THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT - THE WINTER THAT WASN’T

OK let’s address the elephant in the room.  Is this winter of our discontent about weather or climate?  Weather is about yesterday and next week.  Climate is about the last decade and next year.  The climate here is changing, quickly.  Quicker than we predicted.  Exponentially.  

This winter-that-wasn’t has been a catastrophe for skiers and the local industry, even for Vail who is somewhat insulated from climate by their selling season ski passes in the summer.  They have their money up front.  Is this an anomaly or is this the way it is going to be?  Will the ski town economy remain vibrant or be replaced with other recreation or even toxic dust clouds from The Great Salt Lake or The Colorado Plateau?  Can we fix this or should we move?  We must choose.

Park City has been getting hotter and dryer for years, at a rate of 1 - 3 inches (linearly - exponential trend) of snow less per year since 1990.  Normal weather changes are being compounded by climate change and are exponential now and not linear as historically predicted.  The 2025 Water Year, ending October 1, was the driest in 85 years in Park City, since the dust bowl of the dirty thirties, 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 Calendar Year looks average and we forgot about the 20-year drought, again.  This weather pattern has been predicted by Brian McInerney of the NWS for the last 30 years, and the Save our Snow people, as our new Rain Hydrology.

The last five months in a row, were an unbelievable 10 degrees warmer than average with some days almost 30 - 40 degrees above normal.  We were breaking daily temperature records by 5 - 10 degrees and had the unprecedented warmest winter ever by 2.5 degrees.  We are losing as much as a month on either end of the ski season.  This is anecdotally evident to us all, for even a blind man knows when it is not snowing.  

Average Park City temperatures are up 3 - 5 degrees over 125 years and Summer morning low average temperatures are up 5 - 10 degrees over the past 50 years.   This pattern was predicted by Dr. Simon Wang of USU 20 years ago with the weakening and vacillating of the polar vortex - jet stream due to the poles heating much faster than the equator. Now the west get the winter high pressure and the east gets the low, the cold and the storms  We knew this was coming.

Peak runoff to The Great Salt Lake is usually in May, not June,  and April this year, and the total volume has been diminished by 1-2 acre-feet per square mile per year - for 100 years.  That's enough water for a million people.  No wonder The Lake is drying up.  Statewide snowpack is less than 50% of average this year and The Great Salt Lake should expect less than 30% of average runoff.  It should hit its historical low next fall and could see ecosystem collapse within 5 years.  That is not to mention the increased toxic dust clouds in the Wasatch that kill people, last for weeks, reach Park City, exacerbate early runoff and diminish the historical lake effect snows.  

The Lake collapse was predicted 30 years ago, using early Ai, by Dr. Upman Lall of the UoU.   We did not listen and we pumped extra water from the ample 83-84 snow runoff to the West Desert to evaporate.  We would love that water back now for the unintended consequences of drying up.  The Lake is only 10,000 years old and has never dried up.  There are 150 terminal lakes in the world experiencing collapse.  None have been saved. 

Meanwhile The State Legislature was praying, fasting and paying lip service for another big runoff year like 2023 to save us and proposing authority and funding for more water use development.  They proposed to remove the protection of the natural steam environment, it's recreation attributes and the Public Welfare benefits of The Lake to avoid lawsuits and make development approval easier.  Trump has offered to fix The Lake but then it would have to be called The Great Trump Lake and this should probably be a state thing. 

The State could buy the 8-million-acre feet needed (the size of Flaming Gorge reservoir) from users, mostly farmers, at a cost of 2-3 billion dollars, to fix The Lake, but have not yet allocated a tenth of that amount for the problem.  They would like to drain the North Arm to the South Arm to cover up the dust but some people and all of the The Birds live up north.  The State has turned to private sector philanthrope for a solution and the Romney family has given them 100 million dollars but we need deeper pockets for this one. 

We can blame the cows and alfalfa farmers but this also on us, with our thirsty lawns, green golf courses and exponential population growth.  I believe that the only way to save The Lake is to have The Church step up and help.  They have the money, water, authority, dominion, overpopulation, and the most to gain from saving our little Vatican City II from ruin.  It would be like the seagulls eating the crickets to save Zion. 

