Peculiar's post about fishing for salmon in Nevada got me thinking about how skewed our baseline intuitions are regarding faunal populations. We are very poor at considering how abundant animal life was even three or four hundred years ago, let alone imagining back in deep time. We wildly underestimate what "normal" looks like.

On that subject, here's a charming paper which uses historical Chinese sources to estimate gibbon populations over a four hundred year span, before local extinction.

They (gibbons) appear in some of the Judge Dee stories, I believe as a deliberate attempt to give an air of authentic antiquity (the stories themselves being written over a millennium after that perspicacious gentleman's life). The Van Gulik novels are worth tracking down, being the work of a Dutchman writing English mysteries based on deliberately anachronistic Chinese stories of the eighteenth century written using Tang dynasty sources. Guardians against cultural appropriation can work out who owes what to whom.

I'm giving this a 'primates' label, optimistic that it will see heavy use.

Some Himalayan glaciers may be expanding rather than shrinking:

[The] report, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, found the key factor affecting their advance or retreat is the amount of debris – rocks and mud – strewn on their surface, not the general nature of climate change.

Glaciers surrounded by high mountains and covered with more than two centimetres of debris are protected from melting.

Debris-covered glaciers are common in the rugged central Himalaya, but they are almost absent in subdued landscapes on the Tibetan Plateau, where retreat rates are higher.

In contrast, more than 50 per cent of observed glaciers in the Karakoram region in the northwestern Himalaya are advancing or stable.

These observations regarding debris bring to mind the reported construction of artificial glaciers by Balti villagers in times past:

The last glacier to be started, we were told, had been made 35 years earlier by the grandfather of the present rajah. It had been built to an ancient formula, with ice blocks coming from male and female glaciers (their difference was not made clear). These blocks were deposited in a high valley and covered with charcoal and thorn bushes, on top of which 50 goatskins of water were placed. The water was to help keep the ice cool and to augment the ice supply when the water froze in winter. After 20 years of gradually adding ice and snow, the glacier became strong enough to support itself and send a constant supply of water in the nonwinter months to the dry fields below.

...to slaughter your enemies, see them driven before you, and revel in carbon credits on an epic scale.

I leave attempts to find any actual meaningful content in this article as an exercise to the reader (the study may or may not contain some, but you'd never know it from the Daily Mail).

Some good news for Desolation Canyon. Plus new photos.

Water controversies on the Yampa make it to NPR. I just took the Mr. Tierney quoted in the story down the river last week. There's much that I could write on the subject given time, but it will have to wait at least until I'm done running the Selway. For better visual aids to Dinosaur's river than NPR provides, click here.

Environmentalists, to their surprise, found that timber and mining were easier on the countryside.

"Now that Plum Creek is getting out of the timber business, we're kind of missing the loggers," said Ray Rasker, executive director of Headwaters Economics, a nonprofit that studies land management in the West. "A clear-cut will grow back, but a subdivision of trophy homes, that's going to be that way forever."

Link. Nice to see that some environmentalists are finally noticing. Perhaps tourist economies are not in fact the answer to everything. Who could have guessed?

A victory for the anti-mining faction in Crested Butte. Some background here. As I said in the earlier post, I have mixed feelings about this; however, I can't say I'm unhappy about the news.

Almost missed this one: John Derbyshire reviews a collection of nature writing, and gives a very nice tip of the hat to Steve, who is not included:

The [political] Left survives and flourishes because, as well as there being plenty of people whose satisfaction in life is to boss others around, there are even more who are willing to be bossed. Those who are not so willing — persons of a prickly-libertarian temperament — often head out to the wild places, to end up as lovers of the raw creation. There is, too, that aspect of the conservative temperament that abhors sentimentality and wishful thinking, and greets with happy recognition the cycles of death and mayhem that comprise most of the natural world's activity. I am thinking here, in both cases, of the Western writer Stephen J. Bodio, whose 1998 memoir On the Edge of the Wild offers an eloquent hunter's perspective on nature.

The Left undoubtedly has the best of it, though. They certainly have the best of this volume, which contains nothing of Stephen Bodio's at all — nothing at all sympathetic to hunting, except as carried out by American Indians.

