Proposed final version of controversial Red Cliffs management plans released

Red Cliffs provides important habitat at the intersection of the Colorado Plateau, the Great Basin and the Mojave Desert.

Written by Julie Applegate
St. George News

ST. GEORGE – The Bureau of Land Management has released proposed resource management plans for two national conservation areas; the plans affect more than 100,000 acres of public land in Washington County and have been controversial.

The draft versions of the management plans for the Red Cliffs and Beaver Dam Wash national conservation areas stirred heated debate during the public comment period which ended in October 2015.

County, municipal and transportation officials believe the plans go too far in restricting land use, while conservationists favored more restrictive elements of the plans.

While county officials and others have not had a chance to fully review the proposed plans, Deputy Washington County Attorney Celeste Maloy expressed both appreciation and concern.

“We are so grateful for the participation of thousands of concerned citizens as well as local, state, and congressional elected leaders,” Maloy said.

“We asked for the public to comment last fall and the public responded,” Maloy said. “We asked for support from elected officials, and they stepped up as well. Our collective efforts paid off in some really positive ways.”

Early on in the process, county officials weren’t satisfied with the level of input they were being allowed on the resource management plans, Maloy said.

“Without a doubt, the communication and understanding between the county and the local BLM have improved during this process. We consider that a win. Local BLM staff listened to our concerns when we reacted to the draft plan.”

From an initial look at the plans, Maloy said, some of the changes from the initial draft to the proposed final plan released Tuesday are significant improvements; however, other issues addressed in the resource management plans will take continued work.

“For example, BLM’s final position on the Northern Corridor is disappointing. With all of the dialog between the county, cities, and federal agencies on that issue, we had hoped to have a more clear option to meet our future transportation needs,” Maloy said.

The county will continue to pursue all legal and political avenues to protect Washington County’s interests, she said.

Transportation officials are concerned that the resource management plans will prevent a long-planned Northern Corridor through the Red Cliffs National Conservation Area, which includes the Red Cliffs Desert Reserve, home of the endangered Mohave desert tortoise.

The draft resource management plan for the Red Cliffs National Conservation Area did not list the county’s optimal route in its “preferred” alternative.

History

A 90-day public comment period, which began July 16, 2015, was extended past the original Oct. 15 deadline to Nov. 16 after local officials demanded more time. A series of BLM open houses were held to help inform the public about the resource management plans.

The two national conservation areas are the first in Utah and were created by the Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009, known as OPLMA, to “conserve, protect, and enhance … the ecological, scenic, wildlife, recreational, cultural, historical, natural, educational, and scientific resources” of the public lands, according to a BLM statement.

The Red Cliffs National Conservation Area comprises 44,859 acres and is located just north and adjacent to much of the population of Washington County.

Red Cliffs provides important habitat for the threatened desert tortoise and many unusual plant species in the intersection of the Colorado Plateau, the Great Basin and the Mojave Desert. This area includes a stretch of the Virgin River and a number of popular trails.

The Beaver Dam Wash National Conservation Area covers 63,478 acres and is located in the southwest corner of Utah. The area contains many native plants and animals which have evolved into unique species, some found nowhere else on earth.

Beaver Dam Wash includes the northernmost range Joshua trees and riparian areas that are important stops for migratory birds; the area is also known for remote recreation opportunities such as hiking, rock climbing, horseback riding and wildlife viewing.

A proposed amendment to the St. George Field Office resource management plan has also been released. The proposed amendment addresses two primary management issues: identification of areas where biological conservation is a priority and modifications of the off-highway vehicle area designations to prepare for the development of a comprehensive travel management plan.

Protest period

The publication in the Federal Register of the Notice of Availability by the Environmental Protection Agency of the proposed plans will initiate a 30-day protest period. That is expected to happen Friday, Bureau of Land Management Color Country District spokesman Christian Venhuizen said.

However, copies of the proposed final plans were provided Tuesday to give the county and others more time to review and respond to the documents, he said.

Anyone who participated in the planning process and who has an interest that is or may be adversely affected by the planning decisions may file a protest within 30 days of that publication, BLM information states.

The protest period is not the same as the public comment period, Venhuizen said.

“This is a slightly different period … we’re not looking for public comment,” he said. While the public is invited to review the documents, the official public comment period has passed.

However, the resource management plans cannot be finalized by Records of Decision until all the protests are resolved, Venhuizen said.

The Governor’s Consistency Review began last week and gives the Governor’s office a minimum of 60 days to review the resource management plans before the records of decision are signed, Venhuizen said.

Details

The proposed plans and amendment, along with a final environmental impact statement, are available to view or download from the BLM’s ePlanning website here.

Copies of the documents are available for inspection at the Interagency Public Lands Information Center, 345 East Riverside Drive in St. George, and the BLM Utah State Office Public Room, 440 West 200 South, Suite 500 in Salt Lake City. The documents are available during from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Monday through Friday, except on federal holidays.

All protests must be in writing and mailed to one of the following addresses:

• U.S. Postal Service: BLM Director (210), Attention: Protest Coordinator, P.O. Box 71383, Washington, DC 20024–1383.
• Overnight Delivery: BLM Director (210), Attention: Protest Coordinator, 20 M Street SE, Room 2134LM, Washington, DC 20003.

Before including your address, phone number, email address, or other personal identifying information in your protest, you should be aware that your entire protest — including your personal identifying information — may be made publicly available at any time. While you may ask the BLM in your protest to withhold your personal identifying information from public review, the BLM cannot guarantee that it will be able to do so.

For additional information, please contact Keith Rigtrup at 435-865-3000.

Vegas forges ahead on pipeline plan

Great Basin pumping project is closer to reality

by Matt Jenkins
High Country News

When Marc Reisner updated his landmark book Cadillac Desert in 1992, he mistakenly referred to the "forceful woman" who heads the Las Vegas-based Southern Nevada Water Authority as Patricia Mulwray. Her name is actually Patricia Mulroy.

