Utah’s clawing way out of an extreme water deficit. Will it last?

Photo: Spenser Heaps, Deseret News Glen Canyon Dam holds back Lake Powell in Page, Ariz., on Monday, July 18, 2022.

Upper Basin was at a staggering 4 million-acre feet loss, with power generation compromised, but wet winter helped

It was with some pleasure Gene Shawcroft, chairman of the Colorado River Authority of Utah, was able to point to a stop sign buried under nine feet of snow at a high mountain pass.

It was only discovered after a snow machine hit it, so a scraggly bit of vegetation was placed next to it to warn others of its presence.

As he detailed a presentation to members of the Federalism Commission Tuesday, he showed a slide depicting a vent pipe from a Forest Service outhouse barely poking out of the snow at Bald Mountain Pass in Duchesne County.

This, he told them, is what the Upper Colorado River Basin needed to desperately see last winter, and it did. The trick is if it will happen again this year.

“We’re not still anywhere close to being out of the woods,” said Shawcroft, who also serves as the general manager of the Central Utah Water Conservancy District.

In that extremely dry year from August 2021 to August 2022, system storage dropped to 34%, or the loss of nearly four million acre-feet of water in the Upper Colorado River Basin. To put that in perspective, an acre-foot is enough to […]

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