The review finishes, unexpectedly, as a positive one. I note with amusement and approval that he prefers unknown writers, "writers I had never heard of, but whom I am glad to have encountered," among whom he numbers Ed Abbey. And though I agree with his assessment of two samples which he rightly mocks as purple prose, I disagree about his Eliot Porter quote:

In the winding canyon dark and light reflections replace one another in slow succession. The gentle wake of the boat breaks these images into undulating spots and patches, each wave for a moment holding a fragment of sky mixed with golden globules of sunlit rock.

I suppose Mr. Porter may be justly accused here of having failed to convey the moment to a distant audience, but the moments here described are a very large part of why I squandered years of time and set myself far behind my peers financially working as a ne'er-do-well river guide. Sunny canyon reflections on shaded water, broken by concentric ripples from my quietly dripping oars: it was worth everything for that alone.

Also worth noting is Mr. Derbyshire's mention of the decline in outdoor recreation:

While reading America's Earth I came upon a report just issued by the Nature Conservancy, telling us that people are spending less time in the Great Outdoors than ever before. Activity in this zone has been declining for twenty years, the researchers tell us. The annual per capita rates of decline have been from one percent to one and a quarter, depending on the type of activity measured — camping, backpacking, fishing, hiking, hunting, or trips to national and state parks and forests.

I hear this a lot, and it's probably true, but it's often hard to believe. It seems to be an instance of Yogi Berra's "No one goes there anymore. It's too crowded." So many places are positively infested with recreationists (as Mr. Derbyshire may recall from his hike to Inspiration Point in Grand Teton, where he missed the Peculiars by only a couple days). Even Nevada is becoming a destination, while REI, EMS and their ilk seemingly continue to flourish. I know people (assholes, I might add) who use Delicate Arch as a Frisbee golf hole. I suppose it's true though. Outdoor activities are now dominated by gearheads and destination vacationists, while locals who use their public land backyards on a regular basis do seem to be on the wane. The economic demographics of outdoor recreation are also unencouraging. My river company, which is actually a non-profit organization ostensibly dedicated to exposing the voting public to wilderness, recently raised prices on trips because people seemed to assume that our low cost reflected low quality. Bookings went up and honest working clientele continue to decline.

Still, though many places are overrun, a great many aren't. They can have Grand Teton and the Maroon Bells. There are areas right next door where I can still be confident of not seeing a soul.

The brief Grand Canyon experimental "flood" is over.

I find that perhaps my previous comment on the flood was somewhat unclear. A longtime reader and friend writes:

With the caveat that I am a plant ecologist and not a geohydrologist, and am not familiar with the Salmon River, I think the problem with doing flooding experiments with the Salmon is that there is no dam and thus no large amount of water to use to mimic a flooding event with. Sure, someone could (and I hope is) studying the flood cycle of the Salmon River, but for controlled experiment's sake a damned [sic, indeed] river is better.

(Sorry it's taken me a while to reply, but, well, life gets in the way. And I'm not a geohydrologist either, but I've drunk some beers with them on river trips, so I'll try and do my best to answer.)

The problem with doing flooding experiments in the GC is that there is no large amount of water to use to mimic a flooding event, the dam notwithstanding. Releases from Glen Canyon are determined by a bewildering host of factors: agriculture in California; municipal water needs in Phoenix, Vegas and So-Cal; electricity needs in Arizona; our treaty obligations to provide Mexico with 2 million acre-feet yearly; balancing inflow (i.e., snow melt) with diversions in upper basin states while maintaining useful water levels in three major downstream reservoirs and three major and a host of minor upstream reservoirs. Powell Reservoir has been very low for years now, while water demands continue to increase; no water has reached the Gulf of Mexico since 1982. Under these conditions, sedimentation research in the Grand Canyon is very low on the totem pole.

Indeed, the current flood is really just a small bone thrown to conservationists by the Bureau of Reclamation. Other people besides me are unhappy about the experiment. For instance, the Executive Director of the Grand Canyon Trust:

We need high flows to rebuild habitats whenever we get significant sediment inputs from tributary streams, but instead we get rare, “historic” experiments. We need more natural steady flows through most of the remainder of the year to protect spawning and rearing habitat for humpback chub in the Colorado River, but what we get is continued erosion of backwaters and beaches through an almost unbroken regimen of fluctuating flows... if this high flow experiment is part of a package with no more floods for five years and just two months a year of steady flows, then the package will impair the resources in Grand Canyon.