Reisner's mistake might have been a Freudian slip: Hollis Mulwray is a character in the movie Chinatown who is based on William Mulholland, the powerful founder of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Mulholland occupies a special place in the pantheon of Western water honchos, as both visionary and villain. He is best remembered for his audacious, and very secret, plan in the 1920s to buy up water rights in the Owens Valley and ship the water to L.A.

Mulroy understandably bristles at any reference to Chinatown. Yet she has achieved a degree of power that might even make Mulholland envious. Mulroy has largely set the terms of Western water over the past two decades. She has challenged what she calls the conservative "belt-and-suspenders" mindset that has traditionally prevailed among Colorado River water bosses. And, most controversially, she has led a two-decade-long effort to build a massive groundwater project that will tap huge aquifers lying beneath the Great Basin in eastern Nevada and pipe billions of gallons of water to Las Vegas.

This August, the state governments of Nevada and Utah announced that they had put one more piece of the project into place. They released an agreement that divides the water beneath the Snake Valley, on the Nevada-Utah line, between the two states, and that also delays for a decade the legal formalities needed to complete that final part of the groundwater project.

The announcement touched off a furor in Snake Valley. "We only got about a week's notice, and it left us scrambling to try to understand the agreement," says Mark Ward, an attorney for the Utah Association of Counties.

The agreement apportions the remaining water in Snake Valley 7-to-1 in Nevada's favor and "practically eliminates future development in Snake Valley," says Kathy Walker, the chairman of the Millard County Commission. Since the agreement was released, she says, "we've been racking up some serious miles" in an effort to change the terms of the deal.

Some pipeline opponents, however, see the agreement as a reprieve of sorts. Denys Koyle, who owns the Border Inn casino on a lonely stretch of Highway 50 on the Nevada-Utah border, says, "When I saw it, I thought, ‘Oh my gosh: We've got 10 more years.' I've been saying every day we buy is a big victory."

The hoopla over the most recent development in the groundwater saga obscures a larger reality. Patricia Mulroy has tackled the groundwater project with far less secrecy than William Mulholland would have used. Still, over the past three years, she has moved to lock in the water she needs for the project with remarkable finesse. The Southern Nevada Water Authority now has at least 37 billion gallons of water lined up for the project, which will span seven valleys on the east side of Nevada, from Coyote Springs Valley to Spring Valley, and Snake Valley on the Nevada-Utah line.

"We already have the necessary water rights to go all the way to Spring Valley," says Mulroy.

But even as the Water Authority has amassed the permits it needs to fill the pipeline with water, unsettling questions have emerged regarding the project's impacts on desert springs ecosystems. And one of Mulroy's own scientists says her agency is hiding the effects that groundwater pumping will have on the Great Basin.

When Mulroy announced her plan in 1989, the proposal drew a round of more than 4,000 legal protests from ranchers, as well as from the federal government. Since then, the Water Authority has adroitly moved to head off many of those challenges. Mulroy has spent $79 million in eastern Nevada buying up ranches and related water rights. (The Water Authority acquired several thousand cows and sheep as a result of those deals, and now has a sideline called Great Basin Ranch, and its own cattle brand.)

In 2006, Mulroy neutralized the most significant source of opposition when she struck a deal with the U.S. Department of the Interior, which was worried that the project could harm springs in three national wildlife refuges and Great Basin National Park. The government agreed to drop its protests in exchange for a promise from the Water Authority to fund a program that is now monitoring groundwater levels and the project's potential effects on wildlife.

In Snake Valley, another potential source of opposition came from the state of Utah, which shares the aquifer there with Nevada. But the Lincoln County Conservation, Recreation and Development Act, introduced by Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and approved by Congress in 2004, required Nevada and Utah to negotiate a division of the water in Snake Valley.

That's the agreement released this August. "The purpose of the agreement is to build some kind of cooperative management of Snake Valley so we don't have a pumping war in the West Desert," says Boyd Clayton, Utah's deputy state engineer.

The deal is also an important part of a bigger bargain between Utah and Nevada. In the past, Mulroy has said that if Utah doesn't support her quest for groundwater from the Great Basin, she would respond by monkey-wrenching Utah's plans to build a pipeline from Lake Powell to St. George, the fastest-growing part of the state. Boyd Clayton, the deputy Utah state engineer, says that the recent Snake Valley water-sharing agreement reduces the risk of interference. "Clearly, if Nevada perceives that we're not trying to deal with them equitably on this issue," he says, "they're less likely to be helpful and equitable as Utah tries to develop the Lake Powell pipeline."

That has left Millard County in a delicate position. "Sen. (Bob) Bennett's (R-Utah) office has contacted us a few times, saying we need to be a little careful," says Walker, the Millard County chairman. "We're sort of stuck in the middle."

But with its potential hurdles out of the way, the Water Authority has received approval from the Nevada state engineer, the state's top water regulator, for 114,755 acre-feet of water from Delamar, Dry Lake, Cave, Spring and Snake valleys -- enough for more than 1.5 million people in Las Vegas.

Tim Durbin is a former United States Geological Survey hydrologist who for about a decade did contract work for the Water Authority. In 2001, he began designing a model that the Authority could use to predict the effects of pumping on the Great Basin aquifers. The computer model was a crucial piece of evidence presented to the state engineer during hearings about whether to grant water rights for the project. Yet when Durbin ran the model, he says, it became clear that any amount of pumping would have an effect.

"Southern Nevada Water Authority, for years, has been claiming that somehow they can Pipeline develop this with no impacts, and that is just absolute total nonsense," he says. "There is absolutely no way of developing groundwater in these valleys without having impacts."

But when Durbin testified before the state engineer in 2006, "A lot of pressure was put on me to, in some ways, disown my own work," he says. "The report I prepared was, in effect, taken away from me and rewritten by (the Water Authority) to remove anything that suggested impacts."

Durbin no longer works with the Water Authority; he now has a contract with the National Park Service to help analyze the project's potential impacts. The only way that the project's impacts can be reduced, he says, is to pursue targeted pumping that avoids the most sensitive springs. "The extractions can be designed to focus the impacts on certain parts of the hydrologic system and away from others," he says.

