Development News

New West Feature

High Water in Colorado, With Ripples to Las Vegas

By Allen Best, 5-24-11

Heavy snowpack in Colorado's High Country should help top off the West's reservoirs this summer. Lake Mead pier photo by Allen Best.

Colorado’s snowiest surveyed location, Buffalo Pass, on average reaches its maximum depth on May 9 and then begins shrinking.

This year is not average.

Snowpack at the 10,500-foot pass, located north of Steamboat Springs, this year got to 202 inches but has lost little bulk. Too much new snow keeps coming. That, in turn, means the water content keeps rising. The former record of 71.1 inches was breached long ago, and as of Monday morning the new record was 79.2 inches.

Spring this year is looking over its shoulder at winter. But when the snowmelt finally begins in earnest, Colorado will have what kayakers and rafters call a big water year. The circumstances have some emergency service personnel a trifle nervous. Dam operators, worried about what will happen when the weather inevitably warms, have been draining reservoirs, confident that there’s plenty of water on the mountain slopes in replacement.

Downstream in the desert, the giant reservoirs called Powell and Mead should have higher water levels. Half of the Colorado River’s water comes from Colorado.

It’s a snowpack with dimensions not often seen in recent years. The most frequent comparisons are to big water years in the 1980s.

“This year the lateness of the melt out and the size of the snowpack approaches that of 1983,” says Mike Gillespie, snow survey coordinator for the Natural Resources Conservation Service in Colorado. Utah and Wyoming also have big snowpacks this year, he added, as do other Western states. “But we have the most critical conditions in terms of snowmelt.”

Normally, snowpack in the Yampa River Basin, where Buffalo Pass is located, would be reduced to 55 percent of its maximum moisture content. This year, the basin was at 154 percent the week before Memorial Day.,

“Most of the water remains up high,” says Gillespie. “We get these brief dry periods of three or four days and we will start to see the melt occur, and then we see another storm and we rebuild what has been melted off. The net effect is that we are prolonging what we have out there in the snowpack later into spring. And now we are approaching June. This is definitely much later than we would like to be in terms of melt proceeding.”

Cameron Pass, between Steamboat Springs and Fort Collins, also had a record snowpack in early May, while other regions southward to Vail and Aspen had deep snow but not necessarily records. Southern Colorado, as is common in La Niña years, has had subpar snow, with the Sangre de Cristo Range at just 50 percent of average.

For skiers, the continued snows represent opportunity – and risk. A backcountry skier along the along the Continental Divide west of Denver died Saturday after being caught in an avalanche. For skiers with less risk, Arapahoe Basin remains open on weekends, although it will be joined by Aspen Mountain on Memorial Day and, as conditions allow, into June. “We figure that if we open for skiing maybe it will quit snowing,” quipped Rich Burkley, vice president of mountain operations for Aspen Mountain.

In Steamboat Springs, the snow and now rain hasn’t yet produced floods – and may not. Bob Struble, director of emergency management for Routt County, hopes for cool weather to prevail, as occurred last year, causing a more leisurely snowmelt lingering into July.

The most significant problem has been landslides blocking local roads, the result of soil being saturated by the intense rains of May. “Everywhere you go you can see a slope that is sloughing or has slid.”

Eighty miles south, authorities in the Vail area are also tracking mudslides. “I worry about the potential mudslide and flood-prone areas of Eagle County,” says Barry Smith, director of emergency management for Eagle County. “It’s sort of my job.”

Snowpack and water content mirror those of 1995, and there were no mudslide issues that year. But 1984, the second of the two big water years in the ‘80s, was another matter. Mud oozed down a hillside overlooking the old mining town of Red Cliff, and in Vail, rocks loosened in the spring thaw tumbled into houses at Booth Creek. “It just scared the hell out of a lot of people,” says long-time Vail resident Jim Lamont.

At Dowd Junction, located on the outskirts of Vail, mud from Meadow Mountain surged onto Interstate 70, Colorado’s dominant east-west artery, closing traffic for several days. Since then, steps have been taken to reduce dangers at all three locations. But there has been no similar situations to test their effectiveness.

Ty Ortiz, the lead engineer in for the Colorado Department of Transportation rockfall program, says some slumping of soils and falling of rocks are expected along highways, but nothing out of the ordinary.

