Of Droughts and Floods
Anyone who has been watching the news lately is aware that sections of Colorado's Front Range have been devastated by floods over the past week. The news footage has been truly astounding, with roads, bridges, and homes washed away.
I had several friends and family members calling to see how we've been making out here along the Colorado River, thinking that perhaps we've been affected as well. Well we are just fine, thank you. Not only have the heaviest of the rains been concentrated on the eastern side of the Rockies, (and we're on the west), but the Colorado River has numerous dams upriver which help control the flow long before its comes our way. In fact, 60% of the water that should be flowing past my backyard ends up being diverted to the Front Range by what are called "trans-basin" diversions, which is engineer-speak for the Front Range stealing our water.
In a drought year, which is what this was until about two months ago, this water pilfery is a bad thing. It results in less water for our fish and for our farms. When things get wet though, suddenly dams are not the enemy after all. During the winter of 2010-2011, we had a year for snowfall that can still bring a smile to one's face just thinking about it. There weren't any huge storms, but it seemed as though every night another 2"-3" inches fell, all winter long. It was a wonderful winter, with epic ass-deep powder all the time. A-Basin was not only open until the 4th of July, the conditions were actually pretty good until then. But then came spring, and the other shoe had to drop in the form of all that snow needing somewhere to go once it melted.
The water managers who manage the dams from Denver Water, Northern Water and the Bureau of Reclamation did a bang-up job that spring using the water management function of the dams to keep folks downstream from getting flooded. In June the water flowing past my house peaked at 12,000 cfs, and was over 10,000 cfs for over two months. At that level, my backyard was a part of the Colorado River for that entire time, but my house still stands.
Conversely, in dry years like the last two, by restricting flows by capturing run-off in May and June, it ensures that come August and September when rivers that don't have storage upstream become a trickle, the Colorado is still running strong.
This year's anticipated late summer trickle never materialized, thanks to a monsoon pattern that started in July and has yet to let up. For the past month, weather forecasters have been saying that the monsoon pattern is about to let up, and drier weather on the way, and for the past month forecasters have been wrong. Even this week, the dry weather was supposed to start on Monday, and its rained on Monday, Tuesday, and today.
So far though the only result in the wetter pattern has been to put the river off-color, which means cancelled fishing trips. This means lost income, but compared to what folks in Boulder County and along the South Platte drainage are dealing with, I'll take it.
On Sunday I went north to fish the Yampa, thinking that the water below the dam would be clearer than anything around here. It also gave me a chance to peer into the future, to see what kind of water was coming my way from the upriver. The following day I was supposed to be doing my first paid float in two weeks. The following is the email I sent to my client that evening...
*************************************************************
Mike,
9/15/2013
I just got back from a fishing trip to the Yampa
tailwater below Stagecoach, which took me upriver from where I live.
This morning the river didn't look too bad, there was about a foot of
visibility. Not quite fishable, I don't go with less than two feet (at
least for a trip you're paying for).
13 miles upriver at
Catamount, there was still a couple of cfs coming in at Catamount, and
two feet of visibility above the bridge. So I though, well if it
doesn't rain again today, and it dries up above Catamount, then we might
be fishing Monday.
On the way back from Toponas, I headed
south towards a black sky. Once over the low pass between McCoy and
Toponas, it started to rain. When I got down the river, I could see it
was bright red. There's a bit of red rock upriver and it must have
rained hard up there. So then I followed the river down, and it was red
until just above the Catamount bridge. From there I could see the
leading edge of the plume, marching downriver from McCoy. That two feet
of visibility was just about to be eclipsed by several miles of bright
red silt.
The river cleared up again for the next several
miles again, until I got to Pinball and the red rock canyon I usually
float through. It must have rained there too, all of the cliffs looked
like the elevator in "The Shining", with blood red liquid just pouring
off them in crimson waterfalls. All along the river I counted at least
twenty different red rivulets pluming into the green water. The size of
these alluvial fans would vary in proportion to the size of wash it was
at the mouth of.
By the time I got home, the river still
looked pretty decent, even better than it looked this morning. That's
because I was looking at the morning's Catamount water, this afternoon
in my backyard 13 miles away. I told my wife about what was coming our
way, and ten minutes later it changed from green to red.
So
needless top say, fishing's off tomorrow. The good news is that the
extended forecast looks good. We're supposed to at least four days off
in a row without rain this week, and all it takes usually is three days
to get decent again. It should be good for by this weekend, right up
until when it starts to rain again.
Jack
***********************************************************************
So as you can see, the Colorado River is a rather dynamic and volatile ecosystem, and in wet years a rather unreliable fishing venue. When its on, there's no river I'd rather ply my boat upon, but when once it goes off-color, it takes a couple of days for it to clear and heal itself. Over the ten years I've lived beside it, I've gotten pretty good at predicting its moods, but its kind of like a marriage that way. Just when you think you know what's coming, some rain shower fifteen miles away rears its head like an email from an ex that your wife reads, and all bets are off!
Wednesday, September 18, 2013
Introduction To My Blog
Jack's Mountain Blog
Introduction
My name is Jack Bombardier, and this is my new blog. I haven't done this before, so it may not have a lot of bells and whistles to start with, but presumably I'll get there.