For her part, Mulroy says that Durbin's model was less sophisticated than another one that the Water Authority is now developing. And, she says, her agency will finesse its pumping to minimize impacts on the desert springs. "If you follow Durbin's line of thinking, no groundwater can be touched, period," says Mulroy. But a more flexible approach can prove more sustainable. "You change your pumping strategies, year to year. You move pumping around. You let basins rest. And you artificially recharge."

Under an artificial recharge program, annual snowmelt from the mountains can be channeled into infiltration basins in the desert valleys to "recharge" the aquifer with water. "That's why we bought the ranches," says Mulroy. "If you put infiltration basins at the base of those mountains, you can get that runoff into the ground rather than have it run off and evaporate on the playa."

The one thing that could derail the project now is money. Four years ago, the price tag was pegged at $2 billion. Today, that number stands at $3.5 billion. And when it comes to how the Water Authority will finance the project, Mulroy is keeping her cards close to her vest. "At this point, we're spending only the money that we absolutely have to spend," Mulroy says. "The combination of a very effective conservation plan" -- with correspondingly reduced water sales -- "and a crashed economy with no connection charges" -- the hookup fees for new homes through which the Authority generates most of its revenue -- "have left revenues pretty stressed."

Even if the Water Authority is in a thrifty bent of mind right now, Mulroy says her agency is prepared to reach for the underground water when the moment is right. Much depends on the now-more-than-decade-long drought on Colorado River, and on yet another agreement. Three years ago, the seven states that draw water from the river negotiated a set of ground rules for how to share shortages if Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the river's two main reservoirs, continue to shrink.

Thanks to those rules, 1,075 is now the most important number in Vegas. The water level in Lake Mead -- one of the key indicators of the state of the system -- is now at 1,093 feet. When it drops below 1,075 feet, the first round of shared shortages will kick in on the renewed series of negotiations between the seven states -- and, Mulroy says, the Water Authority will launch construction of the groundwater project.

"We need to start," she says, "the minute we hit 1,075."

Park Service airs complaint against proposed coal plant

By JOHN G. EDWARDS
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

The National Park Service says the $3.8 billion, coal-fired power plant that Nevada utilities propose to build near Ely is "unacceptable" because it would damage air and water quality and would interfere with scenic views in the Great Basin National Park.

"Like a clean white page, the relatively clear air in the Great Basin can be marred easily," wrote Paul DePrey, park superintendent.

DePrey made the comment in a Jan. 9 letter to the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection in response to the draft air permit the division has issued for the 1,500-megawatt Ely Energy Center. The center is a project of Sierra Pacific Power Co. and Nevada Power Co.

The division can issue a final permit without substantial changes in the draft document, amend the permit or deny it after reviewing comments about the power plant.

Utility spokesman Adam Grant said: "We agree with NDEP's initial filing that the Ely Energy Center meets all existing air quality standard regulations. This is all part of the NDEP environmental process, and we're not going to comment any further."

Division spokesman Dante Pistone said NDEP does not give comments from federal agencies any more weight than from others.

"As a rule, we normally don't comment on the comments," Pistone said.

The division may take six months or more before deciding on the Ely Energy Center air permit application, he said.

The park service's letter says that coal-fired power plants in Utah appear to cause a brown-yellow haze after long periods of northeasterly winds.

"Fortunately, winds are seldom northeasterly for long periods," DePrey said. "If similar pollution sources were built to the west, the parks visibility would be affected more frequently. White Pine County's night skies are among the darkest in the country."

Air pollution would scatter light in the night sky and cause less visibility.

"Dark night skies, for the first time in history, are becoming an extinct phenomenon," he said.

Acid rain could affect life on land and in lakes in the Great Basin, he said.

Charles Benjamin, a spokesman for the Nevada Clean Energy Campaign, a group that opposes the power plant, supported the park service's arguments.

The state agency, as the delegate of the Environmental Protection Agency, is legally charged with "preserving, protecting and enhancing national parks and wilderness areas," Benjamin said.

"The draft (air) permit doesn't do enough to protect the park," he said.

Benjamin criticized the state division for failing to consider the combined air pollution from the 1,600-megawatt coal plant under development by LS Power Group and from the Ely center.

Some Ely residents last week told the division they wanted the jobs that would come with the Ely center, but Benjamin said the division may not consider job creation as a factor in approving an air permit.

Barstow students buy acre of desert land

Chuck Mueller, Staff Writer
San Bernardino Sun

BARSTOW - Appreciation for nature begins in childhood, and a group of youngsters has demonstrated how anyone who cares can help protect a small patch of the Mojave Desert and its creatures.

After collecting aluminum cans and plastic bottles for a year, 80 first-graders at Lenwood School raised $214 to help buy an acre of land at Mojave National Preserve.

"With their effort, coupled with an $86 contribution from San Bernardino County's waste-management department, we presented a check for $300 (recently) to the National Park Service to add a bit of land to the preserve," teacher Ginger O'Brien said.

"Students in four classrooms brought recyclables from home and turned them in for vouchers. It was a part of our program to teach children to understand and appreciate the desert. Hopefully they will continue this appreciation throughout their lives."

Superintendent Dennis Schramm and resource chief James Woolsey of Mojave National Preserve accepted the check. "We welcome the efforts of these young people," Schramm said. "We want children to learn about the natural world early in their lives so they can enjoy it throughout their lives."

Lenwood School's nature-awareness programs, which include field trips to Barstow-area museums and hands-on involvement in caring for a cactus garden, awakens the children to the wonders of the vast Mojave region.

"Children are our future," Woolsey said. "If we don't teach them early about our environment, they may never appreciate it. We have millions of acres of wild lands around us. For youngsters not to go out and enjoy them would be a shame."

Since the 1.6 million-acre Mojave National Preserve was established in 1994, an ongoing effort has been made to acquire parcels of privately held land within its borders. Private land within the preserve has dropped from 220,000 acres to just under 100,000 acres.

"Every year, we ask landowners if they want to sell their property," the superintendent explained.

"The National Park Foundation, chartered by Congress to support the park system, negotiates to buy land. Whatever it acquires is donated to the park system."

