The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
“Snowpack has been dropping quickly”
Statewide, rivers and creeks are surging and if they haven’t reached peak flows yet, they’re about to. You can thank a lengthy stretch of warmer than usual temperatures, paired with the dark red coating of dust on the snowpack for the speedy meltoff. On the bright side, the boaters are out en masse and loving it—but river rescues and warnings are rampant across the state.
For example, the city of Vail released this warning Monday afternoon: “All community members should stay away from creeks and rivers; banks are unstable and can collapse without notice.”
The same day firefighters in Golden responded to four river emergencies between 1:40 and 2:30 p.m., according to the Denver Post. Tubers and kayakers were overwhelmed by the fast flow, and though all self-rescued, one man’s finger was reportedly amputated in the metal rigging of his kayak.
Mike Gillespie, snow survey supervisor for the Natural Resources Conservation Service, said locally we’re “probably pretty close to the peak—given that our snowpack is nearly gone I can’t imagine it’s going to continue to increase much longer.
“The snowpack has been dropping quickly, and we’re at 31 percent of average [snowpack] in the Gunnison Basin. There’s probably an inch of water in the snowpack versus, in an average year, we’d have about four inches of water in the snowpack,” continued Gillespie.
“Those percentages sound pretty bleak, but we’re not talking about a lot of water,” Gillespie added. “Last year at this time we were already melted out at our [survey] sites; we melted more snow in less time last year.”
But that doesn’t mean the water isn’t running big on the area’s rivers.
Tuesday mid-morning, the stream flows on the Taylor River at Almont were 773 cubic feet per second (CFS), according to real-time data from the U.S. Geological Survey website. The East River below Cement Creek was running 2,570 CFS and the Gunnison River, measured near Gunnison, was 3,640 CFS, and it looked to have spiked around 4,000 CFS on Monday.
And word from the Arkansas River this past weekend was “huge,” “10-foot waves” and “It was running 4,500 CFS!”
Gillespie said raging rivers are “just a fact of life here in the spring. The difference between this year and last is we just didn’t string together a series of warm days like last year, and we didn’t see a surge in snowmelt like we have right now. We’re seeing that pretty much statewide. We didn’t have as dramatic peaks last year, because shortly after this date last year we went into a cooler period so things were less dramatic. This year, without that cool down, we’re seeing a real magnified peak flow.”
Frank Kugel, manager for the Upper Gunnison River Water Conservation District, provided an update Tuesday. “Blue Mesa and Taylor Park reservoir are at 81 percent and 85 percent of capacity, respectively, and neither are projected to fill this year.
“The above-average temperatures of the past two weeks have finally gotten the snowpack melting to the point that we exceeded the median annual peak of 3,570 CFS. [Monday] the Gunnison River at Gunnison reached 3,990 CFS, the highest thus far this year. [Tuesday’s] flows are some 400 CFS less than yesterday,” reported Kugel.
The surge doesn’t add up to sustained flows in the long term. The Blue Mesa inflow forecast for April through July is just 69 percent of average. That deficit is due to a fairly dry spring overall, according to Gillespie. That’s a big change from April 8, when the Gunnison Basin snowpack was at 102 percent of average.
“The total volume is not all that great—the snowpack wasn’t really very good this year,” said Gillespie.
