Water Line: Across California on the 38th Parallel

A year ago we traveled from our home at Mono Lake, near the eastern edge of California, across the state to Point Reyes, where a lighthouse sits at 38°00' (it is intriguing that lighthouses mark the 38th parallel line at each edge of the continent). The 17-day trek was done on foot, bicycles, and by boat. Starting from Mono Lake, where a battle over stream diversions by the City of Los Angeles was won by citizen activists (the Mono Lake Committee, National Audobon Society, and CalTrout), our route intersected with the Sierra crest snowpack/glacial melting/climate change story; with Hetch Hetchy reservoir inside Yosemite National Park; with the New Melones Reservoir on the Stanislaus River; with the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta; with San Francisco Bay; and with Point Reyes at the Pacific coast. At each location we met with persons involved with those water topics--researchers, environmental activists, park rangers, and local residents--and were delighted that so many people took time to educate us. The full story will be told in our book and a shorter version was published by Coast & Ocean magazine (look for it online soon at their website; see links).

Water Grab in Eastern Nevada

We arrived in the old mining town of Pioche, 37°56', 114°27', on a bitterly cold afternoon. The local history museum provided a warm shelter and many interesting exhibits. It was staffed by Barbara Zelch, who told us her husband has been very involved in the battle over Las Vegas planning to export groundwater from eastern Nevada valleys. There are so many parallels to the Owens Valley/Mono Lake/Los Angeles Aqueduct history in this current water grab--family ranches being bought up for their water rights, local people overwhelmed by the big city movers-and-shakers, water to be moved hundreds of miles to fuel development and growth in a sprawling metropolis. Glennan Zelch met us in the Pioche library, across the street from a building rented by Southern Nevada Water Authority (Las Vegas), but sitting empty with only pretty photos of Nevada in the windows. so far. Glennon is a retired civil engineer who had lived in Louisville, Kentucky and worked with water systems. The Zelch's moved to Pioche 8 years ago, not knowing about Las Vegas's pipeline plans. This project is complicated by the biggest water basin, in Snake Valley being shared between Utah and Nevada. Concern is building in Salt Lake City, not only about the depleted groundwater basin, but unhealthy particulate dust (shades of Mono and Owens Lake, again) should the groundwater table drop significantly. On the day we were in Pioche, a district judge in Gardnerville, NV, overturned a 2008 state ruling that had granted the Southern Nevada Water Authority permission to take groundwater from three other valleys in central Lincoln County (west of Pioche). This should slow things down, but stay tuned for much more on this issue. This water grab issue seemed to bring us full circle, as we approached our Mono Lake home. After Pioche, we crossed Nevada, seeing wild horses and watching for aliens along the Extraterrestrial Highway. Our first view of Mono Lake was a thrill-- back home in the Basin after a month exploring our nation's communities and landscapes along the 38th parallel. The angle of light and the evening sky are the same along that latitude, but there's no place like home. We are home for the winter, now, but we'll be out on the line again by next April to extend this exploration across Europe and Asia. Please take a look at the list of countries we'll visit in the August blog titled "Where in the world does 38°N take us?" We would appreciate any suggestions of contacts for those regions.