Several thousand private landowners hold chunks of land in a checkerboard pattern scattered throughout the national preserve. Among these parcels are state-school lands that sometimes are exchanged for surplus federal property, Schramm said.

Mojave National Preserve contains the world's largest Joshua tree forest, lofty sand dunes, the historic Mojave wagon road, Indian wall paintings known as petroglyphs, and hundreds of wild creatures like the desert tortoise and Mojave ground squirrel.

It is the only place where three desert ecosystems meet the Mojave, the Great Basin and the Sonora.

"Lenwood School's efforts match up with the goal of Park Service Director Fran Mainella to improve the relevance of the park system in the 21st century," Schramm said. "Many children don't have the chance to sit around a campfire in the wilderness today. We want to attract more of them to our parks to help amplify the marvelous heritage they represent."

At Lenwood School, two first graders shared their feelings on the fund-raising effort.

"I brought in a lot of cans and bottles to buy more land for the desert tortoise," said Karina Cruz, 6, daughter of Manuel and Maria Cruz.

Michelle Kounovsky, also, 6, daughter of Brian and Kimberly Kounovsky, said the yearlong effort was fun. "We want to help the national preserve get bigger," she explained.

In addition to O'Brien, first-grade teachers Wendi Matley, Melissa Moor and Debbie Williams, helped spearhead the conservation program.

"The children took home bags with brochures about the desert tortoise to share with their family and neighbors," O'Brien said. "And they drew pictures of various Mojave creatures to fill a book in which they described the animals."

Among the children's comments that accompanied the drawings:

"Kangaroo rats hop on long back legs and use their tails to balance," said Gabriel Alvarez.

"Cactus wrens build a nest like a football. They eat lizards. They take dust baths," Faith Aguirre said.

"Burrowing owls live in the ground and come out during the day," Delena Chavez said. "They are not smarter than other birds."

"Cougars jump high. They walk quietly. They make a purring sound," Vernon Colbert said.

Applauding the conservation program, Lenwood School Principal Tom Reynolds said first-graders are eager to learn about the environment. "By learning about it early in their lives, their appreciation of the natural world will stay with them," he said. "It's important that our children appreciate the desert around us and help conserve it."

In the Desert, Ancient Signs

National Park Service archaeologist David Nichols hikes through the Mojave National Preserve.

New York Times
By STEPHEN REGENOLD


On the northern border of a vast desert preserve, halfway up a dusty hillside and overlooking a great forest of Joshua trees, David Nichols knelt to brush off a flat gray stone.

"Yep, this is one right here," he said, motioning toward a sheet of exposed bedrock. A group of small, closely spaced stones, like tiny turrets in the sand, formed a vague ring at his feet. "These supposedly kept the rodents out."

Mr. Nichols, one of two full-time research archaeologists employed at Mojave National Preserve, was showing off a recent discovery. On a nondescript hill, a quarter-mile off a four-wheel-drive dirt track, the remnants of a prehistoric way of life lay scattered in the sand.

Throughout Mojave National Preserve, a 1.6 million-acre park about 140 miles northeast of Los Angeles, the subtle traces of a bygone civilization are all around. Pictographs painted on cave walls, dart tips in the sand, shelters, fire rings and pottery shards are common in the area, where generations of prehistoric people lived and died. Indeed, Mojave National Preserve is an amateur archaeologist's dream, with undocumented sites open year-round for visitors to explore in the empty, undeveloped park.

The Drying Pallet Site, as Mr. Nichols has come to call his new hillside finding, features 21 limestone slabs encircled with rocks that were carefully placed hundreds of years ago. The indigenous people, Mr. Nichols told his small tour group, used the sunny protected rock platforms to prepare Joshua tree blossoms.

"It was dried like beef jerky," he said of the white blossoms, which each spring still daub the land below in one of the world's largest and densest forests of Joshua trees. "Food in the desert was dried for preservation; it was the only way."

Mr. Nichols, a 39-year-old Los Angeles native, has discovered more than 50 significant sites since coming to work for the park in 2001. The Drying Pallet Site was identified just four months ago. Dozens of others, he said, most likely pepper the preserve's hills and canyons.

In recent years, noteworthy findings, including pictograph-packed caves, have been discovered by visiting hikers and amateur archaeologists. But while the park staff encourages people to explore the backcountry, collecting artifacts or disturbing historical sites in any way is forbidden. Take only photographs, leave only footprints, as the axiom goes.

Rangers at Mojave National Preserve do not provide directions to most documented archaeological locations, though some staff members and volunteers, including Mr. Nichols, may give clues. "We call Mojave a 'discovery park,' " Mr. Nichols said of the Delaware-size preserve, which has only 30 miles of established hiking trails. "I might suggest features to look for in the hills, but people are on their own to get off trail and see what they can find."

The official park map is nearly devoid of references to archaeology, as is the park's Web site. Signage is scant. Tours are limited to an occasional offering from California State University, Fullerton, which operates its research-oriented Desert Studies Center in the park.

Mr. Nichols's recent tour was a rare occasion, as he leads fewer than 10 trips a year, primarily to educate fellow park staff members or visiting researchers. His tours are not available to the general public.

Like most activities in Mojave National Preserve, exploring the park for uncharted archaeology is a do-it-yourself adventure. Visitors coming to see petroglyphs and arrowheads need to plan ahead, researching the area's history and culture to become educated on where to start the hunt. Visitors also need to be prepared for an immersion in the desert wilderness — snakes, scorpions, sun, heat and all.

Mojave National Preserve is the meeting place of three great North American deserts: the Great Basin, the Sonoran and its namesake Mojave. The area is a vast hinterland of dunes and cinder cones, tumbleweed plains, mesas and mountain forests. Turquoise deposits brought journeying Anasazi to the area hundreds of years ago.

Temperatures are extreme all year, with cold nights and blazing days. Elevations range from 800 feet to higher than 7,000 feet. It is exceedingly arid, with some parts of the park seeing only three inches of rain in a year.