The Colorado River, likewise, is expecting less than 30% the average annual runoff volume while Lake Powell and Mead are only 25% full.  The River was originally allocated for 17-million-acre feet (MAF) in the Colorado Compact of 1922, and now only flows 5 MAF.  This year we will be lucky to get 2 MAF and something has to give.  Lake Powell is looking at Minimum Power pool this year, where they can't make electricity and we have to burn more carbon to replace the lost power, compounding the problem yet again.  Dead Pool could be in 3-5 years, where we lose control of the outflow to the Grand Canyon and downstream Compact deliveries. But no one is talking conveniently about replumbing the Glen Canyon dam outlet to insure Lower Basin states get their legal allocation, even if the Upper Basin wanted to give it to them.   

Western Governors met in DC with the Feds and their lawyers to renegotiate The Compact and devise a plan for cuts by the end of the year, since their state representatives punted and blame Arizona.  The Compact was created to avoid the Feds and lawyers.  How's that working out?  This is The Tragedy of the Commons mixed with Russian Roulette and Game Theory, where the only way to win is to cheat.  What we need is some Quantum Entanglement, synchronized cooperation, to battle our basic human survival nature of greed and fear.   Meanwhile we continue to privatize profit and ethics while socializing cost and morality.

The Supreme Court doesn't want water law cases, so we could give this problem to Trump.  Legal or not, he could just take over the Colorado basin and stop people from growing hay, cotton or rice and we could all be great again.   Grow cotton in Alabama and rice in Viet Nam. California could desalinate seawater and Arizona could stop pumping their share into the ground.  Colorado could stop stealing its headwaters, and Utah could stop cooling Ai-Bitcoin data centers in the high desert (put them in  Alaska).  As far as Wyoming,  New Mexico, Las Vegas, Mexico, the Native Americans, the fish, the river, the riparian habitat, the littoral environment and the public trust, well, no one seems to care. 

Lets face it, the issues with The Lake and The River are symptoms to the larger sickness of Climate Change, which is here today and accelerating and unimaginable rates.  It is simply too hot and dry these days to do everything for everybody.  Solutions to both The Lake and The River range from creating free and fair markets for water so we all pay the true price, cost, value and worth of this commodity, while maintaining the self-evident, inalienable right of minimum human water needs.   This would encourage adjustment of the Prior Appropriation doctrine of ‘first in time, first in right’, ‘use it or lose it’ priority system for more equitable and economic water distribution.  We would finally be incentivized to address climate change and alternative energy instead of subsidizing oil wars and burning more carbon (put solar panels on your roof to power your house and car).  We might even grow less hay, lawns and golf courses, and turn off the tap while we shave and brush our teeth, if the price is right.  We might want to vote green; to save the planet and make money doing it at the same time.  We need to recognize water, lakes, rivers and most other natural resources, for the best beneficial use by all.  There is enough water out there, we just need to choose wisely how to use it. 

EXESTENTIAL VACUUMING

 

 

When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school
It's a wonder I can think at all
And though my lack of education hasn't hurt me none
I can read the writing on the wall

Paul Simon

 

I was just 17, and you know what I mean; an indestructible non-descript, hippy-sporto-weirdo, with good friends, a car, a gal, good grades, and nothing to worry about except where the next party would be.  I hadn’t had it so good since the day before they taught me to tie my own shoes (left over right, right over left), cross the street alone (look both ways – twice), or go to kindergarten (skipping thru duck – duck - goose) - opening up a new world of responsibility and mystery.  I had settled into an easy coexistence within the all-male, tie wearing, prep school I endured, full of overachieving Catholic, New York Irish and Italian Wise Guys, where humor ruled and nobody took themselves too seriously. 

Sitting in a sleepy, sunny, afternoon Religion - Philosophy class that had, here-to-fore, been composed of warnings of the dangers of hard liquor, refer madness and masturbation, Brother Gravitas gave us a book. by a Jewish guy named Victor Frankel, called Mans Search for Meaning.  It was about Vic surviving Hitlers concentration camps by finding the smallest reasons to live there and translating it to a life of meaning and worth.  Fair enough we thought, good for you.  But that only led to a discussion on Existentialism where life itself had no real meaning and it was up to us to fill the Existential Vacuum with things like family, friends and Jesus.  Seriously. I’m at the top of my game and you have to teach us this depressing dribble, now? I looked at the omnipresent crucifix and cursed my fate.  

My next class was on Classical Music where the squirrely teacher, Mr. Cassata - Stone revived my spirits by playing Beethoven's 'Ode to Joy' real loud on 11, on his killer quadrophonic stereo, exalting my human spirit.  English followed where the imposing Sister Harmonica Uptalk taught us to find the Christ figure in Beowulf and Moby Dick and then memorize a plethora of pretentiously haughty vocabulary words nobody ever uses.  It was good practice for the SATs, so we could get into good schools we couldn’t afford but our supercilious parents would be proud to advertise on the back of their cars.    We all just just wanted to go to the bacchanalian, party schools. After that I shuffled off to Calculus where Mr. Huey Newton talked about change and the change in the change.  Why cant things stay the same we wondered, what’s wrong with now, living in the present. 