Radioactive Cleanup on the Colorado

In Moab, UT, 38°34', 109°32'; we met Kimberly Schappert by choosing the Up the Creek tents-only campground in the middle of town. Kim came to Moab over 20 years ago, and started a mountain biking magazine. She has seen Moab change from a small mining town with a Uranium Cafe and Atomic Grill, into a mecca for outdoor recreation. Kim became involved in county government and worked for years to get the huge uranium tailing pile on the north end of Moab cleaned up. Decades of tailings piled adjacent to the Colorado River were sending a radioactive plume of groundwater seepage (also polluted with ammonia) toward the river. The mill served dozens of uranium mines south of Moab (near the 38th parallel) and was located in Moab because of the large amounts of river water needed to process the ore. Millions of downstream users in Arizona, Southern California and Las Vegas, were threatened. The funding is finally in place to move ahead with the cleanup, which began last April (the mining company went bankrupt to protect itself, so we taxpayers are paying the bills). We had a morning tour of the site by Department of Energy contract geohydrologists, Ken Pill and Liz Glowiak. Truck containers are loaded with contaminated tailings, then the containers are transferred to clean trucks that move to trains hauling the material about 30 miles north out of the watershed. Moab wash runs right through the site, carrying surface water to the river. There is a need to dry out the tailings before they are moved, and much monitoring of groundwater going on with test wells. Ken and Liz showed us the "habitat " area along the river. Birds were singing and fish swimming among the small strip of riparian plants left along the river front. There is a huge potential for this site at the gateway to Moab once the tailings are gone. It will take 10 years of constant work to move 2 million tons, a mountain of tailings. Arches National Park is literally next door to the tailings pile. Our driving route across Utah forces us to go around the majestic Colorado River and Green River canyons that we had canoed last spring (the confluence of the Green and Colorado Rivers is within a mile of the latitude line). The 38th parallel route passes through a series of incredible national park landscapes, all sculpted by water: Canyonlands NP, Lake Powell NRA, Grand Staircase-Escalante NM, Capitol Reef NP, and Bryce Canyon NP.

Telluride 350

A lot of planning has gone into this trip, but the surprises keep coming and have made for some of our best experiences. Telluride is a ski town that used to be a mining town and is almost right on the 38th parallel. We planned to look into water issues (San Miguel Creek runs right through town), then learned that a 350 Global Climate Change event was scheduled for October 24. Mono Lake, our home in the Eastern Sierra had a similar event planned with canoes spelling out "350." In Telluride, they were making a 350 "sign" out of bicycles, solar vehicles and hybrid cars, and they asked if our Prius could become part of it! The "New Community Coalition" sponsored the local event which was also occurring, the same day, in over 5,200 locales in 181 countries, all pointing to the goal of reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere back down to 350 parts per million. Our blue car ended up front and center in the picture, forming the top of the number "5," and directly in front of the court house podium. Dave was enlisted to climb up to the top of the building across the street and help the organizers with the photo shoot. Meanwhile, Janet spruced up a poster that the local high school kids had made, to make the letters stand out. It was nice to be a part of a community, if however briefly. Telluride has solar panels on its schools and library and nearby Mountain Village has a "Green the Gondola" campaign to offset 20% of the energy used by the gondola that connects the two communities, by installing solar panels. We also learned that Ouray (our previous day's stop) was the first town in Colorado to convert its street lighting to LED bulbs. We met another cross-country traveler, William Grote, who happened to be in Telluride and also joined in with the 350 event. This young man is making the trip west to east in a solar-powered recumbent bicycle, and reading the Lorax book to school children along the way . It was hard to leave Telluride (next stop, Moab, Utah), but we finished off with human-powered fruit smoothies that we blended by pedaling a stationary bike!

The Headwaters State - Colorado

We reached Salida, Colorado along with a night of winter weather. So we stayed two nights with our former Mono Basin neighbors, Shannon and Brett, took a day off from traveling, and learned about a battle led by local citizens against the export of nearby mountain "springwater" (actually groundwater) by the Nestle Co. to their Denver bottling plant. Then, on to the Great Sand Dunes National Park, which was a National Monument until the Nature Conservancy purchased a local ranch to foil a water export scheme meant to serve more development along Colorado's front range. As a result, enough acreage was added to the monument to reclassify it as national park, plus a new National Wildlife Refuge was made from the other Baca Ranch land. The entire water story across San Luis Valley is fascinating and will become a major story for our book. We were helped by Paul Robertson, the local project coordinator with the Nature Conservancy (seen here with Dave as they study our GPS unit to confirm that the highway sign is truly at 38 degrees north). The Rio Grande River moves across this large valley and there are two additional wildlife refuges. Migratory sandhill cranes were there the day we visited! After an oil change for our dependable Toyota Prius, we drove a spectacular mountain road up to Ouray, where rivers run orange and there's an intriguing mining cleanup story to tell. Tomorrow, Telluride.