Yet life thrives, as it has for thousands of years, among the Joshua trees and juniper. Quail, hummingbirds, mule deer, bighorn sheep, roadrunners, coyotes, badgers, rattlers, sidewinders and giant centipedes share a dry, dusty habitat. Sagebrush, creosote and yucca dot the land. Golden eagles and red-tailed hawks swoop above in the desert thermals.

Human habitation is limited to a few park staff members and a handful of land owners whose private ranches were grandfathered in when the preserve was created in October 1994. Mr. Nichols lives in a small green trailer in the middle of the park, Edward Abbey-style, with a water tank on the roof and no indoor plumbing, though with satellite Internet and HBO.

At the second stop of the day, deep in the park's interior and not too far from Mr. Nichols's green trailer, the small tour group walked two miles across the desert. A rocky flat-top ridge was in the distance. Barrel cactuses and yuccas grew sparsely on the red-brown landscape. Rocks and sand stretched to the horizon.

A slight hill dead-ended at a cliff, and Mr. Nichols stopped to look up. The rock wall above, a gray, disintegrating mass, held a mosaic of tiny dancing figures.

"Wow, look at these petroglyphs!" said Mary Ann Guggemos, a 48-year-old park volunteer from Buffalo. Carved in a veneer of rust-brown desert varnish were the depictions of bighorn sheep, masked human figures and male stickpeople with no necks but fingers and small phallic appendages. Concentric circles dotted the stone. Diamonds, ovals, a square, pits, grooves and other abstract images hovered nearby.

The Pinto House Site, as this find has come to be known, was inhabited by ancestral Mojaves or Chemehuevi, according to Mr. Nichols, and they lived and worshiped in the dusty dwelling. Pottery shards mixed with small stones and animal dung in the dirt. A faint ring of rocks encircled a small shrub. Eleven slick metates, worn stone pallets used for grinding piñon seeds, acorns, juniper berries and other grains, sat under the overhanging rock face. And the assemblage of petroglyphs looked down upon it all.

"The sacred and the mundane were mixed in this culture," Mr. Nichols said, standing beside rock rings and milling stones. He said the etchings above were probably made during a ceremony, perhaps dreams manifested and scratched on a wall. "They didn't go to a church to worship," he said.

A hawk hovered in a wind gust above the cliff face. Petroglyph men stared down four modern-day visitors. The Pinto House Site, a bare forgotten diorama, cradled a human presence once again. Dust kicked up, and a second hawk moved into the updraft, paralleling its mate, two desert beings silhouetted and still on a pale blue sky.

Squeezing Water from a Stone

Damned with a tiny share of the Colorado River, and running dry, Las Vegas sets its sights on the driest part of the driest state in the Union

by Matt Jenkins
High Country News

LAS VEGAS, Nev. — Few parts of the nation are drier than the Las Vegas Valley. Yet, like a circus performer catching bullets in his teeth, the city here flouts the terrors of the desert and has achieved its own sort of rowdy transcendence.

Las Vegas "owes nothing to its surroundings," wrote historian Hal Rothman in his 2002 paean to the city, Neon Metropolis.

Today, 1.7 million people — 70 percent of Nevada’s population — live in Las Vegas and its suburbs. Unlike more traditional Western resource-extraction economies, which reach far out into the countryside for their fuel, Las Vegas tends to generate its wealth in place: The city’s $60 billion-a-year economy is dominated by the service industry — casinos and tourism — and its environmental footprint is remarkably small.

In fact, as the city has grown, its economy has come to serve as a life-support system for much of the rest of the state: Thanks to Las Vegas, 10 of Nevada’s 17 counties are guaranteed a fixed amount of tax revenue from the state, far more than they actually generate themselves.

Las Vegas’ phenomenal success has led boosters such as Rothman, a University of Nevada, Las Vegas history professor, to tout it as a model for the New West. But the city’s economy, powerful as it is, is perched atop a precarious pedestal: A tiny slice of the Colorado River’s water.

That doesn’t particularly concern Rothman. "No American city has ever ceased to grow because of a lack of water," he wrote in Neon Metropolis, "and it’s unlikely that Las Vegas will be the first."

"The only genuinely determining factor in acquiring water," he argued, "is cost." And money, Rothman wrote, "is no problem in Las Vegas."

As if to prove him right, Las Vegas is now pushing forward with what will be the biggest groundwater-pumping project ever built in the United States: a $2 billion effort that will pump more than 58 billion gallons of water out of the ground every year. The project will reach far beyond the glitter of Las Vegas into the valleys of eastern Nevada’s Basin and Range country, ultimately extending as far north as the area around the high-desert town of Ely.

When the play of light across the Great Basin is just right, it reveals the pockets of water that seem to disappear in the glare of the midday sun: stingy seeps, shy rivulets that poke their way across the desert, great limpid pools of water bubbling into the light. Those are all mere hints of the watery treasure trove that lies beneath the entire area: An enormous aquifer that spreads across some 100,000 square miles of eastern Nevada and western Utah.

Las Vegas has always pushed the limits harder than any other place, because it has had to — and because it can. "When you’ve got a city the size of Las Vegas, that’s growing as fast as it is, it’s hard to estimate what’s going to be economically infeasible," says Mike Dettinger, a U.S. Geological Survey hydrologist who authored some of the first comprehensive studies of the aquifer. "Anything’s possible if you have a big-enough city at the other end of the pipeline."

Las Vegas may, however, have reached the tipping point, beyond which its continued growth can only come at the expense of the rest of the state. The groundwater project in the Basin and Range will pry open a place of tremendous biological diversity that includes Great Basin National Park, three national wildlife refuges, at least three state and five federally listed threatened and endangered species, and a host of rural farming and ranching communities. Tapping the aquifer could unravel the tenuous hydrologic, ecological and political equilibrium in the Great Basin, giving the lie to boosters’ claims that Las Vegas is the city of the future. And, ultimately, the water project may be a prelude to an all-out war for the waters of the Colorado River.

