Last winter was huge, and water was plentiful this summer. Except that all summer long, I had a hard time getting irrigation water out of the North Fork of the Provo River and into a couple of ditches. One of the ditches flows year round, through a pasture and then on down to an adjoining property where there is a fish pond. Even in the worst drought year, there was flow there all year. This year it has gone dry.
This being Utah, the river is a complicated piece of plumbing infrastructure with Trial and Washington Lakes storing late season water to be released in August, and the Duchesne Tunnel intercepting water that would otherwise flow to those Godless Californians, and instead, pulls it under the Uintas and dumps it into the Provo.
The guy in charge of all this is the river commissioner. He’s a former ski patroller, no kidding, who was the only applicant for a job that nobody else would take. So now he’s in charge of the water flow to meet the needs of a million or so people depending on the Provo River.
This year, when he would release water from the Uinta lakes, expecting to see it show up in Jordanelle, it never got there. I was complaining all season that the flow was well below average at my place, in a year when there was surplus water everywhere. It didn’t make sense.
Late this fall, when the river level naturally dropped, the North Fork went dry. There was a full stream at my north property line, but a half mile downstream, it was dry. I did the only reasonable thing, and walked upstream until I found where it was going.
I expected to find a beaver dam. Instead, a sinkhole has opened up in the river bed. It’s like an open manhole, and the river just vanishes down the drain. It actually makes that sucking sound. We’re talking a lot of water, maybe 5 or 6 million gallons a day. A whole river gone to China as best I can tell.
Jim Ivers, who was a local mining engineer, was convinced that the water pumped out of the Park City mines mostly came from the Uintas. If the flow in the Ontario Drain has spiked this summer, I might know where it’s coming from.
This is not your usual business problem. The river commissioner came out and looked at it. He threw a stick in the river to watch it go down the hole. He shrugged and went home. I called the water district that runs the Duchesne Tunnel, thinking that it was largely their water that was vanishing. Their guy was very interested. He also threw a stick in the water, watched it get sucked down the hole, shrugged and went home.
The conclusion among the experts is that “geology happens.”
For 80 or 90 years, that stream has provided stock water to our winter feeding ground. That’s where the barn is, and the hay is stored, because it was close to water. The neighbor’s fish are walking.
So the neighbor did a proper hillbilly fix, and built a flume over and around the sink hole with a sheet of plastic. It kind of worked and may solve the immediate problem. But I keep wondering what happens next, if I will wake up one morning and find the earth has collapsed.
A neighbor is convinced there is a fault line all wet down and ready to slip. Eons ago, the North Fork went the other way and was part of the Weber River. Geology happens.
In less earth shaking news, the District Court ruled in favor of the Park City Planning Commission, and upheld their decision denying the permits for the replacement of the Eagle and Silverlode lifts at Park City Mountain.
It was a victory for defending local planning processes and regulations, but in the end, solves nothing. The resort still needs better ways to move people up the mountain in the morning, better parking, better crowd control, and really a better skier experience than the goat rodeo that exists at the base of both PC and Canyons. They are adding a new gondola at the Canyons side, which will help, and soon, paid parking there that will disrupt in ways we don’t know.
Where do we go from here? What needs to happen is the resort and both Summit County and Park City to re-work the two separate and very old approvals to address current conditions in a single joint planning agreement.
Neither the 1990s planning agreement at PCMR, nor the slightly more recent development agreement at Canyons contemplated the two resorts merging. Neither anticipated the Epic Pass and the increased skier volume. It’s as if they had gone through the process and approved a church, but suddenly the pastor was operating a bowling alley out of the building instead.
It’s one business with entrances in two jurisdictions. A push here creates a bulge there. There should be a single, three-party development agreement. Otherwise actions at one base impact conditions at the other, and neither jurisdiction has any real control.
That should have been done back before the connecting gondola was built. Now Park City is facing an identical issue with Deer Valley adding the Mayflower entrance. It would be great if we were making new mistakes instead of repeating the old ones.
Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986.