 |
| Dry, cracked earth remains where a pond once stood at Monte Vista National Wildlife Refuge in the San Luis Valley. |
By Joe Garner, News Staff Writer
May 4, 2002
ALAMOSA -- The mountains that define the San Luis Valley stand strangely bare for spring.
Relentless winds twist trees and shrubs in weird shimmies. Whirlwinds skitter across landscape parched to stark shades of beige, tan and khaki, the moisture all wrung out.
Drought has descended on Colorado, gripping the southern counties mean and hard.
Instead of a season of renewal, 2002 in southern Colorado has brought a drab, dangerous spring, threatening tragedy.
"During the month of May, no matter where you go from the valley, it looks better than it does here," said John Shawcroft, whose family has ranched in the Rio Grande basin since 1883.
Folklore and science agree that water will be scant in this semiarid state. Water is precious in the best of times, but there is little water or no water some places in the driest spring on record.
Statewide, the snowpack is at 19% of average, a historic low. But it is 6% of average in the Rio Grande basin and in southwestern Colorado.
Snowpack provides 80% of Colorado's surface water supply, and rainfall provides the balance. Agriculture consumes 85% of the water, according to water officials.
So any drought begins on Colorado's farms and ranches, where only about 1 percent of the workforce draws a check. Rural towns are hit next, where combines and pickups sit unsold.
Across the state, irrigation companies already have notified farmers and ranchers no water will flow in some canals. There is simply no water, unless spring rains suddenly come.
Scientists at the University of Colorado and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predict that an emerging El Nino, the periodic warming in the tropical Pacific Ocean off Peru, may bring monsoon rains to reduce the severity of drought conditions by midsummer.
But two months of lengthening days and rising temperatures is a long time to wait for relief.
"There are good years and poor years in the valley, and the good years aren't all that good," said Art Brown, 74, who's spent his life farming near Mosca except for two years in the Army.
"They tell a story that a family in 1898 had all their possessions loaded in their wagon, ready to pull out the next morning," Brown said. "But the next morning it was raining, and it was still raining the morning after that, and the morning after that, and they're still on that farm.
"That's supposed to be the truth."
In the valley, the price of potatoes, a mainstay in the region, is 600% above the price last season, buoying up the entire economy, said Anthony Bagwell, who specializes in agricultural lending at VectraBank in Alamosa, the valley's largest community.
Farmers have two water sources, he said. They rely on surface water from canals fed by snowpack, but there will be scant runoff. They also rely on water from wells, some that extend to the unconfined aquifer that goes down less than 100 feet and others that extend to a confined aquifer below 100 feet.
Because farmers plant a diversified portfolio of crops, including barley, oats, lettuce, carrots and spinach, they can use the bonanza of their potato income to ride through 2002, praying for snows that will begin to fly again in the fall.
"The financial impact of this year will be two things," Bagwell said. "Increased pumping costs to get water for irrigation, and the cost of deepening the pump equipment within the wells to get down to the water."
"At this point, I don't anticipate more farm sales because of one year's drought," he said. "But if the aquifers don't get recharged in the coming winter, the pain will go up greatly."
Cattle ranchers are the segment of agriculture already hurting, the banker said.
The ranchers don't have water, and they are being denied access to summer grazing on public lands in the high country. Further, the cost of buying feed for winter 2002-2003 may be prohibitive.
"The prospects for the coming winter are bleak," Bagwell said. "There are some really good cows out there with nowhere to go, and if they are sold, they go cheap.
"It's a tragedy."
Alamosa sits like an oasis in the dry valley.
The Rio Grande flows modestly past the city, but it's hardly ever a river of legend here.
Lawns are green. Parks are green. Trees are budding.
What's all this about drought?
"Because we draw out water from the confined aquifer, I don't expect this drought to have an impact on us, if it continues just one year," said Don Koskelin, public works director.
The city relies on nine deep wells to draw water for its 9,000 residents. Eighty percent of the water is sprayed over lawns, parks and the campus of Adams State College, he said.
"We promote conservation, but for us to start pushing the use of low-flow showerheads isn't very effective, when it's being used for watering in the middle of what is basically an alpine desert," he said. "Sometimes, you see water flowing off the yards and down the streets."
How dry is southern Colorado?
Outside Gunnison, in the central Rockies, Blue Mesa Reservoir will be only about one-third full this summer, with water 35 feet below normal, said Paul Davidson of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.
Boulders will protrude above the surface, beaches will widen between hillsides and the shore, and recreation may dangerous and curtailed.
Near Walsh, in the southeastern corner of the state, some farmers are destroying fields of winter wheat, dead from lack of moisture, said Tim Macklin, of Colorado State University Cooperative Extension.
"Land that would be green wheatfields this time of year already is brown," Macklin said. "Our big concern now is that the soil will start blowing like in the Dust Bowl in history past."
Farmers hope for some moisture to plant a backup crop, such as sorghum, sunflowers or millet, because the wheat is lost, he said.
Only 2.65 inches of rain have fallen since September at the CSU research station outside Walsh, compared with a 10-year average of 7.86 inches.
Not even weeds are growing.
In the Four Corners area, cottonwoods along the edge of the La Plata River ignited in a wildfire this week.
"Some people were surprised that cottonwoods in the riparian areas, which are usually moist, were burning," said Kent Grant, assistant district forester with the Colorado State Forest Service. "It's just that dry."
He saw drought coming.
Grant was part of a team thinning timber last winter in forests where the snowpack typically extends up to mid-thigh, or at least his knee.
"It only got to 8 or 12 inches," Grant said. "That was the most snow we had all winter."
"We're dealing with conditions we've never really dealt with in southern Colorado," said state engineer Hal Simpson, who is responsible for ensuring the water in Colorado's reservoirs, irrigation systems and rivers is allocated fairly.
Some water shortages likely will occur in northern Colorado, roughly north of Interstate 70, where snowpack is as high as 44 percent of average. Reservoirs are as much as 90 percent full because of water left over from other years, he said.
With snowpack in southern Colorado at only 6 percent of average, reservoirs are 40 percent to 60 percent full.
"The southern half of the state is in an extreme drought, while the northern half of the state is in what I would call a severe drought," Simpson said. "There's not much difference, but there's a little difference."
Simpson hopes for more runoff from high snowfields, but other water managers consider the snowmelt essentially finished, with dry soils absorbing runoff before it can run into the creeks that feed the river basins.
The Natural Resources Conservation Service plans a June 1 snowpack report.
"I don't think there'll be much to report," said snow survey supervisor Mike Gillespie.
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/state/article/0,1299,DRMN_21_1126183,00.html