Santa Fe Trail--Kansas to eastern Colorado

Across much of Kansas, the historic Santa Fe Trail closely follows our target latitude line and, not coincidentally, also closely follows the Arkansas River, the major surface water source in this part of the country. We entered Kansas at Fort Scott, one of a series of forts built along what was intended to be the permanent boundary to Indian territory, and later functioned as protection for settlers using the Santa Fe Trail. This is prairie country--rolling dry hills had replaced the green of the Midwest heartland. The Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve (38°26', 96°33'), was established 12 years ago in eastern Kansas. Because of local opposition to a "real" national park, the legislation creating the park limited National Park Service acreage to about 100 acres; the rest of the 11,000 acres are owned by the Nature Conservancy and considered private land. Some of that history was told by William Least Heat Moon in his book PrairyErth, which focused on this Kansas county. Moon wanted to write about the "center" of the country, and traced diagonal lines from the 4 corners (northwest to southeast and southwest to northeast), finding that they intersected here--a calculation that also coincided with the 38th parallel. The week after our visit, 20 bison were scheduled to be introduced to the park, brought from Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota. We visited Pawnee Rock, a major landmark along the Santa Fe Trail that was unfortunately quarried later. A viewing platform shows how tall the big black rock used to be. Not far away was Fort Larned ,on the Pawnee River, serving travelers on the trail. In Dodge City, Queen of the Cowtowns, we reached cattle feedlots and the 100th Meridian--the 100 degrees West latitude line. From there on, as we moved westward, we would come to appreciate "the line between the humid east and the arid west," as recognized by John Wesley Powell. In land with less than 20 inches of annual rainfall, Powell wrote, "agriculturalists will early resort to irrigation." In western Kansas, Garden City is home to the Sandsage Bison Range, (37°56', 100°54'), 3670 acres where Tom Norman, the State Park manager showed us the herd of 90 bison , about to be reduced to 60 with an annual round-up. Bison have been here ever since "Buffalo Jones," one of the founders of Garden City, rescued a few of the last remaining buffalo from extinction. A few scattered trees are also on the preserve, evidence of an attempt to create the Kansas National Forest Reserve early in the 20th century. Millions of tree seedlings were planted, but climate and soil realities doomed that quixotic project (a fascinating bit of history we will explore in the book to come). The overlapping story of the Ogallala Aquifer, also part of our travels through this region, comes in our next post.

Mining the Ogallala

We had experienced a lot of surface water when we visited the wildlife refuges in the middle of Kansas. Farther west, we are now in an entirely different water basin, a portion of the vast Ogallala Aquifer that extends from Nebraska down to Texas. This enormous source of "fossil" groundwater allows the region to grow corn and grain and raise most of the nation's cattle on plains that could not be nearly as productive until the invention of efficient groundwater pumps and center-pivot irrigation sprinklers. The Ogallala groundwater is being mined. We learned about that situation by visiting the Kansas Groundwater Management District #3 in Garden City, (37°56', 100°54'). Director Mark Rude explained that there is less than an inch of recharge into the aquifer each year, but the withdrawal is happening, in places, hundreds of times faster than that recharge rate. Pumps are today working at reduced capacities. When the water runs out, the economy and environment of this vast region will have to change. Meanwhile, in the attempt to slow, if not control the situation, each water user in the District is limited to a set allotment, enforced by well-monitoring meters and sensors. Some farmers, inevitably, play games with the District staff, reversing meters in the pipes so they run backward, for example. The gloomy news is that the situation has not been stabilized, because the limits on pumping are not adequate. "Economists are winning; not hydrologists," Mark told us. Our investigation also led us to Garden City Mayor Nancy Harness and her husband Donald, and Regional Fish and Wildlife Supervisor Mark Sexson. The consensus was that, east of the 100th meridian, a plan for sustainability has a chance to work, but west of Dodge City, the "plan" is for depletion. It was a hard thing to hear. This story extends across the region on the surface, where up to 50,000 ephemeral playa lakes are the most important wetland habitat for birds in the region, while serving as a critical source of recharge for the aquifer. The story also extends up the Arkansas River into neighboring Colorado. We noted the changing appearance of the Arkansas (pronounced Ar-Kansas in these parts), wet with emergent groundwater in Great Bend, bone-dry in Garden City, perking up near Bents Old Fort, and looking healthy in the mountain watershed in Colorado. But relations between the "upstream" and "downstream" user states are strained. Before we left Garden City, Mark Sexson showed us an encouraging project he is conducting to clean the water in duck ponds at the city zoo using man-made wetlands. He hopes to extend that effort to clean up feedlot wastewater in the region. The parallels between the mining dilemmas of the Ogallala and mountain-top coal mining are striking: in both cases, a current economic choice will leave future generations with enormous problems and environmental loss. The details of both stories will become important parts of our book.

