"We need the moisture." Snow, aridity, and the West

We’re getting close to the end of the semester, and my American West class, which I mentioned before, is winding down. At some point, I’ll tell you all about it … well, maybe not all, but lots. But for the moment, one particular theme is on my mind: aridity. The defining feature of the West, it seems, is aridity. High desert dryness. A pitiful lack of water. Aridity, it turns out, has shaped the history, the economics, the culture, and the character of the West. 

Now, it may be hard to believe we have a problem with water in Colorado when you look out the window today. Here’s the view I awoke to this morning. 

 My first impulse was to groan; my next was to say, “It’s good. We need the moisture.” 

You might also find it hard to believe that we need moisture if you recall that just a week ago, the CU campus looked like this:

But ironically, these storms are precisely why water is on my mind. 

A little background ...

Early in this class, the professor, Dr. Patty Limerick, challenged us to define what counted as “the American West.” After considerable discussion, Patty suggested that the West can be defined by water—or, more accurately, its scarcity. Geographically, the West begins roughly at the 100th meridian, the “boundary between the moist east and the arid west.” The imaginary line that runs north and south through the country at roughly the Missouri River. Here’s a map so you can see what I mean.

The 100th meridian runs almost exactly along the right-hand edge of that bright yellow section in the map. To the west of that line is the “arid West,” where the annual precipitation is less than 20” per year; to the East is the “moist East,” where it’s over 20”. That matters because 20” of annual rainfall is the requirement for things to grow without irrigation.

A bit of history (it’s fun history, so stay with me here). When European invaders of this continent began to move west from their initial settlements along the east coast, they expected that the lush landscape of the east would continue indefinitely. And for a while, that’s just what they found. But when Lewis and Clark’s explorations and then the California gold rush encouraged folks to light out across lands farther north and west, they were startled to find that the land was far from lush. In fact, they found it dry and, from their perspective, barren, foreboding, foreign, frightening.

The problem was that 20” thing. Back east, growing things was never an issue. You could plant crops for food or raise livestock feed without worrying about water. There were also plenty of trees for lumber—heck, you had to cut down forests to make room for your cabin. But beyond that mythic 100th meridian, it was a different story. Almost nothing grew without the help of extra water—and water was exceedingly scarce. So they saw the whole center of the nation—from the Missouri across the plains and over the Rockies—as useless and miserable. A place to get through rather than a place to go to.

When folks finally came here to stay, they brought along an ideal for the life that they wanted to create here on the semi-arid high plains: a home just like the one they’d left in the East, where water was abundant. That meant trees, landscaping, and lawns; later, it would also mean water features, swimming pools, and golf courses. All of which require water. Lots of water. And that’s before we even talk about drinking, cooking, and bathing water. Look again at the map. Folks wanted (still want) the water-sucking lifestyle of those lush green areas even though they were (are) now living in the semi-arid to arid yellow and orange parts of the country. Not surprisingly, the 100th meridian also marks a line where population density drops dramatically. Except maybe where water has been somehow corralled (like in large cities), it’s still hard for most people to believe that the West—the plains and desert (too dry) and the mountains (too rugged)—can be a place to live rather than a place to visit on vacation.

Wallace Stegner, a famous historian of the American West, has said that people who choose to live in the West have to deal with its aridity. We have two choices: adapt to it or engineer it out of existence. During carefully circumscribed wilderness adventures, we adapt. The rest of the time, we rely on engineering.

As I've learned about water and its discontents in the West, I’ve become really aware of our disregard for the reality of the aridity of this place. Yesterday, we had a guest speaker, the head of Denver Water, the agency that provides water to about 1.3 million people in the city of Denver. His discussion of this topic was really sobering. Among other things, he talked about the now-two-year-long drought that has left the state parched. You may recall that I whimpered about this in my first-day-of-spring blog and even provided photographic evidence. This picture is also a reminder of what most of our winter has looked like—and a hint at how remarkable the recent storms have seemed in contrast. 

With this drought, the water storage levels are at historic lows, as anyone who has recently driven past Dillon Reservoir (or probably others) can attest. It’s so low, he said, that before the storms of the last two weeks, folks at Denver Water were looking at being down to the “strategic reserve” by this fall—that’s the amount of water you need to meet the city’s minimal needs for a year. The amount you never drop below. The amount you absolutely must keep in case of a catastrophe. Put into perspective, the message is clear: a two-year drought amounts to a catastrophe for our water supply. That’s a pretty thin line.

Our recent snowstorms have made a huge difference. In fact, the storms of the past two weeks have raised the snowpack from 72% of average to 93% of average. (For folks who may not know these things, the snowpack is the depth of the mountain snow that will provide water for the coming year when it melts in the spring.) Not that our average is exactly bountiful, but this is nonetheless very good news. Still, how scary is it that a week of snow storms amounts to about 20% of our total snowpack for the year? Not a lot of moisture, eh? And not a great margin of safety.

Given this dilemma—anyone who’s halfway sane wants to live here, but there is really not enough water—the history of the West has been the history of efforts to, in Stegner’s words, engineer aridity out of existence. Turn the desert into an oasis. We have dams and channels and tunnels and pumps that store water and then send it hundreds of miles away, where it’s used for agriculture, drinking water, and Water World. Some of it gets returned to the system, but lots doesn’t. So much gets used up, in fact, that the Colorado River, the largest river in the West, one that drains seven states and waters countless farms and cities, dries up before it ever reaches the Gulf of California, where its delta has long since turned into a broad, flat, dry desert in its own right.

So now, in addition to thinking snow is beautiful, I’ve gained another level of appreciation for it during these past weeks. The phrase, “We need the moisture” is such a mantra in the West. You hear it every time people start to complain about snow or rain. In fact, I overheard it at my coffee shop earlier today as folks were gazing nostalgically at this scene:

We all say it. I’ve said it all my life. It’s a kind of throw-away comment, a way to bond over shared misery and still make everything be alright. But from now on, I think I’ll be hearing it in a different way. Because I realize that we can’t actually engineer aridity out of existence.

We really do need the moisture.