BY JEN PELZ
Waterfalls in the Grand Canyon. PHOTOS BY JEN PELZ (LEFT) AND TIM PETERSON (RIGHT).
Breath by breath, I ascended the red rocks away from the Colorado River, captivated by a ribbon of water, searching for its source. When I reached the canyon’s wall, I found a few wispy bushes, dry branches, and stained, dry rock: a missing waterfall. What had once been a verdant oasis had dried up completely.
Encountering a dry spring shouldn’t have surprised me. The Colorado River Basin, including the Grand Canyon, is experiencing a multidecade drought that began in 2000 — one of the driest periods in 1,200 years. The region is warming, and the increasingly arid environment is likely to persist. Water for this spring comes from high on the Kaibab Plateau and enters the intricate groundwater system of porous rock and faults that carry water deep underground into the canyon. Even the historic snowpack of 2023 — the second wettest year in the 21st century — was not enough to power the spring’s flow.
How much snow we receive and how much of it we can conserve once it melts off are key to meeting current needs and making up for water deficits from previous years or decades. A good snow year can help restore river flows, refill drained reservoirs, and replenish groundwater, seeps, and springs. While it is too soon to tell how much runoff we’ll see in 2024, several key indicators can help shed some light on where we are today, including how much water is contained in the snow.
As of late January 2024, the snowpack outlook was below average. The snow water equivalent in the Colorado River Basin was 85% of median in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming and much lower — 68.5% — in Arizona, California, and Nevada. These levels are well below the 148% and 218% for the upper and lower basins respectively that we saw in 2023 and are tracking more closely with 2021 and 2022 levels.
While 2023 runoff into Lake Powell was 167% of average, both 2021 and 2022 were below-average years. As of early February 2024, the forecast predicts runoff into Lake Powell will be a weak 79% of average — closer to what we saw in 2021 and 2022, and roughly half of what the lake got in 2023.
The Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. TIM PETERSON
Given the modest snowpack forecasts for 2024, conserving the water-storage gains we made in 2023 will likely be very important. 2023 helped fill up the tubs, adding the second largest volume of water to Colorado River Basin reservoirs in a single year since 2011, the wettest year in the 21st century. Most of that water is stored in lakes Powell and Mead, but these gains are still meager in the big picture.
As recently documented by Jack Schmidt, director of the Center for Colorado River Studies at Utah State University, in a series of blog posts, history shows that the water added to reservoirs from the previous year’s high runoff is typically completely used up within two years.
To understand how effective recent policies are at protecting yearly gains in reservoir storage, Schmidt is tracking monthly losses in reservoir gains from 2023 and comparing those to each year over the past decade.
So far, efforts to hold on to 2023 runoff have been successful. We’ve been depleting reservoir levels more slowly than over the past decade, likely due to a combination of policies that trigger water-use reductions as water elevations in Lake Mead fall. In 2023, those agreements saved about 235 billion gallons of water.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation also paid billions of dollars to water users in the lower Colorado River Basin to conserve water in Lake Mead, which added another 114 billion gallons of reductions. Combined, these efforts appear to have protected at least 350 billion gallons of water in storage. A typical household uses about 150,000 gallons of water each year for its indoor and outdoor water needs; by that measurement, the water saved is enough to supply more than 2,300 households for one year.
While this is good news, the challenges associated with a drying climate go far beyond reservoir elevations and water supply. Less rain and snowfall leave environmental, spiritual, and cultural resources, like springs, vulnerable to drying up.
Let’s return now to the drying spring where this story started — Vaughn Spring. While at first glance it looked to be a casualty of climate change, in reality it is more a lesson in geology. Deer Creek — the water I had followed through the rocks — is fed by two sister springs: Vaughn and Deer.
Deer Spring (see the photo at right at the top of the story) contributes more to the creek’s flow and in fact "pirates" most of the water traveling through the layers of rock in the Grand Canyon toward its cave-like surfacing point. Vaughn Spring (see the photo at left at the top of the story) only pours forth when the volume of water is too much for the faults in the rock to carry it to Deer Spring — it is essentially an overflow valve, and an important reminder that when it comes to water in the Colorado River Basin, it is complex and there are no easy answers.
Jen Pelz directs the Grand Canyon Trust’s Water Program.
EDITOR'S NOTE: The views expressed by Advocate contributors are solely their own and do not necessarily represent the views of the Grand Canyon Trust.
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