"One would as soon expect to see seagulls in Kansas" Mark Twain (about Mono Lake)

Well, we discovered there ARE seagulls in Kansas, and lots of them. Also cormorants, white pelicans and phalaropes. Central Kansas has the largest inland wetlands in the country. It was truly a treat to cross miles of prairie and arrive at the Quivira National Wildlife Refuge (38°12', 98°30'), which was celebrating National Refuge Week. Blue skies had returned and many familiar birds from home were out on the slightly saline water. Quivira and neighboring

Cheyenne Bottoms (38°27'), provide critical habitat for migrating birds, a big expanse of surface water in the prairie landscape. Biologist Rachel Laubhan and Ranger Barry Jones welcomed us into their event, shared much information and even fed us a roasted pig dinner. Sunset at the northern edge of Quivira was especially magical. The white fronted geese were coming in for the night, ducks were settling, blackbirds massing, and all were honking, quacking, or singing. It was a privilege to be there, in their place, sharing the evening with the birds. The next morning, we stopped at the new Kansas Wetlands Education Center at Cheyenne Bottoms, a showplace for environmental education, and a joint effort between Fort Hays State University and the Kansas Dept. of Wildlife and Parks. Some of the Bottoms is also managed by the Nature Conservancy. The Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network sign brought back fond memories of installing the same signs years ago at Mono Lake. We headed out of Great Bend, Kansas (38°21', 98°45'), on the Arkansas River, and stopped to replace Janet's dead cellphone at a Verizon store. Lo and behold, we met greeter Keith Herl, who had just returned from teaching in Korea and had travel tips for our journeys next year! (Next: The Arkansas River and Santa Fe Trail, wagon ruts and forts, plus Crossing the100th Meridian: importance and gloomy status of the Ogallala aquifer)

A Pioneering Pioneer Forest and the Population Center of the U.S.

Wendell Berry had suggested a visit to the Pioneer Forest in Salem, Missouri (37°34') to learn about a half-century long experiment in sustainable forestry. We met foresters Jason Green and Brandon Kuhn, and Terry Cunningham, the Forest Manager, told us about the forest. It began with Leo Drey, a visionary who purchased 150,000 acres of forest lands, most from a distillery company (that had used the oak wood for barrels). Drey aimed to demonstrate methods of sustainable logging of the oak forests. The Pioneer Forest follows a long-term cycle of single-tree harvesting that makes for an aesthetically pleasing forest with trees of different age-classes, that minimizes erosion and run-off impacts on the watershed, and improves reproduction and overall health of the trees. This stands in contrast to a clear-cutting approach favored by the Forest Service in such mixed hardwood forests, where regrowth produces dog-hair thickets that must be aggressively thinned. An aerial photograph on an office wall revealed how widely spaced the cut stumps were within an otherwise untouched-canopy of large trees. During our visit it was cold and rainy, and we would have had to drive over 60 miles south to tour the forest, so we stayed at the headquarters in Salem on our visit. They loaded us up with publications about their management, including a dvd they produced for owners of private forest land, emphasizing techniques for minimizing watershed impacts. Later, we drove to the north end of the Ozark National Riverways Park (a unit of the National Park System) where the Current River provides canoeing and fishing recreation. Along much of the waterway, the Pioneer Forest is a neighbor to the park (the park itself only owns a narrow strip of shoreline along the riverbanks). The Pioneer Forest staff have been encouraging the park service to reduce recreational impacts from its users and bring management more in line with standard national park service resource protection. And then, off to nearby Edgar Springs and an intriguing geographical landmark. After each national census, the “population center” of the nation is identified. For the last few decades, that point has hovered around the 38th parallel, gradually shifting westward and southward. Edgar Springs (37°41', 91°52') is a tiny little place, south of Rolla in central Missouri. Its distinction was noted on the highway sign, but we went into town to see what else might be found. The lady at the general store said she thought maybe there was a stone marker up at the north end of town, but added, “I never go that way.” We found the stone (outside the gates of a cemetery with its own stones telling a population story), took our photos, and figured that, even in a hamlet that small there was a drift toward the southern side of town. .Oak woodlands gave way to prairie, as rain chased us the rest of the way across western Missouri. Not far from Missouri's western border, we stopped by another presidential birthplace: Harry Truman was born in Lamar (37°30', 94°16'). The house was closed, but a friendly cat in the yard made us welcome. Tonight we are at Fort Scott, Kansas. Tall grass prairie, saline wetlands, the Santa Fe Trail, and the Ogallala aquifer are out there to the west.