This year’s big water has also reinvigorated long-standing arguments about the best purpose of spring runoff. Farmers, cities and others say the record snowpack demonstrates, yet again, the need for dams and reservoirs to store water for the inevitable dry years.

“I think it’s one of those ‘duh’ moments,” says Brian Werner, spokesman for the Northern Colorado Water Conservation District. “Look at all the water that is going downstream, on both sides of the mountain (Continental Divide).”

That is, says Werner, water that could legally stay in Colorado – if it had the necessary dams. “We need to put some more buckets out there, and these are good years to illustrate why we need buckets.”

The district delivers water to 640,000 irrigated acres of farmland that extends to Nebraska plus cities in one of the West’s fastest-growing areas, between the university towns of Boulder and Fort Collins. To deliver reliable water, Northern proposes a new reservoir at Glade Park, adjacent to the Poudre River, where peak flows of 6,000 cubic feet per second are forecast this year, double the average.

A sub-district of Northern also wants to expand export water from an existing impoundment on the Colorado River called Windy Gap, located near Granby. Existing transmountain diversions from that area between the Winter Park ski area and Rocky Mountain National Park have already reduced native flows by 60 percent, with this and other planned diversions potentially increasing the take to 80 percent.

Conservationists say the individual cuts over the last century, some larger than others, now collectively threaten the ecological integrity of the river system. The flows this year stand out because they are so rare.

“The last time the river was really allowed to flow was in 1984, over 25 years ago. The river needs high flows more often than that,” says Ken Neubecker, of the Western Rivers Institute.

Neubecker and other conservationists argue that rivers need frequent flushing flows, to clean out the mud from the interstitials between river-bottom cobbles, crucial to both fish and the invertebrates upon which the fish feed.

In an average year, says Neubecker, reservoirs hold back so much water that there is little life left to the “Colorado. He cites 2004, when he visited Pumphouse, a popular raft-launching site at the bottom end of Gore Canyon. The snowpack normally could have produced 3,000 cubic feet per second. “It was 249 cfs,” he remembers. “I waded across the river and barely got my knees wet.”

From 1905 to 1918, before most dams and diversions, peak spring flows ranged between 6,700 cfs and 22,000 cfs at the Kremmling gauge, near Gore Canyon. Even during the 1990s, a generally wet period, the big water year of 1995 yielded only 6,700 cfs.

Downstream in Utah, those big flows of 1983 topped off a nearly full Lake Powell and then threatened to dismantle Glen Canyon Dam. Water being released at huge volumes threatened to tear apart the spillways. While at least some fans of Edward Abbey’s “Monkeywrench Gang” relished the thought, the Bureau of Reclamation gave highest priority that summer to replacing the faulty design.

The spillways haven’t been needed since then, however, and nor are they likely to be used again this year. Lake Powell still has plenty of capacity. But other reservoirs upstream, such as Flaming Gorge, located on the Utah-Wyoming border, are being drained to allow room to hold water form the snowpack in the Wind River Range. Reservoirs in the Colorado River Basin as of May 16 were at 53.6 percent of capacity.

In Nevada, operators of Lake Mead project the reservoir will get 12.36 million acre-feet of water from Powell. This compares with average deliveries of 8.23 million acre-feet. Depending upon how much water Los Angeles needs and other variables, this may allow the level of Mead to rise by 32 feet from its low point last November. The reservoir then was at the lowest levels since after Hoover Dam was completed in 1935.  The Southwest has had drought conditions more years than not since 1999, with one year in particular, 2002, remarkable in its dryness.

For marina operators, the receding shoreline has posed enormous logical problems. Each has a tangle of power lines, water and sewage pipes, all of which must be moved, along with other infrastructure, in pursuit of the retreating shoreline.

Now, says Andrew Muñoz, spokesman for the Lake Mead National Recreation Area, marina operators will have to begin moving their small towns back up along the shore as water levels rise.

On the other hand, the National Park Service itself will be able to save money. It has been spending $2 million to $6 million per year to extend the concrete boat ramps to the shoreline. For the park as a whole, it cost $6 million for every 20 feet drop in water level. At one location, Hemenway Harbor, the Park Service has had to lay a half-mile of concrete ramp.

“If you Google Hemenway Harbor, it actually looks like an airport runway,” says Muñoz. “That’s how far we have had to expand the ramp.”

Long-time Colorado journalist Allen Best can be found at mountaintownnews.net.

Like this story? Get more! Sign up for our free newsletters.