Finally in my ninth period Physics class Ms. Casavas - Mellon taught us the concept of Entropy where everything in the universe tends to move to a state of randomness and disorder.  Christ, I thought, they are ganging up on us and now they have gone too far.  My adolescent naïveté was shattered in one irresponsible afternoon.  We could have learned about Socrates and the Unit Circle, or an infinite weight on a frictionless plane, but they chose to smash our juvenile complacency and expectations for a crushingly oblivious, manic and mindless future.  Thanks for nothing.  At wrestling practice coach Rotundy told us all to loose more weight but not to get our hopes up for the upcoming tournament, and that only one person in our weight group will finish with a victory.  What does that make the rest of us, losers?  Second rate

For the icing on the cake, we followed this up with a film by the Ohio State Troopers, for Brother Ormondo’s Drivers Ed, of drunk drivers crashing their cars and screaming in pain at the side of the road.  Steven Hemorrhaging was quietly sitting next to me in the back of the carpeted room when he fell to the floor and started convulsing and doing the horizontal bop, tuna flop.  I slid down next to him as he foamed at the mouth and his eyes rolled back in his head and I held him quietly.  As soon as it started, it stopped, and he sat up straight and slinked surreptitiously into his seat.  'Don’t tell anyone' he said, 'they wont give me a license'.  I wasn’t sure I wanted a license at that point.

Finally, before our first spring break in Florida, in Coach Dugolunchski’s Health Class, they showed us graphic films of women having babies; complete with crowning heads an afterbirth on toast.  'Holy crap', we thought, and it put us off women for about 17 minutes.  What’s next – no Santa Claus, Easter Bunny or the tooth fairy.  Our world was shattered and the only thing to do now was to get a lousy summer job for $2 an hour, apply to a trophy college and leave home forever.  Then get a job, house, kid and dog and become somnambulist sycophant, succubus succulent with a good vocabulary.  My God, what have they done.

But I am happy to say that I am in a permanent state of arrested development from the day before this entangling enlightenment; where I choose to live in the present and simplify with moderation but not mediocrity.  I try not to change who I am intrinsically, or become random or disorderly, over-procreate or crash my car too much, chase conspicuous consumption or excessive self-entertainment, but find meaning in nature and the little things, the people we love and the places we live and visit.  I let life’s meaning come to me, every day.   I don’t ever wear a tie or even tie my own shoes anymore. 

Rojo the Navajo Boy

Rojo, The Navajo Boy, pulled himself up the last exposed overhanging section of his climb up the Navajo Beehive, a rock formation he personally named after its shape and location.  He loved it for the views of The Big Red River, 1500 feet below, and of the rock desert that stretched out in every direction, with shear, iron varnished cliff walls and spooky hoodoos, windy arches and massive bridges, over dry stream channels that raged only a few times a year with chocolate red mud and debris.  A warm breeze blew from the south sun and he curious raven he named Caw hovered overhead inquisitively while Rojo’s partner Woody appeared from the easier climbing route to the north.

“How did you get up here Wood-man” he asked the happy, smart and athletic mutt, who could route find, chimney and scale vertical faces better than most of the Human Beings.  His intelligence was evidence as he surveyed and experimented with different options, planning and selecting the best multi-pitch lines almost every time.  He was smart enough for most human climbers to follow, but even he could not keep up with Rojo who climbed instinctively, smoothly and silently, like the big cats. 

Rojo pulled some pine nuts out of the pocket his mother had sewn in his deer leather loin cloth.  He shared a few with Woody as he laid on his back on the rounded peak formation and looked straight up at the cerulean sky.  He thought, hopefully, that the rainy season might be coming early.  It didn’t really come much anymore, hardly ever big, and not at all the last couple years.  He saw a Woody cloud, a puffy beaver cloud and a long lean fish cloud and one lenticular shape that he did not recognize but thought of the stories of alien visitors from the stars he had heard from the elders.  He wished he had some water to quench his salty thirst but there was less of that available now and none he could take on a climb.