Down the Ohio to the Mississippi

We've been exploring one slice of the vast Ohio River watershed ever since we entered West Virginia: the New and Gauley Rivers, the Kentucky River, and the main course of the Ohio itself. Settlers, settlements, transport and the river's inclination to flood are parts of that story, and, finally, there's the fact that the mighty Ohio is simply a tributary to the even mightier Mississippi River.

Louis and Clark began their great expedition of discovery near the Falls of the Ohio (see earlier post). On the Indiana side of the river, we checked out the cabin of George Rogers Clark (William's older brother) where the expedition started in 1803.

A yen for chocolate then led us into Jeffersonville, to Schimpff's candy store, which has been in the family since the 1850s. Owners Jill and Warren had lived in California for years; he had worked for the Metropolitan Water District doing water quality work! The store survived the big flood of the Ohio in 1937, the worst natural disaster in the United States before Katrina (red marks high on the outside wall of the store show where the flood reached). We sampled warm marshmallow and caramel Modjeska candies, named for a Polish opera singer (who also has a canyon in southern California named for her).

Later that day, after crossing western Indiana, we crossed over the Ohio again, re-entering Kentucky to stop at Audubon State Park (37°52'), which has a wonderful museum exhibiting many of Audubon's original paintings. Audubon had a passion for birds and drawing that he followed in spite of struggling to support his family. Many of the copper etching plates from Birds of America were sold for scrap metal by his destitute widow. He was not truly recognized as a genius until after he was gone.

We spent a night right beside the Ohio River at Cave-In-Rock (37°28', 88°09'), as a birthday present for Dave, who remembered the place as the pirate's lair in the movie, How the West Was Won. It was disappointing to see the striking, historic cave defaced by spray-painted graffiti and with no interpretive information. Maybe the bad-boy atmosphere of the pirates simply lingers at that place. Through the night, the lights of passing coal barges glowed in the mist that hung over the river. In the morning, we finally got a good look at how much coal one boat can move.

The next morning brought our first view of the grand Mississippi at Grand Tower, Illinois (37°37'). Looking for a place to warm ourselves, we found the Mississippi River Museum being used as an office by the County Clerk, Charles Burdick, who explained that he was also a retired river boat pilot. We learned about river steering, pushing barges, reading radar and living conditions on the river system that extends from Minnesota down to New Orleans.

North of Chester, where a bridge crosses the big river, we were back on the line at Fort Kaskaskia (37°58'). Kaskaskia Island was visible on the far side of the Mississippi: the only piece of Illinois west of the river! The land ended up on the wrong side after the Mississippi changed course in an 1881 flood. It had been the first capital of the Illinois Territory and capital of the state until 1820, but the river washed all of that away in the flood.

The bridge at Chester led us over to Missouri and the beautiful little French-flavored town of St. Genevieve, the oldest town in Missouri. A car ferry crosses the river there, at exactly 38 degrees. Of course, a ride across and back over again as walk-on passengers was irresistible. The Mississippi seemed less than a mile wide here, but the moving water looked exceptionally swift and powerful from a small ferry boat chugging back and forth across the surface.