Colorado’s runoff has peaked

Lake Powell 65 percent full, but much of it going to Mead

Lake Powell

By Gary Harmon
The Daily Sentinel

The runoff of 2017 is over and officials expect Lake Powell to rise to 65 percent full, but that relatively high level won’t last long as the inflow into the reservoir will be sent downstream to Lake Mead and Mexico.

In all, Lake Powell is to release just under 9 million acre-feet of water downstream this year, or 7.5 million acre-feet to meet the terms of the 1922 Colorado River compact, and 750,000 acre-feet for Mexico under a 1944 treaty.

Lake Powell functions as a savings account for the Upper Colorado River Basin states, which are required under the compact to release 7.5 million acre-feet per year, based on a rolling 10-year average, from Powell.

Lake Powell can contain just over 24 million acre-feet of water.

The high-runoff year ultimately won’t buy much insurance for the upper basin states, said Chris Treese, spokesman for the Colorado River Water Conservation District.

“It won’t make things worse,” Treese said. “We will continue to bump along about the 50 percent level” in Lake Powell.

While 9 million acre-feet amounts to a third of the capacity of Lake Powell, water continues to flow into the reservoir throughout the year, though well short of runoff levels.

The Bureau of Reclamation operates Lake Powell so as to keep enough pressure to generate electricity at Glen Canyon Dam. The dam’s eight turbines can produce up to 1,320 megawatts of electricity and the dam supplies power to 5.8 million customers.

The spring’s high runoff isn’t operationally significant, James Eklund, the former director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board who headed development of the Colorado water plan, said in an email.

From a strategic perspective, however, “it underscores that even in what seemed like a banner water year, we’re still a long way from recovery from the last 16-year dry spell” and highlights the need to keep enough water in Powell high enough to generate electricity, Eklund said.

Even though the runoff has peaked, people looking to enjoy the water should take care, said Andy Martsolf, emergency services director for Mesa County.

“The water in the Colorado is moving fast and it is cold,” Martsolf said. “People recreating on the river should always use a personal flotation device, multichamber inflatables, and tell someone who is not in their party where they are going and when to expect their return.”

Mitchell Caverns’ long-awaited reopening postponed

Mitchell Caverns’ reopening has been delayed until October in the eastern Mojave Desert’s Providence Mountains. State park officials had hoped to reopen the remote Providence Mountains State Recreation Area, home to the caverns, in May or June. (COURTESY OF CALIFORNIA STATE PARKS)

By Suzanne Hurt
The Press-Enterprise

Mitchell Caverns’ reopening has been delayed until October due to an ailing septic tank and trail work that’s on hold until summer’s over in the eastern Mojave Desert’s Providence Mountains.

State park officials had hoped to reopen the remote Providence Mountains State Recreation Area, home to the caverns, in May or June.

Spring and fall are high season for the park east of Barstow, which has been closed since January 2011, mainly over water issues.

Now the septic tank serving the visitor center and staff housing, which is getting plugged up due to broken ballasts, must be replaced. An environmental review must be completed and more funding won’t come until the new fiscal year starts July 1, said Russ Dingman, acting superintendent of the state parks’ Tehachapi District.

After temperatures get cooler in September, trail crews will return to reinforce the main trail to the caves and align it with natural topography for better water and erosion control. The cost of the work isn’t known yet.

The caverns are one of two public “show caves” in Southern California and the state park system’s only limestone caves.

How Pappy & Harriet's Went From Dive Bar to a Music Destination

Pappy & Harriet's (Courtesy Pappy & Harriet's)

BY GWYNEDD STUART
LA Weekly

During its heyday as a film and TV set — from the late 1940s to the late '50s, roughly — Pioneertown was the backdrop for any number of acts of generic Wild West mayhem. Set against convincing façades of a livery stable, feed store, bank and saloon, cowboys and caballeros with bronzed skin and bleached-white teeth traded choreographed blows and blasts from pistols loaded with blanks to sell a fantasy of lawlessness to little boys lying on their bellies in front of black-and-white TV sets. The good guys usually won, and bad guys suffered fates too terrible to show onscreen, but chaos and coyotes still lurked just around the corner.

On a recent spring evening — April 20, incidentally — some of the fledgling outlaws standing in line outside the now-legendary Pioneertown music venue Pappy & Harriet's are attempting to shift the balance of good and evil yet again. OK, that's an overstatement, but several concertgoers among the 900 or so who've shown up to see Baltimore synth-pop trio Future Islands have gone inside the restaurant, purchased alcoholic beverages and brought the drinks outside to sip while waiting for the gate to the outdoor stage to open. (Among other crimes committed: a preponderance of very on-the-nose Coachella fashion and waaaay too many short shorts for a chilly night.) But in the desert, order is tenuous, and a security guard makes his way down the line confiscating the beverages. It wouldn't be a Wild West town without a sheriff.

Still, Robyn Celia, who's co-owned Pappy & Harriet's since 2003, likes to think that she and business partner Linda Krantz have preserved a sort of "lawlessness" that can't be found at other music venues, a remnant not only of the town's days as a Western movie set but from the decades after that, when the bar-restaurant was a biker hangout for actual Outlaws. She thinks it's part of what draws people to the middle of nowhere to see bands they probably could've just seen in L.A. "I went to a show at a House of Blues somewhere," Celia says, lamenting the hokey, controlled, carefully crafted environment. "I understand now."

A former saloon façade and a functioning cantina since the early 1970s, Pappy & Harriet's opened in 1982 serving up Tex-Mex and live country music. After Pappy's death in 1994, the restaurant fell on hard times and changed hands at least once before Celia and Krantz came along and bought the business on credit cards. Krantz had made a film about Pioneertown in the '90s, and she spread the gospel of the slightly bizarre little village to friends in New York City. They began an annual ritual of visiting for New Year's Eve, and one year discovered the place had changed, "closing at 9, gingham tablecloths," Celia recalls. "It was definitely like they were trying to reach an older clientele." Shortly thereafter, they bought the place and headed West "before all the shit hit the fan with the world," she says, referring to the financial collapse.

You could say that Pappy & Harriet's has become a destination despite the fact that it's situated in a sort of no man's land northwest of the tiny town of Yucca Valley, with no cellphone service in the middle of the desert. Really, it's more likely that it's become a destination because of those things, for bands — Lucinda Williams, Paul McCartney, Rufus Wainwright — and fans alike.

There's also Celia's pragmatic approach to dealing with the talent: "If they want 10 bottles of Patron, just fucking give it to them. They're going to tell people how much they liked it here." Same goes for patrons — the tequila isn't free, but the drinks are big and affordable for a live music venue. And people seem to like the food. We showed up about an hour and a half before the bands went on and were basically told we wouldn't be getting a table that night.

Based on the rather large crowd of bohemian millennial types who frequently descend on Pioneertown, thanks to Pappy & Harriet's, you could be justified in wondering: Is it going to get too "cool" to be cool anymore? Will this quaint town of ranches and adobe casitas soon be overrun with hipsters who've glorified rural life? Celia doesn't think that's likely. "It's still the desert," she says. "You have to handle your shit out here."

Even on a clear spring night, when the sky looks like a black sheet blasted with buckshot, it gets very dark in Pioneertown. Yes, it's in the middle of the desert, so no shit. But it's a sort of darkness that you can't really reckon with until you're attempting to navigate haphazardly laid-out dirt roads back to your Airbnb after a show at Pappy & Harriet's. A cellphone will get you only so far in Pioneertown, but at least the flashlight feature will guide you to bed before the coyotes can drag you off into the hills. It's the desert, and you have to handle your shit.