“I have mentored in New Zealand, Chile, Argentina, Alaska,” said Gordon Tharrett, who describes his 30-year career guiding elite fly fishermen around the world. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“It’s phenomenal,” says Stephen Lytle, the son of the local game warden who has floated and fished this stretch since childhood. “You get people from all over the world. Eric Clapton has been here. Tiger Woods. If you’re a fly fisherman, this is one of the places to strike.”
“Millions of gallons of water are needed for a golf course,” Tharrett said. “It’s going to get to a point where people have to decide, ‘Do I survive or do I play golf? Do I have to have a lawn in the desert or pay $100 for a basket of berries?'”
“The gorge is on fire,” John Wesley Powell wrote in a journal after he first saw the golden hour light up on the red rocks in what would become known as Flaming Gorge.
It was 1871, and after launching his boat, the Emma Dean, into Wyoming’s Green River, the one-armed Civil War veteran was on his way to become the first known man to enter this great Colorado tributary and cross the Colorado River. Grand Canyon.
His journey followed the passage of the Homestead Act, which promised that any citizen willing to settle and improve America’s Wild West could claim 160 acres of federal land for free.
But after studying the geology and hydrology of the Colorado Basin, Powell warned that these policies “pile up a legacy of conflict and lawsuits over water rights because there isn’t enough water to supply these countries.”
Congress and the newly formed state governments ignored the warning, and by the mid-20th century, they were convinced that damming several spots along the Colorado system could build enough oases to keep farms, ranches, and megacities alive.
“In this part of the United States, water is key,” said John F. Kennedy at the 1963 Flaming Gorge Dam dedication ceremony. and poverty in dry years and waste in wet years. Now water will be available where needed…”
If alone.
Less than three months later, the president encountered tragedy in Dallas, and in the years following its dedication, the dam had devastating effects on fish downstream.
But in the late 1970s, after a graduate student convinced the fly-fishing governor of Utah to consider retrofitting a dam called a penstock, engineers were able to escape specific depths of the Flaming Gorge Reservoir. , regulate the temperature of the tail water below and a Goldilocks zone for hatching insects and the rainbow and brown trout feasting on them.
Today, most of the local economy depends on tourists who come to splash in the reservoir, which extends deep into Wyoming, or to fish and float on the Green. And when the federal Bureau of Reclamation and four states in the Upper Colorado River Basin agreed to release 500,000 acre feet — 1/6 of the reservoir’s capacity — to help parched communities in the South, it caused a local tumult.
“There’s a lot of people who just get mad,” Lytle said, paddling the gin-clear swirls. “It’s their water. It’s their geographic asset. So they don’t like going to desert cities that need it too. And any effect on the fisheries, especially up here? I mean, that’s people’s livelihood. “
“We’re concerned,” said Woody Bair, co-owner of the Flaming Gorge Resort, as he leaned on shelves full of hand-tied flies. “As Lake Powell has declined over the years, we’re concerned, ‘Will Flaming Gorge get to the point where it won’t generate electricity or go far, far down?'”
Stretching across the Utah-Arizona border, Lake Powell is named after the man who first sounded the drought alarm more than 150 years ago. And climate change is accelerating its grim forecast.
The reservoir has dropped frighteningly close to “dead pool,” when “we draw a vortex similar to what you would see in a bathtub as the water drains,” said Nicholas Williams, the Bureau of Reclamation energy manager for the Upper Colorado River. basin . “If you don’t have a pool of water deep enough, it causes problems and can damage the power plant equipment and it’s too low to generate electricity.”
Land reclamation officials this week told a Senate committee that western states must brace for even more dramatic cuts to water allocation in the Colorado River by 2023 — up to four million acre feet or more than 1.3 trillion gallons, almost as much as California in a year.
“How long can we do this?” Williams said about the Flaming Gorge releases. “It’s limited to a few years. The rest depends on how long we can last the drought and where will our water use go? We’re going to have to learn to live with the water we have, and the use we’ve sustained over the decades, is going to change.”
Tharrett believes officials have a misguided idea that they will be able to save something by draining the reservoirs in the upper basin.
“It’s like a teenager when they get their first paycheck,” Tharrett told DailyExpertNews, “and the next day they go and spend everything and they don’t get paid for two weeks and then they panic. these upper reservoirs, which are the lifeblood of everything below, will have nothing.”
He added: “And then they really start to panic.”