Barely 16 suns and 2 moons old, he was no longer a boy, and not quite a man.  He was in his prime, feeling the random natural beauty and strength of youth in his body that seemed to grow stronger every day.  He wore a long black braid down his back that he had never cut and he had deep set, black eyes that often squinted blindly in the midday sun, but never missed a thing.  His senses were taught, tense and always aware and alert.  His world was simple and safe; his only responsibility was doing everything that his mother and father asked of him.  Today was easy, hauling rocks for a small addition to their cliff dwelling his dad was building.  After helping for a while his dad signed for him to ‘go, run and explore’.  So he did.  Mom frowned but signed ‘careful’ as he left. 

As he lay there on top of the Beehive rock overlooking The River, full of verdant glens and coves at the bottom of steep red walls, lined with natural colors but without the missing layer of the rock story, he thought about his future.  He would become a man soon, in secret, religious, smoking-sweat ceremonies in the tribal Kiva, and would have to help more in the hunting, farming, building and protection of the village.  He would become a warrior and find a wife, start a family and build his own dwelling space.  He would stay close to the tribe even though the choices were now limited in his small village on the cliff.  He would be responsible for the feeding and care of his family and protection of the tribe against warring bands that inhabit or nefariously pass thru the canyon, taking who and what they wanted and often leaving the vanquished dead or destitute.  Perhaps he would become a great father or leader, a Shaman or a Chief, planning the well-being and destiny of the entire tribe or fighting heroically in great battles with hostile neighbors. 

The future weighed heavy on young Rojo so he just rolled over on his stomach to take a nap in the mid-summer sun with Woody stretched out besides him.  He awoke, seemingly a short time later, from a fitful dream where he was running from his enemy in quick-sand to a place he had never been before.  It seemed now that he was in a different place with a different sun in a different location in the sky.  Things looked hazy to him in his groggy state so he jumped up instinctively and defensively and scanned The River and the horizon in every direction.  The world seemed smaller, more familiar to him now and not as mysterious and majestic.  

He caught a glint on the far horizon and perhaps a puff of smoke that seemed strange to him since it came from an uninhabited slickrock canyon and there had been no lightening.  He remembered his father’s story, where he saw a line of round tent covered boxes on big wheels, being pulled by strange giant elk with no antlers and driven by white people in funny clothes with thick beards and heavy metal walking sticks on their laps. They had stopped at The River edge below the great cliff with a hole in it.  They seemed perplexed by the cliff and The River.

Rojo headed home immediately.  He needed to tell his father, he would know what to do.  He had heard stories from the elders about funny tall white men on The River a few years ago, led by a one arm man in a chair in a fat flat canoe, who floated by, half naked and sunburnt, emaciated and hairy.  Warriors had watched them float from the bushes and heard their noisy camp down river and they spoke a language no one knew.  He remembered his grandfather’s story of the white holy men on horses called Fathers, with no children, who had crossed the same wide spot in The River they called The Crossing, several generations ago.  The Shaman had said it was a sign of change and disruption from the gods and an omen of visiting tribes or families with different colors and customs, needs and values.  The visitors had been forgotten, until today, when they lit a fire in Forgotten Canyon.

Rojo and Woody scrambled in a control slide down the Beehive, over a large exposed slickrock and down a slot canyon to the Wah Weep creek where they lived.  He ran effortlessly and continuously stopping only at a small spring, where he and Woody previously drank from the water flowing from the rock, dripping down green mosey tentacles, that had recently run dry.  He was barely sweating when he entered the village of the Shade Seekers tribe despite the hot and dry mid-day sun.  The Village consisted of several stream side, connected caves and masonry upper cliff dwellings that faced the midday sun, warming in the direct low winter direct sunlight but shady and cool in the growing season from the rock overhang and the recess.  The bottom lands were covered with corn and bean crops they watered with diversions from the creek, when it flowed.  There were racks with meat, fish and skins drying in the sun and rock shelves of pottery curing in the open air. There were also piles of waste and refuse, burial grounds and a small field for games and ceremony.  

At the end of a minor side canyon there was a small spring that was fenced off from all the domesticated dogs and chickens they had collected.  He ran past the spring and spied his young second cousine Rojean, gathering spring water in decorated pots, but he did not acknowledge her shining eyes and with their usual secret greeting.  They were old, best friends, maybe more.  His chest fluttered at the sight of her but Rojo quickly climbed the chiseled steps in the rocks towards his home and finally up the hemp ladder to their dwelling where he met his father.