Or the National Parks Conservation Association:

...the experimental plan fails to include follow-up floods, which are critical to ensuring that endangered fish and sandbars are preserved. Instead, it calls for steady releases during September and October over the next five years –essentially locking-in smaller flows from the dam in order to generate additional power – when larger flows might be more beneficial to the park’s ecosystem at other times of the year, particularly in the spring.

This "flood's" 41,500 cubic feet per second for 60 hours is a paltry flood in a drainage the size of the Colorado Basin. And we only get this every four years (the last such experiment was in 2004). I have no doubt that these events do provide a wealth of data for scientists, and are useful due to their closely controlled nature, one data set in four years is a pretty plodding pace of research.

The big thing that's missing in the science here is baseline data for the behavior of sediment in a natural river system of this size. No one thought to look at any of this before the dam went in in 1963. And there is precisely one river system in the same ballpark in the United States unaffected by dams: the Salmon. Lets look at some hydrographs (which I got here). Here is the Main Salmon's high water season (April-July) for the last two years

2006, a fairly average year:

2007, a low year:

(Note that the scales are not the same; 2007's peak was about 38,000 cfs, while 2006's was over 90,000. That's a ton of water, and the Salmon can go way bigger than that!) Observe how the high flows are spread out over a good three months. Low elevations melt first, it peaks when the weather really heats up, and lingering snow melt and groundwater keep feeding it, stretching out the right end of the graph. Note also the multiple small peaks.

Now lets look at the Colorado. Here's last week, encompassing the flood:

And here's the last 12 months of business as usual at Glen Canyon Dam, with the flood spike at the far right:

In the flood graph, obviously, we have a sharp rise, a steady plateau and a sharp fall, enormously different from a natural high-water episode. In the lower graph, note that the daily fluctuations are so extreme that they're represented by three separate lines; GC boaters have to be careful when setting up camp to avoid being flooded or having their boats beached. The many little spikes represent weekday vs. weekend flows: they don't need as much electricity Saturday and Sunday when Phoenix office buildings are closed. Note also the increase to power Phoenix A/C in the summer heat.

Is a four day peak long enough to really stir up the sand and put it where we want it? Does the steep right-hand tail of the flood actually do harm by causing beaches to erode into very steep banks, something I've observed non-scientifically in Idaho (Mark Schmeeckle is probably working on this question as we speak)? What would happen if we three one-day floods instead? Is 41,500 cfs at all adequate, or do we really need something closer to historic highs (estimated to have been something like 70,000 to 300,000 cfs on the Colorado pre-dam; again, the Salmon's the only river with at all comparable bed and gradient that gets anything like these flows)? These are the kind of questions which the Salmon's annual natural flood experiment could help answer, without being dependent on the vagaries of western water politics. No, it's not a controlled experiment, but natural scientists commonly use natural experiments to gather data on phenomena for which a deliberate experiment would be irresponsible or impossible. That's how we've gained almost all of our knowledge about things like debris flows, landslides, avalanches and forest fires, let alone earthquakes, volcanism and astronomy.

Also worthy of note is that baseline data for sediment behavior in a natural river system would not be useful only in the Grand Canyon. Lodore Canyon below Flaming Gorge Dam on the Green and the entire Dolores River in Colorado have very similar management issues. I ran Lodore on an experimental flood in 1999 (which was a blast), but there hasn't been another, and we're not likely to see one any time soon. McPhee Reservoir has rendered the Dolores virtually dead for two decades. The Yampa (the last significant undammed river in the Colorado Basin) is also threatened by headwaters diversions and a dam on the Little Snake which would cut off its major source of sediment. Solid baseline data on sediment behavior would greatly benefit conservation proposals for these rivers.