The fight building over Nevada’s groundwater might never have started, if not for a space-age nuclear weapons program. In the late 1970s — at the same time he was hoping to create a legacy as a champion of arms control — President Jimmy Carter backed the MX missile program, a plan to shuffle 200 intercontinental ballistic missiles between 4,600 shelters in the Great Basin. The shell game was essentially a bluff, meant to force the Soviets to the negotiating table or risk blowing their entire nuclear wad shooting missiles at empty bunkers.

To the rural Nevadans who were going to be on the receiving end of a project designed to draw Soviet fire, the MX program made less sense. Environmentalists, Indians, ranchers and academics allied to mount a fight that swept the state. Steve Bradhurst, who directed the fight against the MX program for the governor’s office, says, "Wherever you went, particularly in rural Nevada, you’d see stop signs … you’d see ‘STOP,’ and then people would paint on ‘MX’ underneath."

In 1981, Nevada Sen. Paul Laxalt, a close friend of and the campaign chairman for Ronald Reagan, prevailed upon the newly elected president to ax the program.

Although the program never put a single missile in the desert, the search for the water it would have required significantly advanced scientists’ understanding of the desert’s aquifers.

In most of the eastern Great Basin, there are two aquifers, one on top of the other. For more than a century, farmers have tapped the one closest to the surface, which is made up of water caught in the sand and gravel that has filled in the valley bottoms. But below that lies the real prize: the deep carbonate aquifer, so called because the water is contained within massive bands of limestone. Several million years ago, the geologic faulting that created Nevada’s Basin and Range province took what was then a 50-mile-wide band of limestone, broke it into splinters, and smeared it out across the Great Basin. The fractures in the rock are packed with water.

As part of its investigations for the MX program, the Air Force drilled a series of wells that reached down into the carbonate aquifer. Those wells soon became fodder for the kinds of legends normally associated with deranged conquistadors seeking cities of gold in the desert. Dettinger, the USGS hydrologist, says one MX well, north of Las Vegas, "hooked into some sort of crack that went God knows where, and it produced like crazy." After that, he says, "there was a tendency to imagine that if you put a well into the carbonate, it would just make water."

Back in 1922, the seven states along the Colorado River met to negotiate the Colorado River Compact. The Compact divvied up the river’s water and came to serve as the foundation for a complex set of agreements and legal rulings known among water managers, with a sort of Ten Commandments reverence, as "The Law of the River."

At the time, Nevada (which, practically speaking, meant Las Vegas) had less bargaining power than any of the six other states — California, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico. Las Vegas was just a miserable little rail stop back then, and in all the years since, the city has been bedeviled by one stark fact: It walked away from the negotiations with just 300,000 acre-feet of water per year, a measly 4 percent of the water in the Compact. (One acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons, or enough water for two homes in Las Vegas for a year.)

By the 1980s, when a string of record-breaking growth years began, Las Vegas was beginning to feel the pinch. In 1989, the metropolitan area, whose population was just shy of three-quarters of a million people, grew by more than 61,000 — an astounding 8 percent.

The same year, Vegas hired Patricia Mulroy as the general manager of what would become the Southern Nevada Water Authority (HCN, 4/9/01: The water empress of Vegas). Mulroy immediately made it a personal crusade to ensure that the city had enough water to continue growing. And on Oct. 17, 1989, she made her first move toward the Basin and Range. Mulroy filed water-rights applications with the state for over 800,000 acre-feet of groundwater — more than twice the city’s Colorado River allocation, and enough to supply almost 1.7 million new homes.

Rural Nevadans reacted as if they were under Soviet attack, filing more than 4,000 protests with the state engineer and assembling a legal team that included former Arizona governor Bruce Babbitt, who would go on to serve as U.S. secretary of the Interior.

In response, Mulroy turned her attention elsewhere, and put the project on hold. Over the next decade, Vegas proved itself more adept than any other city in the West at digging change out of the couch. The Water Authority worked to increase water efficiency in Las Vegas, and began offering a dollar-a-square-foot bounty to the city’s residents to rip out their lawns, an effort that has resulted in the removal of 64 million square feet of grass. The city has also perfected a watery sleight of hand to stretch its meager share of the Colorado as far as possible: It pumps far more than 300,000 acre-feet out of Lake Mead each year, but treats its wastewater and returns it to the reservoir for re-use by California and Arizona.

During the 1990s, Mulroy also began talking with the six other Colorado River states. She called for a "major rethinking" of the way the river is managed, and she courted the other states in an attempt to buy some of their water (HCN, 2/21/94: Las Vegas wheels and deals for Colorado River water). Mulroy won the ability to "bank" some water in Arizona for drought years, but her call for changes on the river met a cool reception — particularly from Colorado, which has long styled itself as the enforcer of order on the river.

At the time, Colorado was in an enforcing kind of mood. For more than 40 years, California had been using more than its share of the river. Finally, in the 1990s, Colorado successfully led the Upper Basin states — which also include Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico — in demanding that it stop (HCN, 5/21/01: Quenching the big thirst).

Las Vegas’ relentless growth was proving equally worrisome. In 2001 alone, the city added more than 90,000 residents. The Upper Basin began to talk about forcing Vegas to live within its Colorado River allocation; when Mulroy came knocking, asking for more water, the other states sent her home to deal with her own problem.

Mother Nature, meanwhile, was putting a finer point on things. A major drought had started on the river in 1999, and 2002 brought a frying-pan-to-the-head moment. That year, the Colorado River received only a quarter of its average runoff.

Mulroy says that when river managers ran computer models during the 1990s to predict the likelihood of drought, "there was zero probability that a drought of this magnitude would hit. Nobody anticipated it."

It was clear that Mulroy was running out of options. Once again, she turned her attention to the Basin and Range country, and the hundreds of thousands of acre-feet of water that the city had claimed.

The project in the Basin and Range, as currently proposed, will use 115 to 195 pumps, spanning seven valleys in eastern Nevada, to fill a 235-mile-long, six-and-a-half-foot diameter pipeline that follows U.S. Highway 93 to Las Vegas. It won’t pump a single drop of water for at least a decade, but it has already kicked off what is sure to be an epic struggle between Las Vegas and rural Nevada.

