A River Divided
Slicing and Dicing a Desert River, a Stunning Ansel Adams Retrospective, How to Survive False Spring, PCT Movies, Superblooms are Back, and more!
NOTE: I’m just getting back from a family trip to the East Coast, so no opening howdy this week, as most of my budgeted writing time was instead devoted to playing with my niece and nephews. It’ll return next week!
The Big Story
Something to talk about
A River Ran Through It
I’ve been writing frequently here about the increasingly precarious state of the Colorado River. Long story short, the way we’ve been dividing its water among Western states was built on a foundation of very bad math, including a massive overestimation of the river’s flow, underestimation of the region’s growth, and including a tangled mass of archaic water rights laws, and now with a regional megadrought all of that has finally caught up to us.
The seven states that use the water of the Colorado River (Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and California) have failed to come up with a solution on their own, and earlier this week the Biden administration stepped in to speed up that process by essentially saying if the states couldn’t reach an agreement, the federal government would figure it out for them.
The feds don’t have jurisdiction over the water rights of the entire river, but they can make cuts to the three ‘lower basin’ states—California, Nevada, and Arizona. That doesn’t mean those options are great for everyone, though—equal cuts to all three states means a lot less water for California’s farms, which provide food to the entire country. Cuts based on water rights mean serious threats to cities in Arizona and the region’s Native American tribes, who also have treaty shares.
This will continue to be an ongoing issue with enormous ramifications for the West, and an update from the New York Times goes into greater depth.
Modern Hiking
Good stuff from the Modern Hiker site
Bobcat Fire Updates
If you’ve been scouting out places to see some wildflower blooms around L.A., the north side of the San Gabriels is usually a good spot. Andrew Shults scouted out the area around the Devil’s Punchbowl to see how it fared after the Bobcat Fire. We have three trail guides in the area that have all been updated (Devil’s Punchbowl, Devil’s Chair, and Burkhart Saddle), and you can see some updated photos Andrew took here.
Cleo Egnal has also put together a list of some of her favorite multi-day camping hikes in California, just in case you wanted to stretch a little extra mileage out of those day-packs or dust off the big ol’ backpacks for the 2023 season and wanted some new ideas.
Your Parks
Your Places
Adams Photos
Just in time for National Parks Week, San Francisco’s de Young Museum has opened a huge Ansel Adams retrospective featuring over 100 works including images from Yosemite, Kings Canyon, Sequoia, Death Valley and many other national parks and iconic outdoor locations throughout the American West. The exhibition also features contemporary artists in dialogue with Adams, and looks to be a truly killer collection.
The de Young Museum was the very first museum to exhibit Ansel Adams’s photography back in 1932, and to celebrate they are also running a photo contest on Instagram. Share your own nature photography with the hashtag #AnselingOutdoors and tag @deYoungMuseum from now through June 10th for a chance to win some Ansel Adams merch and a Museum Family Membership, too.
Read more about the exhibition in the California Today newsletter.
Seasonal Survival Guide
Having spent nearly 20 years living in Southern California, I’m pretty attuned to the seasonal shifts that happen in that climate. But now I’m in the Northwest, and apparently we have something called “False Spring,” which was definitely not listed in any of the tourism information.
“False Spring” is a few days—maybe a week and a half—of glorious sunny, warm, dry weather coming out of the depressing slog of Gray Season proper winter. But after False Spring, we get a season called “Second Winter,” which is exactly what it sounds like and is honestly such a dang bummer. The native plants in my garden are equipped to deal with this but me? I’ve been packing and unpacking my winter and summer clothes every few days for the past month.
If you find yourself in a similar situation, the Oregonian has a great primer on how to deal with this maddening seasonal change. It involves a lot of patience.
Related:
It’s not just you—spring is starting earlier via Scientific American.
The beautiful and terrifying arrival of an early spring, guest essay in New York Times.
31 atmospheric rivers hit California this year via Los Angeles Times.
How all this feels sometimes via Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Tech Talk
Gadgets, Technology, and Hype
Google Maps Goes More Outdoors
Google announced a slate of new updates to Google Maps that are specifically aimed at making National Parks easier to navigate. Over the next month, the Google Maps app on iOS and Android will highlight a park’s main attractions, provide more detailed information like entrance kiosks and ranger stations for more precise directions, offline capabilities, and more. And when you look for a specific trail, you will see the entire route instead of just a pin.
Google is relying on user-generated contents for this hike beta, so my standard critiques of this kind of online outdoor info still stands—use it only for research and then go to a trusted, verifiable source to make sure everything Google tells you is actually accurate.
2600 Miles in 18 Minutes
Not everyone has the time (or energy) to hike all 2600 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, but surely you can find a decent 18 minutes to join Julie Zweng on her 2022 journey? Her trail film Nothing is Off Limits has a lot of the stuff you’d expect in a PCT film—gorgeous scenery, blisters, food that is really only considered food while backpacking a long distance—but it also comes face to face with the effects of climate change on this stunning stretch of hiking heaven. I found it refreshingly honest and inspiring.
Watch the full video on YouTube. Via GearJunkie.
Leafing Out
Plants!
Superblooms, etc.
I am sort of loathe to even talk about superblooms anymore (see the February 16th newsletter, for example), but I guess it’s back and we’re all writing about them again. The Los Angeles Times has a helpful guide to the current superbloom that mirrors some of my Wildflower Resources post and contains a few current recommendations for areas to visit, too.
A few good quotes from the piece:
There’s no scientific definition for what constitutes a superbloom, Daniel Winkler, a research ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, Southwest Biological Science Center, told The Times.
“The superbloom is really a cultural phenomenon, where people decide that there are enough flowers here, right now, that we’ll call it a superbloom,” Winkler said.
and
"It's really hard as a naturalist to enjoy the places that are overrun with tourists and Instagram models and people that are not used to being out in these places," Dudney said, adding that visitors are too often "out there for the spectacle" and "haven't yet developed a connection with these natural spaces."
Good luck out there, people.
One More Thing
Oh yeah, before I go …
If you are of a certain age (Elder Milennials and age-adjacents, hello), you may remember the formerly beloved trope of normal people breaking into silliness in TV commercials. Writer Shane O’Neil tracks down the origins and meaning of this trope, and how it affected (and continues to affect) us culturally in the newest installment of the excellent Pattern Recognition series in the New York Times.
I apologize in advance for any commercial jingles that get re-activated in your head, but hope this inspires you to add a few dance steps into your next hike as you come back to the trailhead.
Thank you, Casey! Your writing connects, inspires, and did I mention 'inspires'?! Probably worth mentioning twice. Thank you!
Glad to discover your newsletter! I’m a Colorado mountain runner (which involves a lot of hiking). Thanks for your reporting on the Colorado River.