Dust - #122

How the west was worn.

March is here, and with it will come the Spring Equinox, Spring Forward, and the astrological New Year — the trio also known as false hope. Today, the sun reached over the ridgeline at 7:47am. We’ll see her there for another week before we plunge back into the darkness that holds so many of us bed bound. But I have come to know the dark, falling asleep swiftly without noise or tincture just after 9pm, waking up clear eyed at 5:30am. Don’t worry — I’m not getting up to chant bonding meditations with my torso nor am I using the hour to write or draw or “get ahead.” Instead, I’m using it to lay there and snuggle whichever cat is snuggled up to me. Still, these are the hours the pregnancy has inflicted on me, and so I keep them.

The bedroom has a door of framed glass to an outside patio. It is taped shut to hold the wind at bay, and the blinds hang down over the glass, closed to the world outside to further insulate. But, the blinds are pulled up about a foot from the bottom — for the cats, of course. You can’t have a cat-level window and not let the cats enjoy it. And when I wake in the night, I am on my side peering out the same pane of glass, just another cat in repose. I can see if snow has accumulated overnight, or if the wind in her fury has swept the patio clean. I can see if the moon is high on a clear night, illuminating the white canvas with her light. I can see if spring is nearing by the gleam of ice. And I can see when the snow is compromised, when it's been kissed by the swift death of dust. 

It has not been a strong winter, something people ache for here. Our snowpack has been below average, and even as it nips the heels of “not atypical,” it still feels weak. No devastating snowstorms, no waking up to 24 inches, we’ve barely tapped into our wood supply. Of course, winter here lasts through April and into May — there is time. But as the sun rises into clear skies day after day, our grumbles about a weak winter turn into fears about a dry summer. 

Colorado is a headwaters state. The water in our snowpack doesn’t just serve the ecosystem, but millions of people in every direction in and out of Colorado. The Arkansas, Colorado, Platte, and Rio Grande rivers all start here. Snow is a key ingredient in all our wellbeing, and one that can’t just be tossed in the pot. It needs a steady accumulation and even steadier melt to make the feast of summer turn out just right, and that steady melt is threatened most by dust.

In the wild world, snow has the highest natural albedo (reflectivity) of any surface. Pristine snow reflects sunlight so well it can damage your eyes. At its most reflective, snow melts slowly and steadily — a persistent and regulated drip — but when dust accumulates on the snow, that drip is disrupted and accelerated. 

Think of the heat difference underfoot of concrete versus blacktop. Dust has the same effect: as it darkens the surface of the snow, the snow absorbs more radiation and melts faster. As it melts faster, that dust doesn’t melt with it. Instead, the dust stays, settling down to the next layer of dust, creating an even thicker layer of dust, absorbing more sunlight. The only hope to slow the melt is another snowfall on top of the dust layer. 

The Center for Snow and Avalanche Studies based out of Silverton, CO runs the Colorado Dust-on-Snow program that tracks dust layers at 11 mountain passes with a focus on Red Mountain Pass in their own backyard. Red Mountain Pass, part of the San Juan Mountain range, gets the most focus because it gets the first wave of dust. It’s located in the southwest corner of the state and is the first to receive the brunt of desert storms from northern Arizona, northern New Mexico, and southern Utah. 

Earlier this week, we saw our first dust event of the season. From the CSAC: 

“The winds kicked up well before any significant precipitation fell here in the San Juan Mountains. The winds in fact were a pesky presence through most of the storm that rolled through Feb 26-27. Some friends drove from Silverton to Flagstaff on Monday and reported widespread dust mobilization and a dusty hazy sky throughout the Four Corners region. The highway hosted fast moving “sand snakes” and at a few spots sand dunes on the road were ~6” deep. So the dust that settled on the snowpack was expected.”

Dust isn’t just weather driven, though. Activity from drilling, overgrazing, overland vehicles, residential development, and general drought stress all affect the level of dust making it into the air and into the mountains. The CASC monitors it regardless, digging snow pits to find the layers of accumulated dust. These profiles help them predict when snowmelt timing and intensity. A particularly heavy layer of dust can bump snowmelt as much as 50 days earlier in the season. 

The dust is also impossible to ignore.

Credit: Center for Snow and Avalanche Studies

As we drive southwest to warmer climates, the dust lays like grime over the landscape — a reminder of declining conditions. Dust changes the snow’s surface, adding grip and drag. But worse than slowing your skis down, dust layers also compromise the stability of the snow. Buried dust layers can lead to more avalanches, and dangerous conditions lead to shorter seasons. 

That’s true for other sports too: high-water kayaking ends early, white water rafting companies have a shorter season, and warmer waters mean trouble for anglers and even more trouble for the fish their angling. 

But so what, right? The snow melts, the trails open, the skiers and the kayakers move on to trail running and mountain biking. But snowmelt, when not accelerated, is the West’s drip irrigation system. It keeps the rivers and streams flowing evenly. When snow melts too fast, while the ground is still frozen, we lose that water to flooding. And without enough water in the ecosystem later in the season, we face the increased threat of wildfire along with myriad other sweeping concerns. 

In 2010, researchers found that heavy dust years caused the Colorado River’s flow to peak an average of three weeks earlier in the season — three weeks doesn’t sound like much. But earlier melts lessened the amount of water running to the river by ~5% — that’s “more water lost than the entire state of Nevada uses from the river in a year.” Given that most of the country still loves manicured lawns and golf courses and hamburgers, that is a lot of water. 

And therein lies the big problem with big dust: it’s not coming from one plateau and affecting one river. It’s coming from an entire region of big industry — agriculture, real estate, fossil fuels — and it’s affecting millions of people mostly in ways they don’t feel. The taps still run, the rivers still flow, and unless someone is a backcountry skier, elite kayaker, or water management professional, they simply don’t notice it and when they should, like when their house burns down in a wildfire, they don’t connect it. 

My first winter here, the red tinge to the mountain ranges in March signaled spring to me, as if a layer of dirt was so desperate for the sun that it crawled up through the snow. It softened my shoulders in anticipation of the chill leaving my bones until I saw it make someone else shudder. Now, when I drive through the Rockies and see the peaks filtered through a powdered sugar of rust, I feel the call to sling my passengers from the glory of the mountains back to the reality of their future: like everything else, they’re melting too quickly. 

As the blue of before-sun colored the world outside my window this morning, I inspected the ground. The bricks were visible, shorn of their snow coat by a whipping wind, while the whipped snow slept in wave like piles around them. The sharpness of the image suggested a clear sky and the crispness of the snow told me the dust hadn’t quite made it. But it would. And we will suffer the consequences.