THE LAND I LOVE: National Parks Week

It’s National Park Week, and I’m declaring my love of our very own Lake Mead National Recreation area, which is entrance fee free this week. I’m rejoicing that for us…wilderness begins at our city’s edge with hardly a transition. Not everyone is surrounded by such land riches. Many international visitors prize us, in part, because wide open spaces on our scale don’t even exist back home, for them. I love that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, because for me that means there’s hardly anybody out there when I get off the beaten track or go off road. There lies my refuge, where I can feel the explorer, become the one who can brag about the huge tortoise she nearly tripped over, who escapes her stress by walking it off on the trail. This year, thankfully, our shores will finally rise at the rate of two-to-four feet of water a month, because of stellar snow pack in Colorado. But, I’m diving in right now….figuratively. It turns out that what grows in Lake Mead is supposed to stay in Lake Mead. Quaggas, to be specific. And, they are surprising scientists. On the positive, they have made our water 13% clearer. But the dreaded quaggas are clogging water intake pipes and valves. They’ve even covered the B29 lying at the bottom of Lake Mead, according to Diving - Biologist Bryan Moore, who tracks these invasive hordes. If final approval come, Hoover Dam’s managers will test Zequanox downstream, in May, as a possibly effective quagga killer. Lake Mead is working hard to keep the quaggas from hitchhiking on boats to foul other freshwater ways. These pesky muscles are Mainly a problem for the thousands of boats moored at marinas. Not so for the day or weekend use boats, who, usually, aren’t in still waters long enough for quaggas to attach. Its volunteers who’ve been pulling the invasive Sahara Mustard plant throughout the early spring to give our native wildflowers the room They need to grow. During National Park Week, Lake Mead’s 4000-plus volunteers will be honored for their contribution of donated labor. My admiration grows for those who bend their backs for conservation, while I only lift my fingers. From my perch in Boulder City, I recall my favorite time on the Big Blue Below: Shore camping with friends on a remote site reached only by their boat. You, too, can turn your next visit to Lake Mead into a favorite memory. You’ll find it Entrance fee free during National Park Week through Sunday, April twenty-fourth. Or you can challenge your boundaries, as I am planning to do, by walking across the 900-foot high new bridge. That unique perspective is free year round. # # #

THE WATER LINE OF EARTH DAY

I went on an energy diet just in time for today’s Earth Day. For ten days, I lived off the grid. Back in Boulder City, normal amenities seemed like absolute luxuries, especially a hot shower. I know most people aren’t as flexible as I am about such sacrifices. But sacrifices are on the horizon for us all, it seems, when it comes to water conservation. Federal water shortage restrictions will be triggered when Lake Mead goes down another 30 feet. But first, let’s imagine snowy cold mountain meadows, because when we turn on our faucets, it’s from the alpine forests that our waters journey. The water towers for Las Vegas and 70 percent of the Inland West are actually 700 miles away in snowfall on the Rockies. In northern Nevada, the Sierras are the water towers. Snowpack is like a high-altitude reservoir; and forests are like water sponges, storing melted snow for the coming summer. But a warming climate is melting snowpack. Unfortunately, our stellar sunny skies cause enough water evaporation from Lakes Powell and Mead to supply nearly 4 million people for an entire year. Evaporated water knows no boundaries and floats off elsewhere. It’s a comfort to see Mt. Charleston snowcapped on the horizon, to recall the winter’s freak snow and our recent rain. I could almost forget the drought along the north end of Lake Mead, so green with compact creosote bushes it recalls Ireland, as crazy as that sounds, the high ridges of black basalt, the narrow green valley bisected by a single road rising to a rim, the charismatic big-headed sunflowers smiling back at me. This is the aesthetics of desert greenery we are supposed to appreciate. It has been said that lawns are the largest irrigated crop in the U.S. Agriculture actually uses the majority of U.S.’s water, not homeowners, though not here where residential use is over 50 percent. We don’t want a future of choosing between affordable food and affordable water. We can adapt our habits more than we might want to admit. Gas at four-dollars a gallon taught us that. Perhaps it was growing up with Depression-era parents, but conservation is a natural habit for me. Even though I grew up back east, I can no more imagine replicating my father’s proudly maintained green lawn here in the desert, than I can fathom how in good conscience more Las Vegans don’t take the Southern Nevada Water Authority up on landscaping rebates. Perhaps they will see the light come July when Lake Mead is predicted to be within 17 feet of the federal water restriction level of 1075. We all will, if and when, the water emergency measures hit. It might be the instructive lesson we need. Which green is more important—the pastoral grass lawn or the green ethos of conserving more water? Some people undoubtedly feel they deserve their lawns. Deserves got nothing to do with it, as the movie character played by Clint Eastwood, so infamously said. Want to learn more about all the ways you can save water? Then hit the Springs Preserve this Saturday for the free “What on Earth” event. And, next time you feel the wet of water…appreciate it’s value…it’s only increasing. # # #