Traveling the West was an education in water and the lack thereof. Everywhere I went I confronted the impact of the devastating drought that is topic number one throughout that part of the country. I saw it in the empty reservoir behind Glen Canyon Dam, in the complaints of rangers in Grand Canyon about the complete lack of essential spring floods and the accumulation of damaging sand and silt in the Colorado River, in signs everywhere to conserve water ... I couldn't get away from the impact. And then there's California's Central Valley. You'd never know there was a drought given the massive amounts of water they use to keep their crops alive. I was amazed at some of the things the farmers were doing. I saw more new orchards being planted and watered than made sense given the water is running out. And, in the heat of the day, I saw massive watering operations going full tilt ... imagine the evaporation and how much water never got to the thirsty plants. I seems many haven't gotten the message that water is RUNNING OUT. Farmers think it's an infinite resource along with several large municipal water authorities (I'm looking at you LA). In Mono Lake the LA water authority came around in the 1920s and basically confiscated all the streams that fed the lake. You can imagine the outcome ... the lake almost disappeared. It took decades of fighting and court battles to get even a little of that water back and now the drought is sapping that supply to death so the lake is still very much in trouble. And you read about the convoluted legal arrangements and you no longer need to wonder how this all came about. It involved politicians so the outcome was foregone ... an absolute screw up. They made the mistake of creating fixed allocations ... each entity got a certain absolute amount of water and, unfortunately, the amount they worked with was a historically high measurement. Now there's not as much water but everyone still wants their fixed allocation and screw everyone else. It's a huge mess and I'm not sure if anyone, but especially politicians, can square the circle to fix it. But fix it the must because the future of the West depends on finding a solution. It should be interesting ...
Great Sand Dunes Snowstorm
As I've stated before, I spent a month in the Great Basin of Utah and Arizona because the cap for my 15 year old Nissan pickup needed to be special ordered. When the day came to have it fitted I was informed by the store that the truck carrying it had been diverted down into Texas and Oklahoma and would be delayed for 4-5 days. I wasn't about to sit around Albuquerque waiting at $65/day in a hotel so I jumped in my truck and headed north into Colorado and the Great Sand Dunes. I got dumped on big time ... two nights of heavy, wet snow (which collapsed my tent at 3 am) and froze my proverbial ass off. But bad weather makes for amazing photographs and I got a ton. The dunes were covered with a frosting of white and the sky was heavy with storm clouds ... a photographer's dream for sure. So I put the 70-200 mm f/4 zoom on the DSLR and went hunting for nice compositions. Along the road into the park there were downed trees and that's where I found exactly what I wanted. This is an HDR of 3 images with some Lightroom touches at the end. It's nice and pleasing to the eye and those storm clouds ... what more can I say.
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| Great Sand Dunes - 70mm(1.6 crop),f/18,HDR,ISO 100,license CC BY NC 4.0 |
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