High good, low bad: Mead in June
NASA image of the Colorado River Delta in the Gulf of California. Click on image for NASA history of the image and the region.
LAKE MEAD is the Colorado River reservoir holding key water supplies for California, Arizona, Nevada and the Republic of Mexico. The remnants of what was once a vast watershed concluding in the Gulf of California now depend on releases of water from Mead.
The Colorado River in San Marino
THIS kind of discretion could put a reporter out of business, or in court, but the essay by photography curator Jennifer A. Watts introducing the “Downstream” exhibit at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens is too beautiful to bowdlerize. Better to lift it intact:
Karen Halverson, Davis Gulch, Lake Powell, Utah from the Downstream series, 1994-1995. Archival pigment print. 24 x 20 in. Courtesy of the Artist.
ONE WINTRY MORNING IN 1994, KAREN HALVERSON (b. 1941) awoke convinced she needed to photograph the Colorado River.
An accomplished artist who had already spent 20 years exploring the American West, she set off on a two-year encounter with the vast, breathtaking terrain along the river’s serpentine route. “The impulse to photograph the Colorado River came to me out of the blue,” she writes, “but I acted on it as if it were my destiny.” Personal destiny and the Colorado River …
High Good, Low Bad: May Elevations on Mead
Lake Mead is the Colorado River Reservoir holding water supplies for California, Arizona, Nevada and Mexico. The maximum elevation is 1,229 feet. Below, gleaned from US Bureau of Reclamation records, are year-on-year May elevation reports going back to 2004. Also borrowed from Reclamation is a nifty graphic published on Friday, May 8, 2009 showing April and May 2009 elevations. The May elevations were largely estimates (in yellow). Kudos to the graphic artist. The actual closing elevation for May 31, 2009 was 1,096.92.
DATE ELEVATION OF LAKE MEAD
May 31, 2009: 1,096.92
May 31, 2008: 1,107.05
May 31, 2007: 1,115.89
May 31, 2006: 1,131.14
May 31, 2005: 1,141.89
May 31, 2004: 1,129.70
For April Elevations, click here
…
Vegas Draws Line on Mead Lakeside as Trigger Point to Build Pipeline to Great Basin Ground Water
JUST in case any of the board members of the Southern Nevada Water Authority have become squeamish lately about mining the Great Basin Aquifer to sustain growth in Las Vegas, they have been given a deadline to approve building the 300-mile-long pipeline that they will need to pump the Great Basin’s ground water water south. The deadline will come when the elevation of Lake Mead, the Colorado River reservoir that currently supplies roughly 90% of Las Vegas’s water, drops another 23 feet or reaches 1,075 feet.
From today’s story by Henry Brean in the Las Vegas Review Journal:
- Board members have already approved the pipeline concept and signed off on ongoing efforts to secure water rights and environmental permits, but they have never actually voted to build the project
- That decision will come if, or perhaps when, the surface of Lake Mead sinks to elevation 1,075, a low-water mark
In Defense of Salt Cedars
Those gorgeous plants are bad, right? They’re the invasive riparian trees sucking Western water ways so dry that in 2006 Congress dedicated $80 million to study how to get rid of them.
Wrong.
Yes, millions have been spent trying to kill them, but it turns out that they may be good for the West.
WaterWired spotted the story in the May / June issue of Southwest Hydrology and today zapped it straight into the echo chamber. It turns out that the much vilified Salt Cedar, aka Tamarisk, does not gulp inordinate amounts of water. Moreover, it cohabits nicely with native vegetation except where native vegetation is stressed by human pressure on the rivers. Evidently, tamarisk is even a good habitat for birds.
To read the article by Edward P. Glenn of the University of Arizona and Pamela L. Nagler and Jeffrey E. Lovich of the US Geological Survey, click here…
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