The rural counties are at a phenomenal disadvantage. The Water Authority’s budget this year is $642.7 million. Meanwhile, White Pine County, home to Ely, was forced to ask the state to step in to manage its finances after it went broke earlier this summer. In addition to its economic might, Las Vegas holds 70 percent of the votes in the state Legislature. One potential champion for the rural counties — U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, D, the Democratic leader in the Senate — has made only a tepid commitment to their cause, and critics are quick to point out that Reid’s son Rory is a county commissioner in Clark County, which includes Las Vegas, and that he also sits on the board of the Southern Nevada Water Authority.

Nonetheless, rural Nevadans are rallying around the cry that this is a repeat of Los Angeles’ infamous water raid on the Owens Valley in the early 1900s, when the city secretly bought out farmers and shipped their water south, turning the valley into a dust storm-ravaged wasteland.

Many of the project’s most thoughtful opponents are veterans of the MX fight. One is Dean Baker, who runs a ranch in Snake Valley, on the Nevada-Utah border. Baker’s ranch stands in the shadow of Wheeler Peak and Great Basin National Park, on the northeasternmost fringe of the water project, in what he calls "the driest part of the driest state in the Union."

In the 1970s, Baker began buying center-pivot irrigation systems to water his land, then watched as the water they sprayed out simply evaporated without ever hitting the ground. He experimented for years, souping up his center pivots with a wizard’s array of special nozzles, and pushing more water through the machines, before he was finally able to put enough water on the ground to grow a crop.

Baker is one of three rural representatives on the 26-member advisory committee created by the Water Authority, where he’s one of the few voices questioning whether farmers’ irrigation water will disappear as Vegas pumps down the aquifer. Once a month, he flies his Cessna 182 to Las Vegas for committee meetings: "I keep asking them, ‘Is there any other project in the world at this elevation, with this precipitation, with this humidity, (that is) sustainable?’ "

Jo Anne Garrett, another MX veteran, has also been involved. Back in 1989, when Las Vegas first filed its water-rights applications, she helped convince White Pine County residents to tax themselves to underwrite the opposition’s legal efforts. Last year, after two White Pine County commissioners and the district attorney attempted to negotiate a water deal with Las Vegas, Garrett and two other county residents took to the streets with a recall petition. They got less than half the signatures needed to hold a recall, but voters ousted the two commissioners in that fall’s election; the district attorney is up for re-election next year.

The county hasn’t met with Las Vegas since, but the fight has begun to border on the desperate. There’s a little more than $100,000 left in the fund to fight Las Vegas, and earlier this year, White Pine county commissioner Gary Perea took the unusual step of asking Pat Mulroy for money so the county could hire somebody to fight her water project. Mulroy, not surprisingly, declined.

The science and the landscape are full of questions. A series of U.S. Geological Survey reports released in the 1990s raised concerns that, in spite of the immense size of the aquifer, only a fraction of its water can be sustainably pumped without permanently depleting it. The Water Authority originally applied for more than 800,000 acre-feet of water per year. Now, it says it can sustainably pump 125,000 to 180,000 acre-feet, skimming off only the pulse of "recharge" that the aquifer receives each spring and summer as snowmelt percolates down into the limestone.

This spring, the federal Bureau of Land Management began work on an environmental impact statement for the pipeline, noting that the project could affect desert tortoise, sage grouse, pygmy rabbits, and several species of endangered fish. Nevada state engineer Hugh Ricci will hold public hearings to help him decide whether to approve Las Vegas’ water applications, something which could happen within the next few months.

The U.S. Geological Survey is also working on a new estimate of how much water can be sustainably pumped from the aquifer (HCN, 9/13/04: A water-and-wilderness bill kicks up dust in Nevada). But that study won’t be finished until November 2007, and it won’t model the potential impacts of the Water Authority’s pumping on existing well users. Nor will it address the risks to the springs that dot all of eastern Nevada, and are some of the most ecologically important — and sensitive — places in the Great Basin.

"From an evolutionary standpoint, it’s just absolutely fascinating," says Jon Sjöberg, a Nevada Department of Wildlife supervisory biologist, describing the world of life that the aquifer supports. About 10,000 years ago, as the climate warmed, the salty lake that covered eastern Nevada began drying up. But a few vestiges of the saltwater ecosystem were caught by the freshwater springs as everything else evaporated away. In these isolated springs, a remarkable array of fish, snails and amphibians survived and evolved, creating the Great Basin’s legendary biological diversity.

Sjöberg offers the example of the White River springfish, a tiny creature averaging slightly more than an inch in length, which was placed on the federal endangered species list in the 1980s. There are five different subspecies of White River springfish in five springs strung over more than 100 miles between Ely and Las Vegas.

With such small populations in such isolation, "it doesn’t take much to affect them," says Sjöberg.
"We’re in a constant crisis mode, running from one disaster with one species to another. All you’re trying to do is keep them from going extinct," he says. He talks about using pickle buckets to rescue Pahrump pool fish from springs northwest of Las Vegas when they dried up after farmers started pumping nearby.

"We’re used to that," he says, but the groundwater project "has the potential to affect all of those resources collectively" — not just fish, but also mammals such as desert bighorn sheep and elk that depend on isolated water sources.

One big concern is that, in the fractured carbonates, water-level declines from the project’s wells can "propagate" along the fractures like cracks spreading across a windshield, possibly affecting springs hundreds of miles away.

The Department of Wildlife was an official "cooperator" in the BLM’s environmental impact statement until this June. Then, at the direction of Gov. Kenny Guinn’s office — and for reasons that the office has never convincingly explained — the agency withdrew from the process.

That has left Sjöberg sidelined, with plenty of questions. "This has to be done right, because you’re looking at something that is happening on a landscape scale. And that’s where it just kind of takes your breath away," says Sjöberg. "We spend a lot of time just staring at the wall going, ‘Oh shit. What do we do?’ "

Only a little more than a century ago, groundwater hydrology was seen as something of the occult, and despite great advances in the science, it still requires a certain willingness to feel your way forward toward the answers.

