proof that Woody was there and he was real. Only his sister could see Woody, sometimes.  They jumped the fence behind the house together every day and ran wildly, nily-wily thru the Woods with no shirt on, in his PF Flyer moccasins. 

One day Rojo woke up and there was an elephant tied to a tree in The Woods.  When he and Woody jumped the fence to investigate there were horses and goats, lambs and livestock milling around among tents and machinery, rides and games, concession stands and a food court.  The circus had come to town.  Rojo was willing to share The Woods for a week with all these animals and people but he was glad when they left and he had his sanctuary back.

 

This clump of trees was big enough for Rojo, for a time, and since he was not allowed to cross the street yet, the Woods was his home. He would spend hours lying on the grass with Woody under Eisenhower skies, by a Kerouac stream.  Looking up at the clouds and making animals out of the patterns he wondered if the kids in China were looking at the same clouds. In the spring he frolicked in the mud under the budding lime-green leaves.  In the fall Rojo would play in big piles of musty smelling, colored leaves and in the grey winter wind he would track animals and build a snow fort for protection, warmth and naps.  

Then one day, several big yellow machines, that looked like dinosaurs, came and started digging up The Woods.  They knocked down the trees and dug a big hole.  Then they filled the hole with foundations and big sprawling concrete buildings.  They paved the paradise parking lot and put up a big neon sign that said Jesus is 'Coming Soon’.  Rojo wept wordlessly and retreated into himself.

 

Every day my mom would tie my shoes and ask me what I was going to do on such a glorious, sunny day. Play Rojo, I would say. Then one day mom taught me to tie my own shoes, easy as pie but the tide had somehow shifted.  Then dad taught me how to cross the street (look both ways, twice) and my world expanded beyond my backyard and The Woods.   Rojo was forgotten.  Eventually all the fields went away, all the lots were filled with more sprawl and progress, all The Woods were razed for something new and not necessary.  All the roads got bigger and busier. All the people got hectic and bustled around like ants.  I did too.  

 

Soon I was going to school, riding a bike, and making new friends.  In fifth grade I got a job delivering newspapers, by seventh grade I discovered girls.  Soon I was going to prep school in the city in a jacket and tie.  Then it was designer colleges far from home and then a huge road trip out west to start my own life with a job, a home and a family of my own. 

One day I was hiking in the leaves in the woods out west, and I just started, inexplicitly, running, delicately, dynamically, effortlessly, joyfully, up and down and all around.   I jumped over logs and rocks and threw sticks at big trees and rocks.  I was energized by nature, the sunshine, the wind, the color, the cold climate and my surroundings, my freedom and just the fun of being young and healthy and alive. I was feeling my inner Rojo again and I loved it. I found myself doing it more and more often to keep my life in balance, for my sanity and for my own real sense of self.  

 

I consequently structured my life to maximize my inner Rojo; to ski and ride and hike outside in the hills as much as possible.  I tried to simplify my needs and desires and find pleasure in just getting out and about, to treat people and animals with kindness and to revel in nature, preserving and protecting it. I still spend a lot of time in my big new back yard; the woods of the West, the slopes of the Rocky Mountains and the deserts of the Colorado Plateau, channeling my inner Rojo. 

Whatever you do, don't forget who you really are, who you really were.  Channel your inner Rojo as often as you can and return to a simpler age when there were no worries or time constraints, appointments or obligations, shoes to tie or schools and jobs to attend, when the world was The Woods and you loved everything in it.  

Killer Keeper Holes

 A river has great wisdom and whispers its secrets to the hearts of men.  

Mark Twain 

Hedge funders, Jerry and Judy were on a bucket list, family dream vacation, on the Salmon River in the Frank Church Wilderness in central Idaho, an untrammeled wilderness the size of Connecticut, ‘where man is just a visitor, who leaves’.  A-list, Baby Boomers relaxing effortlessly on a sunny summer day in the lap of luxury on a top-shelf, commercial river trip, Jerry was suddenly and ignominiously tossed from the boat as it entered an inconsequential, unnamed rapid.  Immersed instantly in a brand-new underwater environment of cold-water waves and rocks, bubbles and sediment, fish and algae, he struggled to get to the surface, unsuccessfully.  His industrial-sized life-jacket tugged ineffectively at his shoulders as the river drove him incessantly down to the bottom.

