Well, with midsummer heat wave redefining the word drought, the Colorado River running dry, and the Great Salt Lake losing a half-inch a day with nobody seeming to care, it is time to address our other summer fascination: road construction. With orange cones everywhere, why should Tom Clyde have all the fun?

I have no explanation for the things UDOT does other than they are tied to their outdated standards. They insist that they need a 15-foot-wide shoulder everywhere they go, even though no one ever uses it. Who breaks down that can’t pull over safely in the gravel for a few minutes? But can we really afford all these shoulders?

It’s like building a dam for a million-year flood while all the grammar schools will flood from a 100-year flood. Let’s have some risk design consistency. Is there a highway benefit-cost analysis or risk assessment or are they just using UDOT’s West Valley City Road template everywhere? Let’s have some site-specific consideration and sensitivity.

Case in point 1

The I-80 east exit to U.S. 40 south backs up to Kimball Junction, not just on holidays but all day, every day because it is a one-lane exit going up a hill with oil trucks. 

During the last Olympics, they painted that as a two-lane exit, and it worked fine with half shoulders. Not any more. And it was just repaved in perpetuity. 

Case in point 2

S.R. 248 is an abomination, an embarrassment and a disgrace that is always backed up with two empty shoulders and a center divider, left-hand turn lane to nowhere. It drives me nuts and I never drive on it at 8 a.m. or 5 p.m. And it is redone every year.  

There is ample room on each side for four free-flowing lanes with gravel shoulders and a movable center divider with a No Left Turn sign. If someone has a problem, once in a blue moon we can all slow down and go around but not suffer gridlock every day for the luxury of the ubiquitous empty breakdown lanes. 

And now we have added a monster Maverick at the Quinn’s frontage road death intersection, but with a new traffic light, before S.R. 248 inexplicably shrinks to two lanes again for 500 feet with two huge shoulders. What are you thinking? You don’t need another study. You need common sense.

Case in point 3

Is S.R. 224 going to be nine lanes wide, wider than most aircraft carriers or runways, to accommodate empty bus lanes, shoulders and random left hand turns. Stop the insanity. 

And my last pet peeve is the sidewalk in the middle at the I-80 junction by the car wash so left hand turns to Smith’s can back up cars to Jeremy Ranch. It’s a road, not a sidewalk, garden or parking lane. Even with the smart new double turn lanes now to reduce the cycle split time dedication, it is still a bottleneck.

What’s your point?

And that brings us to my final comment. These are major arterial roads, not collectors, made to move people safely and efficiently from point A to point B. Forget the frills and national templates, shoulders and turn lanes, bike lanes and byways. Make them work for us. Time the lights, restrict access, paint the lanes, build them for peak flows. At least until we all get our own personal computer Olympic drones and traffic becomes AI 3D by 2034.

I know bigger roads lead to more traffic, but we are beyond that here with already failing levels of service. 

In New York and New England, they stopped building roads and told people to live with it. In many places like Boston, people drive on the shoulders unrestrained when traffic gets bad. Will it take that kind of revolution here? 

We are not rural and quaint anymore. We are a metro, urban, crowded, world-class destination resort. Live with it. 

I wish you luck with the new bus lanes and paid parking with day skiers and resort workers hopefully parking at the junctions. I like the idea of fewer day skiers in town, unless they pay. 

The Canyons should make $5 million a year in parking fees from their new parking lot.  They should chip in and pay their employees for an extra hour if they take the bus.  Why should they make all the money, and we pay for all their roads, buses and satellite lots? 

The resorts need more skin in the game for housing, traffic and paying a living wage. I asked the boss at Deer Valley how he would find enough employees and get them to work at Deer Valley East Village, and he said he would give them a cookie or coffee if they carpooled or took the bus. Good idea. We need the carrot and the stick to make the buses work. 

Nutcase in point

But so much of our traffic is contractors who need their tools and materials for building, fixing and cleaning more of our trophy homes every day. The rest is single-occupancy vehicles. 

We are still the car-culture problem. Water and traffic flow towards money but you can’t buy or build your way out of gridlock. You have to be smarter and make sacrifices. You can’t have it all. 

In the psychology of traffic, the most important component is the nut behind the wheel. Can we be the solution? 

Matthew Lindon lives in Snyderville. See his website: Waterandwhatever.com

The post Water and Whatever: Car culture calamity appeared first on Park Record.