"The bottom line," says Mulroy, "is even the most sophisticated hydrologic modeling is nothing more than an educated guess."

Jeff Johnson, the Water Authority’s senior hydrologist, says that "the next step is going in and actually developing the resource, through wells and a pipeline, in order to try to refine some of those numbers."

The Water Authority is already part way into a small-scale trial run in Coyote Spring Valley, an empty expanse of Joshua trees and creosote bush 50 miles northeast of Las Vegas, on the edge of the Desert National Wildlife Range. The state engineer is requiring the Authority to test-pump for several years to determine the effects on the aquifer before he’ll consider granting full rights.

"Right now, the philosophy is, we’re going to start slow, pump a certain amount of water, and see what happens to the springs," says Bob Williams, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s field supervisor for Nevada. Williams is responsible for the bevy of federal wildlife refuges in the state, and for protecting plants and animals on the federal endangered species list such as the White River springfish.

The Water Authority, Fish and Wildlife Service, and several other parties are funding studies of the Moapa dace, another endangered native fish in the area, as well as restoring habitat and removing predatory invasive fish. "We’re trying," says Williams, "to reduce one threat as we bring another on."

The Water Authority says it will use a similar pump-and-monitor strategy for the groundwater project in the Basin and Range. "We don’t want to go in and pump for 10 years and then, gee, it dries up and is gone. That doesn’t serve anybody’s purpose," says Johnson. "The idea here is, go in, develop the resource, do it conservatively, and then manage it for long-term viability, indefinitely."

But the strategy is not without risk. "The but," says Williams, "is if you start pumping, and in maybe two years or five or 10, you start seeing (a water-level decline), can you turn it off fast enough to actually stop the effects?"

Dean Baker doubts that "turning it off" will even be an option. He talks about the tremendous investment that Las Vegas is making in the pipeline, and is skeptical that the Water Authority would happily walk away if the project were found to adversely affect water levels.

"If they build that pipeline," he says, "the urge will be overpowering to keep it full."

Clearly, there are simpler — and far less expensive — solutions on the Colorado River. Even six years into a drought, there is still a lot of water on the river. Some is water that the Upper Basin has rights to but still doesn’t use. Much is water being used by farmers — whether on alfalfa fields in Wyoming or asparagus farms in Southern California’s Imperial Valley — that Las Vegas could conceivably buy. The Imperial Valley alone receives 3.85 million acre-feet a year.

"If we could work out some deal, or some agreement, between the basin states where Nevada could get more water," says Williams, "that would be better than to build this pipeline and run the risk of so much environmental — I don’t want to use the word ‘damage’ — but potential for environmental concerns."

For now, however, that water remains beyond Pat Mulroy’s reach. Mulroy maintains that the Basin and Range groundwater project is simply an effort to develop "a plumbing system that is separate and apart from the Colorado River." But she is largely being forced to pursue the project, with all its uncertainties, because there are problems on the Colorado that she hasn’t yet been able to crack.

At the same time, the groundwater project itself is beginning to show signs of strain, albeit subtle ones. The environmental impact statement on the pipeline, originally due out next spring, is, according to Mulroy, "kind of in a stall mode right now." The study will likely be revamped to assess the impacts of another water project to the south in Lincoln County (HCN, 8/4/03: Pipe Dreams); the manager of the study announced that he is quitting this fall, after it became clear that it will probably take at least three more years to redo it.

Meanwhile, the pressure is growing. Last year, Las Vegas added more than 35,000 houses and nearly 95,000 people. New projections, released this August, show that the population will grow even faster than previously anticipated. Based on those updated numbers, the Water Authority says that its existing supplies will allow Las Vegas to continue to grow until 2013. But the Authority is now facing a widening gap between that year and when it can lay its hands on its next big shot of water. Under the most optimistic projections, the groundwater project was scheduled to come online in 2015; now, it may not do so until several years after that. Mulroy is pursuing other options (see story, page 13), but those are even more politically fraught.

That raises two scenarios. Las Vegas, contrary to Hal Rothman’s claims, could be the first American city to stop growing because of a lack of water. But a far more likely scenario is that Mulroy will be forced back to the Colorado and its as-yet-uncracked challenges.

In the past, she urged the other states to "rethink." This time, she may invoke the Colorado River equivalent of the nuclear option, and file a lawsuit asking that the Colorado River Compact be declared null and void. "If there is no way that the Compact can accommodate Nevada, then Nevada has no choice but to consider the Compact broken," she says. "I think we’re all trying to avoid going to court, but in truth of fact, Nevada is backed into a corner."

Because the Compact is essentially a treaty between states, any challenge to it will go directly before the U.S. Supreme Court. That’s the absolute last place any of the states wants to be: While every state would like a shot at a bigger slice of the river, no state is willing to risk losing some of its entitlement in court — especially in the Supreme Court, beyond which there is nowhere to appeal.

But Nevada has almost nothing to lose. Because Las Vegas has, far and away, the tiniest cut of the river — that paltry 4 percent — it has far more incentive than anyone else to go for broke. "What are you gonna do?" asks Mulroy. "Take our 300,000 acre-feet away?"

In past negotiations, the other states have insisted that Mulroy leave no stone unturned at home before she seeks more Colorado River water. The groundwater project may, then, be Mulroy’s effort to show that Nevada has exhausted every option within its borders, a sort of pre-emptive strike to neutralize the other states’ arguments before the Supreme Court. But it may also be Mulroy’s own MX-worthy stratagem, one final effort to force the other states to the negotiating table.

The prospect of a date in court gives the six other states tremendous incentive to help Las Vegas find a solution to its problems. The states’ representatives have been meeting at least once a month since January in an effort to do just that.

They are, however, also hedging their bets. Colorado has long maintained a special $2 million fund to defend its Colorado River water rights. Now, Arizona is preparing a comparable war chest.

Nevada, oddly, is making no such special preparations. But as Hal Rothman is so fond of pointing out, while Las Vegas may be short on water, it has plenty of what really matters.

"If we have to go to court," Mulroy says archly, "we’ve got the money."