 ‘Relax,’ he thought, this happens all the time and the guides know what to do,’ as he stretched his legs downstream as previously instructed, not quiet knowing which way was up or down. Running out of breath quickly, he tried to swim to the surface time and again, only to get sucked down into the gloam before he could even get a gulp of air.  ‘Something is radically wrong here,’ he thought, I should be doing the backstroke on the sunny surface and looking for an eddy or the boat.’  ‘It is time to panic with all my might.’

The boats were rowing and positioning for the save, scouting the rapids for a bobbing head, with a throw-rope, family members in the bow and stern, trained just a few days before.  The kids were increasingly horrified as time ticked by, looking for any sight of dad.  After a long while Judy began to think half-heartedly, ‘these kids are orphans.’   Meanwhile Jerry continued to churn randomly in the gloom of the killer rapid, washing machine, keeper hole, fighting for his life, suspended between the surface and the rocky bottom of the river, thinking, ‘Holy crap, I’m drowning.’  Fighting with all he had, he battled the maelstrom, stressing and straining, circling and recycling in the same endless loop. In the cold water he battled hypothermia and started to care less and succumb.

When his strength, will and air were about to runout and he was about to give up, he felt the hand of a counterintuitive God nudge him down and encourage him to swim out the bottom.  With nothing else to lose, he took off his life-jacket and swam toward the dark bottom.  Miraculously he caught a current along the river-bed that whisked him quickly downstream, out of the chaotic turbulent, keeper-hole into calmer water that settled with organized laminar flow. Regaining his natural buoyancy and screaming for air, he exploded through the surface into the clear, calm, blue light of day, gasping violently for oxygen, well downstream of the boats and his family.  They could not see or hear him yet, so he slowly swam towards the eddy by the shore and hauled his sorry ass out on to the beach, hugging the warm sand, glad to be alive. He could hardly yell or be heard above the roar of the whitewater.  When his eldest daughter spotted him and the boats eventually caught up, his youngest son said, ‘Dad you don’t look too good.’  When Judy embraced him long and hard they were both shivering with tears in their eyes.  Jerry was strangely calm, knowing that it was not his day, with a newfound appreciation for the power, persistence and recklessness of water. 

Jerry and Judy had experienced, firsthand, a keeper hole rapid that occur naturally in rivers and below man-made diversion dam structures,.  The river transitions from deep and slow water above the rapid into the shallow, faster water of the rapid to dissipate energy of the steeper slope.  It then jumps back again quickly to the more efficient slow water when the slope flattens, creating a counter-clockwise, upstream flowing hydraulic, rotating back on itself.  If the river is flat enough and there is sufficient backwater, this hydraulic-jump can become submerged and out of sight, creating a vertical back eddy flow.  These dangerous hydraulics now kill more than 100 people a year in the United States alone. 

Over the last thirty years there has been an effort to address this problem by identifying and inventorying these occurrences, mitigating and removing them while educating and alerting recreationalists and the public.  These efforts have met resistance at the Federal or State level by legislators and uniquely qualified dam regulators, saying it is an unfunded mandate that they have no authority or funding to address.  ‘It is not my job,’ they claim.  Over this time more than one thousand people may have been killed. 

These periodic occurrences fall short of the catastrophic emergencies needed for us to notice, act and assume responsibility.  The private sector has chipped in to help but there is not much money to be earned in this pursuit of unidentified owners and uninterested politicians.  Academia has helped generously with an Ai inventory from aerial photos showing thousands of these structures nationwide, mostly in the mid-west where the rivers are flat and the hydraulics are submerged.  This effort inspired funding for a full national inventory with ground-truthing, but the effort has stalled as funding has been cut by the latest Administration. Dam safety organizations efforts at public relations and a nationwide education program with consistent messaging and warning signage has also been helpful, but ultimately not enough and has fallen short.  As we remain lost in the process, churning around as if caught in a keeper hole hydraulic, we realize that it is up to the water people in the know to demand action.  Saying it is not my job does not cut I anymore.  If the people lead, the leaders will follow.  We must take off our safe life-jackets and swim down and out of our process cycle, to rise to the surface, breathe again and flow freely like water. 