As he breathlessly told of his discovery, the other men of the village gathered round and the women, children and dogs quickly followed.  They respectfully let him speak his piece and tell his story, without interruption, and when he finished, they questioned him on the details, locations, timing and veracity of his tale.  They did not doubt him, but this was serious, and they wanted to be sure.  The men immediately gathered together with the Chief and the Shaman and went down to the Kiva to smoke, think and discuss this happening.  Rojo went to follow but his father stopped him with a firm hand to his chest.  ‘Not yet’ is all he signed. 

The women went slowly back to tending the children and their summer chores of grinding corn, tanning leather, sewing, beading, weaving and making pottery while chatting excitedly in fearful, hushed tones.   Rojo stood there alone, not knowing where to go and what to do.  He didn’t know where he belonged. He was not a man or a boy, a woman or a girl.  He was confused, ashamed and angry.  So he struck out alone, to deal with this situation on his own, like a man, with his dog Woody.  He took his strongest rain stick, a stone knife his dad had given to him last summer and a sling shot he had made with rounded desert marbles he had gathered, and headed for The River... .

Wicked Fast Change

     We have reached another inflection point for modern man, a turning point that will be beyond our comprehension or imagination.  Change has always happened in population, politics, culture, computing and climate.  Change was originally slow and plodding, almost linear, for the longest of times.  Eons.  Slow population change, for example, caught up with modern medicine, hygiene and science, and then exploded.  The world population in 1800 was 1 billion, until then it had  doubled about every 10,000 years, but then reached 2 billion in 1900 and 8 billion in 2000.  The population of the United States went from 5 million to 75 million to 300 million in that time frame and the population of Utah went from roughly 30,000 to 300,000 to 3 million over that same period.  These are the intrinsic integers, the changes or Delta, that drive the essence of everything we do.  Necessity is the mother. 

    In the 1970’s Alvin Toffler wrote a book called Future Shock indicating that culture change was accelerating exponentially, taking us from the industrial to the information age and beyond, and it was causing stress and disorientation.  My grandfather, for example, was born when there were no cars or airplanes, computers or other galaxies besides our own.  He died after splitting atoms won the war, men walked on the moon and now there are billions of galaxies and alternative quantum universes. Hippies replaced the Flappers and Zoot Suits, skirts got short and hair got longer, peace, love and rock and roll replaced wars, depressions and revolutions.  Malls replaced Main Street and Wall Street replaced Route 66.  Sinatra replaced Rudy Valley and the Beatles replaced Elvis.  The Dead replaced Disco and Taylor Swift replaced Grunge.  Now we have Snoop Dogg doing the Olympics with Martha Stewart, ex-convicts mixing greed with weed.  Politics, they say, follows culture. God help us. 

    The biggest worry in 1900 was that city’s would be 10 feet deep in horse manure by now.  Our biggest worry now is that we won’t have enough electricity to power, or water to cool, our Ai and Bitcoin data centers.  After staring at campfires and the stars for eons, singing, dancing and telling stories, we learned to sit in front of the wireless radio, listening to live national broadcasts on a stand-up radio.  Now we can watch any movie ever made at any time we want on huge, cheap LED TVs.  Jimmy Carter was the fist President born in a hospital and Chuck Yeager was the first man to go faster than sound.  Now presidents are manufactured, not born, and we can go Mach 10.  The 1964 World’s Fair in NYC showed television telephones, self-driving cars and instant micro-wave meals, in their Future-Rama pavilion.  It was the age of the Jetsons.  The future was so bright we had to wear shades.  Then we invented the PC and laptops, Internet and Email, Google and Amazon, Facebook and Twitter, bringing all that computer power to the masses.  Our culture followed with our obsession of the Web, communication, searches, shopping and social media.  Technology provided solutions but compounded our problems with unintended consequences, so the changes became exponential. 

    Now with the advent of General Artificial Intelligence and Quantum Computing we are preparing for change that is faster than linear, geometric or exponential.  We have introduced a change faster change than Factorial and even Tetration where the change of the change is accelerating exponentially.  Remember from school that Linear change is (Y=mX+b) or 2,3,4,5,6,7, while Exponential is (n^X) or 2, 4, 8, 16, 32.  Four Factorial  (n!) is a multiplicative sequence of  4x3x2=24.    Factorial series progression is 2, 6, 24, 120, 720 and 10 factorial is already 3,628,800, getting real big real fast. Tetration succession is iterated exponents of exponents and is 2, 4, 16, 65536, 2^19,728.  Super big, wicked fast.    

