Pink Snow in Colorado

To add to our joy this morning, here is an interesting, albeit apocalyptic, article on the growing drought in the West:

Pink snow is turning red in Colorado. Here on the Great American Desert --
specifically Utah's slickrock portion of it where I live -- hot n' dry means
dust. When frequent high winds sweep across our increasingly arid landscape,
redrock powder is lifted up and carried hundreds of miles eastward until it
settles on the broad shoulders of Colorado's majestic mountains, giving the
snowpack there a pink hue.

Some call it watermelon snow. Friends who ski into the backcountry of the
San Juan and La Plata mountain ranges in western Colorado tell me that the
pink-snow phenomenon has lately been giving way to redder hues, so thick and
frequent are the dust storms that roll in these days. A cross-section of a
typical Colorado snowbank last winter revealed alternating dirt and snow layers
that looked like a weird wilderness version of our flag, red and white stripes
alternating against the sky's blue field.

Here in the lowlands, we, too, are experiencing the drying of the West in
new dusty ways. Our landscapes are often covered with what we jokingly refer to
as "adobe rain" -- when rain falls through dust, spattering windows or laundry
hung out to dry with brown stains. After a dust "event" this past spring, I
wandered through the lot of a car dealership in Grand Junction, Colorado, where
the only color seemingly available was light tan. All those previously shiny,
brightly painted cars had turned drab. I had to squint to read price stickers
under opaque windows.

All of this is more than a mere smudge on our postcard-pretty scenery:
Colorado's red snow is a warning that the climatological dynamic in the arid
West is changing dramatically. Think of it as a harbinger -- and of more than
simply a continuing version of the epic drought we've been experiencing these
past several years.

The West is as dry as the East is wet, a vast and arid landscape of high
plains and deserts broken by abrupt mountain ranges and deep canyons. Unlike
eastern and midwestern America, where there are myriad rivers, streams, lakes,
and giant underground lakes, or aquifers, to draw on, we depend on snowpack for
about 90% of our fresh water. The Colorado River, running from its headwaters in
the snow-loaded mountains of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming, is the principal water
source for those states, and downstream for Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and
southern California as well.

While being developed into a crucial water resource, the Colorado became
the most dammed, piped, legislated, and litigated river in America. Its
development spawned a major federal bureaucracy, the Bureau of Reclamation, as
well as a hundred state agencies, water districts, and private contractors to
keep it plumbed and distributed. Taken altogether, this complex infrastructure
of dams, pipelines, and reservoirs proved to be the most expensive and ambitious
public works project in the nation's history, but it enabled the Southwest
states and southern California to boom and bloom.

The downside is that we are now dangerously close to the limits of what the
Colorado River can provide, even in the very best of weather scenarios, and the
weather is being neither so friendly nor cooperative these days. If Portland
soon becomes as warm as Los Angeles and Seattle as warm as Sacramento, as some
forecasters now predict, expect Las Vegas and Phoenix to be more like Death
Valley.

If the Colorado River shut down tomorrow, there might be two, at most
three, years of stored water in its massive reservoirs to keep Los Angeles, San
Diego, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and dozens of other cities that depend on it alive.
That margin for survival gets thinner with each passing year and with each rise
in the average temperature. Imagine a day in the not so distant future when the
water finally runs out in one of those cities -- a kind of slow-motion Katrina
in reverse, a city not flooded but parched, baked, blistered, and abandoned. If
the Colorado River system failed to deliver, the impact on the nation's
agriculture and economy would be comparable to an asteroid strike.