Novembers Gone, December is Toast, January is Next

Welcome to the winter that never was.  After enduring a hot summer in 2025 and the record dry Water Year ending October 1, we experienced a record wet October that would make the calendar year look average and inspire hope for the coming winter.  That was not to be, as our hope was dashed against the exposed rocks on the mountains over the next three months.  Although precipitation was copious in December, it was too warm to snow and make snow, even if they had the water.  If it was colder we would have been buried in several feet of early natural powder, setting the stage for a lucrative Christmas and a Happy New Year of skiing. Bah Humbug.  Not this year.  

So I took another look at the PRISM geospatial database out of Oregon State, that calibrates nicely with an accepted global average annual temperature rise of 1 – 2 degree in the United States, over the past Millennium.  We have seen a 2 -3 degree raise in average annual temperatures in Park City over that period and a 5 – 10 degree raise in summer morning low temperatures, with most of it just in the last 50 years.  Now that is real, anecdotal change we all can wrap our heads around.  These temperatures are not rising linearly at a steady rate but rather exponentially at an ever-increasing rate.  Dr. Simon Wang showed this to us 20 years ago at a climate conference at Utah State, with the repositioning of the winter jet stream and the atmospheric rivers, and Dr. Upman Lall showed us an Ai model of the drying of the Great Salt Lake as well, but no one would listen.

   Recently, I took a look at the monthly average temperatures for the last ten and thirty years, long enough to have a valid sample set yet still capture the most recent trends.  The 135 year data set created by Prism shows similar results that are washed out a bit by pre-industrial numbers at the turn of the last century.  While our average annual temperature has risen almost a degree, just over this shorter period, the average November has risen 2 degrees and December has risen 3 degrees.   Astonishingly, the November 2025 average temperature in Park City was 10.5 degrees higher than the 10 and 30 year average and was 11.4 degrees higher in December 2025 than  the decadal average.  January 2026, by comparison was only 5.1 degrees warmer than average but felt like a complete anomaly to the average January temperatures that have actually been dropping in the last ten years.  There is no denying that, even anecdotally, it is getting warmer.  We are losing weeks, if not months at the front and back end of the ski season.  We are breaking records by 5-10 degrees now.  Even a blind man knows when it is not snowing.

This may not seem like much but this is an entire monthly average over only ten and thirty years. This occurs at a critical time of year when plus or minus a degree or two can make or break the entire ski industry.  If they miss Thanksgiving or don’t fill beds for Christmas, the season is toast.  Additionally, June and July monthly temps have increased an average of 2 degrees in ten years.  Thankfully January – May average monthly temps have dropped a degree and high temps have dropped 2-3 degrees although morning low Ave temps continue to rise for every month.  It is good to know that in the heart of the winter the daily temps remain cool and robust.  

But another analysis I undertook shows that  the spring runoff season peaks in May now and not June, and we have lost almost a month on the back end of the ski season.  Local Brian McInerney, formally of the NWS, and I have been preaching this locally for years as The Water Guys.  Now we are saying I told you so.  It’s not a minor challenge or a nagging issue to contend with, it is a major problem for us all, in our first world town, and throughout the second and third world. 

It makes me think, ‘what are all these developers thinking’ with their five billion dollar investments that are wallowing in the mud in the middle of January.  I wonder if we will have snow for the Olympics, let alone Christmas.  Water flows to money but not so much with snow.  Perhaps we should rethink the timing of the ski season and have MLK day be the new Thanksgiving and Presidents Week be Christmas and New Years.  We try to open the resorts with10 inches of snow but close them down every year in the spring with 100.   What is wrong with this picture?

The ski industry has put the risk of climate change on us by making us commit to passes by September 1, thereby exonerating themselves from the bad snow year they know is coming.  I would be nice if they had a little more skin in the game.  They are suffering this year with losses from condos and concessions, but it could be a lot worse.  

 I did read a local resort’s strategic plan and the word skiing was not even mentioned until the second half of the publication.  Maybe they see the writing on the wall by promoting other recreation and lifestyles, or maybe they see an opportunity to bait and switch.  It is like them selling all the front row, view condos on a slope-side project and then building another building in front of it.  Either way they knowingly sell a commodity that won’t exist for very long, taking the money and run.  The climate is changing and we should change with it.  Acknowledge, accept, adapt, adjust. Improvise.  Overcome.  Like the Marines.  Ooohrah.  Semper Flexibus.  Reinvent winter.