    These are the speeds and the capabilities that we will be able to compute with Ai and future Quantum Computers doing everything, all at once, mimicking with algorithms our metaphysical collective energy and interconnected unconsciousness, space-time fabric, DejaVu, kismet, coincidences, life, love and God.  This will be done using photons instead of electrons with no interference, friction, heat, energy or cooling water needs, instantaneously going faster than the speed of light.  Millions-billions-trillions times faster than we have today and almost as fast, and as good, as the human brain.  Hold on to your shorts.

    We will need this computing power to keep up with a population of over 10 billion people, and complex world where all knowledge, history coding and calculations are available to everyone instantaneous.  Imagine; computers coordinating all our personal transport drones in three-dimensional space, freeing up the roads for walking, bikes, gardens and parks.  Or cellular implants and USB ports in your head to connect you to Ai and the world for communication, calculation, data and downloadable memory.  This is not the deconstructionist dream of John and Yoko's imagination, it is the future.

    In the same light there has been an exponential rise in the global temperatures, over 1 degree F^*  a century at first, sneaking up on us since the industrial revolution but really taking off since he 70s.  Drill baby dill.  Now we are close to rising 1 degree a decade, in certain places, during certain seasons, and we are still caught up in denial and inaction.  What is alarming is not the natural cyclical change in weather but the compounding rate of change in the change of the climate, which is unprecedented over the past million years and the last 30 years.  Natural disasters have increased in both frequency and ferocity. The years 2023, 2024, and 2025 now rank as the three highest on record for the number of billion-dollar weather and climate disasters in the United States.  Globally, the number of climate-related disasters has tripled over the last 30. Pay me now or pay me later.

This is the existential change our generation has to face, threatening our individual agency and collective sustainability.   They say that economics also follows culture but we have mostly denied this change because it is inconvenient, especially now.   If we ignore it, knowing it is happening, we will be The Worst Generation guilty of Gross Negligence.  Can this be solved with people, politics, culture or computers?  There is already miserable mass migration and rampant repulsive re-immigration spurred by this change.  The fight for food and water, living space and clean air will lead to conflict and wars between the haves and the have-nots.  The have-nots will shoulder most of the burden of change, as usual.  Water and weather flow towards money.  The haves will gain from it as we privatize profits and socialize climate costs again, as we do in wars, disasters and in fair or free-for-all-trade.  Certain places will become unlivable and maybe our entire planet will become a sweltering hell hole.  The rich and the famous are already looking for ways out on Space X or NASA missions.  

    The question is if we can react and respond with resilience and results for re-enchantment and re-evolution or will we continue to kick the can down the road until it melts.  They say that a change is as good as a rest but we don’t have time to rest.  Change is not resting, its accelerating.  Wicked fast.

Matthew Lindon, PE.  Hydrologist.

Park City, Utah

Waterandwhatever.blogspot.com

Bad News - Good News

"A long December and there's reason to believe / Maybe this year will be better than the last."

Counting Crows

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 Calendar 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.  Our new Rain Hydrology

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 (Flaming Gorge) 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.  

The state has turned to philanthrope for a solution and the Romney family has given them $100 million but we need deep pockets for this one. I believe that the only way to save the lake is to have The Church step in and help.  They have the money, water, political ware-with-all, authority, dominion, responsibility and the most to gain from saving our little Vatican city from ruin.  I would be like the seagulls eating the crickets to save Zion.  Trump has offered to fix it but then it would have to be the Great Trump Lake and this should be a state thing.

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, where we have o burn stuff to replace the power, and Dead Pool in 5-10, where they lose control of flows for the Grand Canyon and Compact deliveries. No one is talking about replumbing the Glen Canyon dam to insure lower basin states get their allocation, even if the upper basin wants to give it to them.   At the end of he day we might just get Glen Canyon back again, soft rock and gentle rapids to explore in canoes and inner tubes.

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.  How's that working out.  The Supreme Court doesn't want it so we could give this one to Trump.  He could just take over the basin and stop people from growing hay or eating cows and we could all be happy.   California could desalinate water to grow rice and Arizona could stop growing cotton

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!

Solutions range from creating free and fair markets for water so we all pay the true price, cost, value and worth of water while maintaining the public welfare for all self evident, inalienable human water requirements.   This would encourage adjustment of the prior appropriation doctrine of first in line, first in right, use it or lose it.  We would also be incentivized to address climate change and alternative energy.  We might even grow less hay to feed less cows, if the price is right.  We might even vote green; to save the plane and make money at the same time.  There is enough water out there, we just need to choose wisely how to use it.

 

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.  

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 It 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.