Vernal, Utah
CNN
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Among those who like to chase trout with flies made of feathers, the mention of a certain seven-mile expanse of Utah’s Green River might make a stern man furious.
“I have guided New Zealand, Chile, Argentina, Alaska,” Gordon Tharet describes his 30-year career guiding elite fly fishers around the world. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“It’s unprecedented,” said Stephen Little, the son of the local game warden, who has been swimming and fishing the section since childhood. “You get people from all over the world. Eric Clapton has been up here. Tiger Woods. If you’re a fly fisherman, this is one of the places to hit.”
but bring up the american west worst drought In 1,200 years And their reverence turns into head-shaking anxiety and disgust. They may have the most water—hundreds of miles from fallen fields in Arizona or Browning Lawn in Los Angeles—but they know that Colorado River SystemHuge, uncontrolled demand for water Everything downstream is a threat to the upstream.
“It takes millions of gallons of water for a golf course,” Tharet said. “It’s going to get to a point when people have to decide, ‘Should I live or do I play golf? Should I have a lawn in the desert or pay $100 for a basket of berries?’ ”
John Wesley Powell first saw Golden Hour lighting up the red rocks that would be known as Fleming Gorge.
It was 1871 and after launching her boat Emma Dean in the Green River in Wyoming, the one-armed Civil War veteran was well on her way to becoming the first known person to swim and paddle in and through this major tributary in Colorado. Grand Canyon.
Their visit followed the passage of the Homestead Act, which promised that any citizen willing to settle and reform America’s Wild West could claim 160 acres of federal land for free.
But after studying the geology and hydrology of the Colorado Basin, Powell warned that the policy was “accumulating a legacy of conflict and litigation over water rights, as there is not enough water to supply these lands.”
Congress and newly formed state governments ignored the warnings, and by the mid-20th century they were convinced that by tying various locations along the Colorado system, they could engineer enough oases to keep farms, ranches and megacities alive.
“In this section of the United States, the key is water,” said John F. Kennedy during the dedication ceremony of the Fleming Gorge Dam in 1963. “The Colorado Basin will no longer be home to an erratic flow of water, leading to drought and poverty in dry years and ruin in wet years. Now water will be available where it is needed…”
If only.
Less than three months later, the president was met with tragedy in Dallas, and the dam was having a devastating effect on fish flows in the years following his dedication.
But in the late 1970s, when a graduate student convinced Utah’s fly-fishing governor to consider retrofitting a dam called a penstock, engineers were able to break free from the specific depths of Fleming Gorge Reservoir, below while controlling the temperature of the tailwater and were able to create one. Insects that lay eggs in the Goldilocks zone and the rainbow and brown trout that feast on them.
Today, much of the local economy depends on tourists who come to splash in the reservoir, which extends deep into Wyoming, or swim the Fish and Green. And when the Federal Bureau of Reclamation and four Upper Colorado River Basin states agreed to release 500,000 acre-feet — 1/6 of the reservoir’s capacity — to help uninhabited communities in the South, it sparked a local uproar. .
“There are a lot of people who just get angry,” Little said, paddling the gin-clear eddies. “It’s their water. It’s their geographical possession. So, they don’t like going to desert cities that need it. And any impact on fisheries, especially here? I mean, that’s people’s livelihoods.” Is.”
“We’re worried,” said Fleming Gorge Resort co-owner Woody Baer, leaning over shelves full of hand-tied flies. “As Lake Powell has gone down all the years, we worry, ‘Is Fleming Gorge going to get to the point where it no longer generates electricity or goes down?'”
Lake Powell, which straddles the Utah-Arizona border, is named for the man who first issued a drought warning 150 years ago. And climate change is accelerating his dire predicament.
there is no water. See what Lake Powell looks like today
The reservoir has collapsed catastrophically close to a “dead pool” when “we draw a vortex similar to that of water drains into a bathtub,” said Nicholas Williams, power manager for the Bureau of Reclamation for the Upper Colorado River Basin. , “If you don’t have a deep enough pool of water above, it creates problems and can damage power plant equipment and is too low to generate electricity.”
Corrections officials told a Senate committee this week that western states should prepare for even more dramatic cuts in allocation of Colorado River water in 2023—up to four million acre-feet, or 1.3 trillion gallons, nearly as much as California needs. allotted in a year.
“How long can we do this?” Williams said of the Fleming Gorge release. “It is limited to a few years. The rest will depend on how long we stay in drought and where does our water use go? We have to learn to live with the water we have and for the last several decades we have What is used is about to change.
Tharet believes that officials have a misconception that they are going to be able to salvage some by diverting upper basin reservoirs.
“It’s like a teenager when they get their first paycheck,” Tharet told CNN, “and the next day they go and they spend it all and they don’t get paid for two weeks and then they panic. If they wash away all these upper reservoirs, which are the source of life for everything below, they will have nothing.
He added: “And then they’re going to be really nervous.”