"But what's the point?", you ask. "If the Bureau is so loathe to release a piddling flood for research purposes, we'll never see a flow regime that even vaguely mimics the natural hydrograph." Good point, and alas, very probably true. But you never know: things change. Water issues are only likely to get worse in the Colorado Basin, and if the Colorado River Compact ever comes up for major renovation, conservationists need to have their ducks in a row, with specific proposals instead of just objections. Also, every dam in the Basin is silting up in a big hurry; whether they like it or not, the Bureau is going to have to come up with some new plans eventually, and it would be nice to know how all the silt in the reservoirs is going to behave. Or the drought might even break (hey, I can dream), the dams might someday be looking to release large volumes (as Glen Canyon Dam was forced to do in 1981 and 1983), in which case scientists should be able to tell them how to do it in an ecologically beneficial manner.

You can never have too much data these days, and the Main Salmon is a great place to get some. And there are any number of grad students looking to research their theses is beautiful surroundings*. Grad students, I'm available, I know the Salmon and I'm a good river cook. Science!!!!

*I talked once with a guy who was writing his thesis on box elder trees in Dinosaur National Monument. "So what got you so interested in box elders?" I asked. "They grow here," said he.

Turns out there are downsides to living in gorgeous Rocky Mountain villages:

Lake County Commissioners have declared a local state of emergency for fear that this winter's above-average snowpack will melt and cause a catastrophic tidal wave.

The water is backed up in abandoned mine shafts and a 2.1-mile drainage tunnel that is partially collapsed, creating the pooling of water contaminated with heavy metals.

County officials have been nervously monitoring the rising water pressure inside the mine shafts for about two years. An explosion could inundate Leadville and contaminate the Arkansas River.

Governor Ritter has asked the Feds for help, and apparently someone's doing something. But it's really a very long term problem, as Chas points out:

...the work will have to be done forever. Forever. Until the mountains crumble or someone invents a permanent cure for water trickling down through the rocks, leaching out the cadmium, etc., and then draining through the tunnel conveniently provided in the 1940s, which drains into one fork of the Arkansas.

In related news, there have been plans afoot for a while to mine Molybdenum inside Mount Emmons, near Crested Butte, Colorado. Naturally, lots of people are upset. Kobex corporation argues their side here, but the Leadville situation must be giving their PR department a real headache.

My feelings on the issue are very mixed. My most selfish, not-in-my-backyard reaction is that the Kebler Pass area is extremely beautiful even by Colorado standards, which is saying something. Even if one believes the company's claim that the mine itself will be unobtrusive, the necessary "improvement" of the roads would be doing the area no aesthetic favours. Furthermore, as we are currently seeing, mines definitely cause major problems. The companies love to claim that technology and regulation have come so far that environmental impacts are no longer a concern; but when the potential impacts of the project happen on a geologic timescale, the burden of proof is definitely on the miners.

On the other hand, there is a solid argument that outsourcing all production of the minerals we consume to other countries, countries with weaker environmental and labour standards, is irresponsible and selfish. (Incidentally, if you think your job sucks, spend a few minutes with these photos of sulphur mining in a Javanese volcano.) Furthermore, having attempted to live for the better part of a year in western Colorado in the absence of a trust fund or real estate portfolio, I have a lot more sympathy for the concept of creating jobs. My current town of residence is still a living community largely because of three ugly, carbon-spewing, traffic-generating coal mines five miles to the east. Without this industry, the valley would have either no economy at all (granted, it doesn't have too much now); or else, lacking the deterrent of the mines' unsightliness strategically placed along the road from Aspen, it would be just another leprous Colorado service/tourist economy, real estate through the roof, no use to man or beast but only to trustafarians, "guest workers" and millionaires. Crested Butte is just such a community, and I have few tears to shed over the mine's impact on its property val..., hem, scenic virtues. I personally feel that Crested Butte would be rather improved by some truck traffic and redneck bars, and if the mine happens I hope they route the transportation right through town instead of over Kebler or Ohio passes.

And I do appreciate the glee with which the mine points out that molybdenum is used to make skis and mountain bikes. Mrs. Peculiar suggests that perhaps what Gunnison County needs are some Rossignol and Gary Fisher factories to complement the molybdenum mine. Wouldn't that be a politically incorrect manifestation of localism?

Seriously, these are tough choices, and those who advocate sustainability and distrust globalization face some difficult decisions if we stick to our guns. But let's end on a light note, and recall this classic Monty Python sketch, which really ought to be the Official Comedy Performance of Paonia, western Colorado and the New West.

"Tungsten carbide drills? What the bloody 'ell is tungsten carbide drills?"