The Last Word On Nothing

We had a doozy of a snowfall last week in southwest Colorado, the high desert blanketed a foot and a half deep, the mountains getting a good four feet. Knock on wood, I don’t like to tempt the fates of nature and climate change, and I’m not meaning to brag, I just want to celebrate having to shovel five times in a few days to keep a path open to our vehicles. 

Snow is everything here. This corner of the Rocky Mountains is one reason Lake Powell is draining while Lower Basin States are in a hydrologic tizzy. Low snow packs have become the norm as our reservoirs dwindle and aquifers choke. Another reason for the dryness is Denver, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and L.A., where most of our water goes. I live between here and there and when we get a snow like last week I feel about ten pounds of constant pressure lift off my shoulders. 

Anywhere you live, you feel the pressure. It might be intensified hurricanes, unprecedented heat, or tidal surges submerging streets and basements no one’s ever seen flood. In my neighborhood, it’s snow, or the lack thereof. 

At the café in town, the usuals at a morning table were talking about winters we used to have, backroads in the 1970s impassible till July and now they’re open all winter without plowing. They remembered high country snow over your head lasting months. Bantering and razzing each other about politics — both political persuasions sitting at the table — they talked about climate change and sea level rise without arguing, as if it were as true as sunrise, nothing more than daily news.

In town, we got a brief taste of the last century as plows piled up snow eight feet tall down the middle of the highway. Even the old curmudgeons had to smile.

Observations from the local café are repeatable and reproducable. Precipitation in the Southwest has been on a steady and notable decline, intensifying in the last two decades, making the years 2000 to 2021 the driest twenty-two-year period since 800 AD. A study published in Nature last month looked at soil moisture deficit recorded in the last century and compared that to the last 1,200 years using tree ring samples from 1,600 sites across the Southwest. Seven ‘megadroughts’ (severe droughts lasting two or three decades) were documented between 800 and now, and we are currently in the second driest of them. In the cyclic nature of climates, we’d naturally be in a drought at the moment, and rising temperatures have made it significantly worse. Speaking to The New York Times, the study’s lead author, Dr. A. Park Williams, a climate scientist at UCLA, said that if temperature regimes hadn’t risen, this drought’s severity “would have been only about 60 percent of what it was.” Meaning that as climate warms, droughts in the Southwest intensify. One good snow feels like the scales tipping back, if for a moment.

A day after the skies cleared, my wife and I plowed out our road with the snout of our Toyota and drove to visit friends in Utah. Usually, you’d come out of a storm like this driving west into Utah and the desert would dry right up. Instead, the landscape stayed white for a hundred miles. The storm had dropped low and heavy. About five more pounds came off my shoulders as I imagined snowmelt seeping into the ground, flowing down capillaries in the rock, coming out in the summer in springs and seeps of dried maindehair fern and desert Columbine flowers. Seeing snow like this is seeing life.

I kept reminding myself, it’s only one storm. That pressure you’re feeling, the weight on your shoulders, should not lift. A storm helps. Every snowflake and raindrop should be adored like a child. But it’s a drop in a monumental bucket. 

The friends we visited run cattle in a canyon with a creek down the middle, their ranch in the family for sixty years. Their precipitation ranges between 6 and 11 inches a year, a hard margin for growing alfalfa, harder still for keeping cows profitable (New York City gets 50 inches). The husband of the couple was raised here, and last year for the first time in his life the herd was shipped to Idaho for summer pasture instead of being left in the desert to turn to sticks.

We took a day to walk around where they live, crunching through desert snow, and we couldn’t stop talking about the last storm. The husband had been talking about snowpack lately like a cancer, and now he seemed to be floating. When I asked in seriousness what this storm meant, he kept half-smiling as he said, nothing, really. He said he’s seen precipitation calculations being used in their area and he thinks climate scientists have been overly optimistic. I asked how many storms till he’d see a quantifiable change, either in vegetation or his stock tanks. He said three or four more and I said, shit. If we were lucky for the rest of the winter, we’d get one or two more good ones. Even his dream scenario wouldn’t put receding Lake Powell back to viable levels, and Denver, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and L.A. would keep fighting all the same. 

The prognosis isn’t great, dry predicted to become drier, hot becoming hotter. As we walked, I said we talk about drought as if it were a stranger, but this is desert, drought is the norm. He said all the more reason to appreciate a good storm.

Photo by me of the road to our house last week.