A quick Bio - I am originally from Massachusetts, and moved to Colorado when I was twenty-five. Since I'm now fifty-two, I consider myself a "semi-native" Coloradan since I've lived slightly over half my life here. From 1984 until 2002, I was a Field Engineer traveling all over the US and the world working in the hi-tech world of design workstations. Then for my next company I worked on drum scanners and imagsetters in the electronic pre-press industry, and then in my final position I was in the semiconductor business working with equipment used in the manufacture of computer chips. It was a fun ride while it all lasted, and I got to see many places that would have only been pictures in a magazine for me.
But then late in my career, I met a Colorado mountain girl and that changed everything. Travel was no longer about going to somewhere interesting, but more about who I was leaving behind to get there, and that took a lot of the fun out of travel. When I got laid off in 2002, right after finishing the most productive business trip of my life, we stuck with our plans to get married that fall and moved to the mountains a couple of months later.
My wife Terena is brilliantly smart as well as physically hot, and our original plan was to start a dog trainers school. She created a business plan that won the award for Best Business Plan handed out by the SBA that year, and we were on our way. For my part, I was looking to create a business combining two of my two passions, fishing and rafting, by starting a guiding business, focused on doing trips along the Colorado River which is where we moved. Ten years later, that is basically what we're doing. We moved from our original venue that we were leasing to a place a mile upriver that we own, and the focus of her work shifted more towards boarding and training dogs than to training people, but we are basically "living the dream". Of course the "dream" has turned out to have a lot more twists and turns than we could have imagined back in 2002, but navigating the unexpected is what constitutes living. A life that merely follows some predetermined script or series of bullet points would not be one worth living.
So what will my blog will be about? Basically, it will be about doing things, and then writing about it. I've always been a Doer, and I've always liked to write. So much in the way that I've combined fishing and rafting into a Float Fishing Business, I'm going to combine an active lifestyle and a knack for stringing words together into a Blog. Or at least that's the idea. Whether it will be something that anyone but myself will want to read I can't say. But the things that I'm interested in that I may want to write about at some point include (but are not limited to) fishing, skiing, hockey, driving, sex, travel, music, as well as popular (and unpopular) culture. I also spend far too much time wondering about the nature of what we perceive to be reality, and why we are here, and whether we are spiritual beings made up of tiny little balls of energy that transcend space and time, or just meat.
I hope that over time, these blogs will be funny, insightful, informative, and profane, maybe all at the same time. I promise that I'll try to never be boring. Life is too short and fleeting to waste time on being bored, there will be plenty of time for that when you're dead (or maybe not).
You can find out more about my fishing operation at www.confluencecasting.com.
Introduction
My name is Jack Bombardier, and this is my new blog. I haven't done this before, so it may not have a lot of bells and whistles to start with, but presumably I'll get there.
A quick Bio - I am originally from Massachusetts, and moved to Colorado when I was twenty-five. Since I'm now fifty-two, I consider myself a "semi-native" Coloradan since I've lived slightly over half my life here. From 1984 until 2002, I was a Field Engineer traveling all over the US and the world working in the hi-tech world of design workstations. Then for my next company I worked on drum scanners and imagsetters in the electronic pre-press industry, and then in my final position I was in the semiconductor business working with equipment used in the manufacture of computer chips. It was a fun ride while it all lasted, and I got to see many places that would have only been pictures in a magazine for me.
But then late in my career, I met a Colorado mountain girl and that changed everything. Travel was no longer about going to somewhere interesting, but more about who I was leaving behind to get there, and that took a lot of the fun out of travel. When I got laid off in 2002, right after finishing the most productive business trip of my life, we stuck with our plans to get married that fall and moved to the mountains a couple of months later.
My wife Terena is brilliantly smart as well as physically hot, and our original plan was to start a dog trainers school. She created a business plan that won the award for Best Business Plan handed out by the SBA that year, and we were on our way. For my part, I was looking to create a business combining two of my two passions, fishing and rafting, by starting a guiding business, focused on doing trips along the Colorado River which is where we moved. Ten years later, that is basically what we're doing. We moved from our original venue that we were leasing to a place a mile upriver that we own, and the focus of her work shifted more towards boarding and training dogs than to training people, but we are basically "living the dream". Of course the "dream" has turned out to have a lot more twists and turns than we could have imagined back in 2002, but navigating the unexpected is what constitutes living. A life that merely follows some predetermined script or series of bullet points would not be one worth living.
So what will my blog will be about? Basically, it will be about doing things, and then writing about it. I've always been a Doer, and I've always liked to write. So much in the way that I've combined fishing and rafting into a Float Fishing Business, I'm going to combine an active lifestyle and a knack for stringing words together into a Blog. Or at least that's the idea. Whether it will be something that anyone but myself will want to read I can't say. But the things that I'm interested in that I may want to write about at some point include (but are not limited to) fishing, skiing, hockey, driving, sex, travel, music, as well as popular (and unpopular) culture. I also spend far too much time wondering about the nature of what we perceive to be reality, and why we are here, and whether we are spiritual beings made up of tiny little balls of energy that transcend space and time, or just meat.
I hope that over time, these blogs will be funny, insightful, informative, and profane, maybe all at the same time. I promise that I'll try to never be boring. Life is too short and fleeting to waste time on being bored, there will be plenty of time for that when you're dead (or maybe not).
You can find out more about my fishing operation at www.confluencecasting.com.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)