Dust on snow pushes pace of spring runoff

Record river levels in April

The dust that blew in and settled on the area’s snow a month ago is pushing the pace of the spring runoff faster than local water managers are comfortable with and is causing some concerns about the opportunity to capture as much water as possible.

“We’re struggling with the forecast. It’s really difficult to predict how much runoff we have left because so much has come off,” Upper Gunnison River Water Conservancy District manager Frank Kugel said. “The dust on snow has had a huge impact on how much has come off already.”
The combination of dust and warm temperatures this spring led to water levels on the East River in April that were the third highest in 92 years of records. On the Gunnison River, Kugel said, there were reports of a day in April that broke the previous record for flows on that day.
In April, the inflow to Blue Mesa Reservoir was 167 percent of average and the inflows between April and July are projected to be 126 percent of normal, Kugel said.
“So it’s really coming off quickly. We’re concerned that it’s coming off too quickly, that we’re not capturing some of that water in Taylor Park Reservoir,” he said. “We just want to make sure the numbers are verifiable so we don’t have to end up taking water from rafters or irrigators later in the season to make sure Taylor Park does fill.”
A group of five Taylor River water users met Tuesday, May 6 to discuss the needs of agriculture, boaters, anglers, landowners and the marina in Taylor Park Reservoir in the upcoming summer season.
Kugel said he would take the information gathered from that meeting to the Taylor Park dam managers, namely the Bureau of Reclamation and the Uncompahgre Valley Water Users, to discuss the best way of managing releases from the dam throughout the remainder of runoff so the reservoir fills, but doesn’t overflow.
“It’s a balancing act for the operators of Taylor Park dam. There are concerns with the structural integrity of the spillway if there were prolonged flows through it,” Kugel said. “The other issue is with the mysis shrimp in Taylor Park Reservoir and upsetting the reservoir’s ecosystem by flushing all of those mysis shrimp down into Taylor River and the Gunnison River and down into Blue Mesa Reservoir. It’s important we avoid a spill.”
Meanwhile, the UGRWD is in the throes of completing its Basin Implementation Plan that sets out to show that, by the numbers, the Gunnison Basin doesn’t have any water to spare for the accommodation of urban growth on the Front Range or anywhere else in the state.
The district’s goal in the plan is to protect the valley’s existing water users and to help maintain a vibrant agricultural and recreational economy in the valley. The plan will be presented as one of the nine basin implementation plans from around the state at a meeting in July. Those nine plans will then be distilled into one statewide water plan, which is expected by the end of the year.
So while local water managers are trying to fill the reservoirs with the surplus runoff, they’re also hoping to remind people that the good times don’t last forever.
“We want to encourage irrigators to capture as much water as they can, put it out on the pasture as quickly as possible,” Kugel said. “Because of the accelerated runoff, the runoff they historically see in July may be occurring in June, so that late season flows may be dramatically less because of this early season runoff.”