McGee Pass is NOT a place you want to be in a heavy storm, esp if lightning is involved. It's a wide highly exposed bare saddle. Horse packers dreaded that crossing in bad weather.
McGee Pass is NOT a place you want to be in a heavy storm, esp if lightning is involved. It's a wide highly exposed bare saddle. Horse packers dreaded that crossing in bad weather.
They are predicting a strengthening El Nino.Originally Posted by Nodda Duma
"This winter's El Niņo could be one of the strongest in the past 50 years, leading to a return of meaningful but not necessarily drought-busting rain in California."
Makes no difference except temporarily. In fact, if the reservoirs do fill, it just means all the long-term drought planning will be immediately forgotten and all
the current significant water wasters will get exactly what they wanted - stall the fines with lawyers and lawsuits against water agencies, then expect them the
courts to dismiss the whole thing. In the heaviest of rain years water gets over-allocated as a fashion of political currency (favors - briefly make everybody happy
that has influence money at least), same nothing in the piggy-bank for a non-rainy day. More dams won't help - basically big evaporation pits. They need to take
underground aquifers more seriously, at least the ones the frackers aren't rapidly poisoning.
I believe the quote suggests just that. On the other hand, I suspect most other California residents will take what they can get.
That's a line from The Departed. A synonym for "steal". Not much has changed over the last century in that respect. I'm quite a bit better informed than the average Calif citizen because I grew up right on the canyon of the San Joaquin, which is nicknamed "hardest working water in the world". My dad was concrete
inspector for the start of the Central Valley Project, and I recently witnessed old b&w footage of him in a PSB documentary about Central Valley water wars, which obviously began with that project and water diversions from its first dam. LA is an earlier story, with the movie Chinatown spun off its water scam, and books like
Land of Little Rain and Cadillac Desert telling the story of the Owens Valley water war, with LA and Mulholland in the role of Chief Thief.
Sounds like you might prefer a repeat of 1862.
Drew I remember seeing all the dust kicked up from Owens Lake and filling Indian Wells Valley. It was awful, but I guess the EPA finally told LA to stop simply paying the daily fine and let some water back in to keep the dust down. Is that still being done now with the drought? I moved out 4 1/2 years ago
Newly made large format dry plates available! Look:
https://www.pictoriographica.com
Owens Lakebed is still considered the single worst EPA site in the country for wind-borne contaminants (noxious alkaline deposits), and has been so all along. I've seen those dust clouds as high as 11,000 ft in Owens Valley. The town of Olancha is basically deserted except for a particular "mountain spring water" bottling facility! I presume the water in piped down the hill; but still (??). The evaporation pools out in the middle of
the lake hold small amounts of water amount of water in it fosters all those strange bright red algal and bacterial colors which aerial photographers love, though you can shoot some of this telephoto from halfway up the Cottonwood Rd. The dry minerals left behind in those pools are collected for commercial use. One of my college roomates grew up in the tiny hamlet of Keeler right at the edge of the Lake. One
night, years before, a flashflood came down that canyon from the steep Inyo Range behind there and swept their family mobile home eight
miles away onto Owens Lakebed! Incredibly it never rolled, and they were set down without serious injury on the salt flats.
I just posted some personal observations regarding the Brown Pelican and other wildlife for whom the San Francisco Bay is a food source: http://spiritsofsilver.com/field_notes A sign of global warming or El Nino, or both?
Thomas
That's cool, Thomas. Long-term trends or climatology per se (versus short-term fluctuations like El Nino) really require long-term study over
decades or worldwide cumulative studies, though certain things are already apparent to us outdoor types, even if politicians have their noses
too buried in payoff money to see anything green or not green outdoors. In coastal zones, the shells of plankton accumulate like tree rings
year after year on sea bottoms, just like pollen does on lake bottoms. By studying the species involved, a long-term record climate and temp
record can be modeled. Likewise with certain things in ice cores from glaciers. Here on the Calif coast, some of our soft coastal cliffs carry
such as record from the Pliocene up to the end of the Pleistocene. Nowadays, redistribution of wildlife along with insect species, and serious
changes in conifer forests, and outright disappearance of many small glaciers in the mountains inform us that none of this is incidental. It's
not new. Much started with the industrial revolution and the mass burning of coal. But it's accelerating at a rate faster than any time since the
Pliocene. There's an incredible set of Pliocene footprints in a relatively secret canyon in California; and back then, the climate was more like
the Rift Valley East Africa in terms of fauna and heat. So if Palm Springs can hit 120F in traditonal summers, it might be utterly unlivable
by the end of this century. And our mega-cities like LA, Las Vegas, and Phoenix-Tuscon might be unsustainable in terms of the amount of
energy required to cool them, or even existence of sufficient water. Never mind Miami or New Orleans - they won't even exist. My own field
several decades ago involved some climatology relative to the end of the Pleistocene and how it affected human dispersion in North America.
What were heretical hypotheses from whippersnappers like me back then are now mainstream. Once the thermostat broke, it was a mess - a temper tantrum, and not a gradual thaw at all, like scientists previously thought. Even our local marine microfossils concur.
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