I took a ride down East Canyon Creek recently to see the new Summit County 910 Ranch on the old Jeremy Ranch property. It is a beautiful piece of land with deep and dark conifer coverage on the north faces, the oak-aspen complex on the dry south faces and herbaceous sage, and rabbit brush in the flatlands, all in various conditions.

It was a great opportunity for Summit County, the state Department of Natural Resources and U.S. Forest Service to buy this land and inclusively ask for opinions on how best to manage it. Open space and free speech are among our favorite ideals.

I agree that this should be a conservation parcel with just enough recreation for people to really get to see it, appreciate it, and want to preserve it.

That may mean keeping cows, sheep, people and dogs out of most of it, for a while at least, because this place needs time to heal. Perhaps that means making this a ride, run and ski through park temporarily, because recovery could take many years.

The county has improved the dirt road nicely up to the Morgan County line and more access can be phased in as warranted. Remember that 2 million people live within 50 miles of this place, so the public pressure will be immense for the last wild, undeveloped acres in the Snyderville Basin.

The focal point of this 13.4-square-mile parcel is, appropriately, the East Canyon Creek, which starts at Jupiter Peak and ends in East Canyon Reservoir, the Weber River and the Great Salt Lake, with five miles of the creek on the 910 land.

The creek’s natural geomorphology has been battered by the past decades of grazing, and this is where the conservation should start.

The side banks of the creek are eroded vertically from the increased flows from the grazed slopes above and from unencumbered livestock access to the creek bed and bank. Arroyos have deepened and near-surface groundwater has drained. Meanders are entrenched or cut off with sharp sweeper turns through the willows at the corners. (A canoe trip down the creek with my daughter at high water a few years ago resulted in bloodied bodies, bruised egos, and ended when we folded the canoe in half under a low bridge.)

When determining the natural, balanced state of a stream, walk up and down it to an undisturbed spot and see what it really wants to do with sediment and erosion, meanders and rapids, width and depth.  

Limited grazing and aggressive riparian revegetation could eventually renew the natural stream by helping restore the natural geomorphology of the creek, helping the bed and banks, fish, beaver, birds, bugs and bunnies.   

Returning the entire drainage basin to the native uber species — like deer, elk, and moose, with less competition from cows or sheep for the natural protein of the basin — is paramount. This promotes natural habitat for the ubiquitous turkeys, squirrels, woodchucks and friends, along with the predators that will keep them all balanced, moving around and off the stream banks.  

It worked in Yellowstone, as an unintended consequence, where stream morphology was markedly repaired by reintroducing natural predators like wolves to move the herds around. Even the near groundwater around the floodplain was restored, improving the surrounding littoral vegetation.  

But beware of good intentions and the unintended consequences of messing with mother nature with biology or a bulldozer. Mother Nature always bats last.

The other need for the creek is water. Climate change has not helped, and our conservation efforts have not been enough. We simply use too much of the natural flow and leave nothing to dilute our wastewater, pharmaceuticals and forever chemicals. The fish are even turning mostly female from our runoff of antidepressants and birth control. If the solution to pollution is dilution, we have nothing more to give this stream. 

Even with all the new regional water being imported to the basin by Weber Basin Water Conservancy District and Mountain Regional Water Special Service District, along with subsequent increased return flows from the Snyderville Basin Water Reclamation District sewer treatment plant, the creek is running dry.

Ideas like recycling water from East Canyon Reservoir back up to the existing mothballed Jeremy Ranch water treatment plant have been floating for years without success due to the lack of water. There is simply less supply and more demand for the creek, the Great Salt Lake and for us.  

Instead, we should all use less water and let our lawns and golf courses go naturally brown in the summer and come back every spring. We should pay the alfalfa farmers in the basin to dry farm more or at least for that weak third crop each year.

There are still rampant flood-irrigated pasturelands by hobby farmers in our basin at 7,000 feet soaking up tons of valuable water for little economic gain. Why use 80% of our water to support 2% of our economy? 

I know the public welfare clause has recently been removed from Utah water rights in favor of data centers and a dry Salt Lake, but the free market incentive should be more efficient for the best possible beneficial use of our water, lakes and rivers. 

The 910 Cattle Ranch is our chance to unite all the stakeholders in this small basin, setting an example to the rest of the state. If we cannot solve it with all our money, effort and ability, then who can?

Let us work together on this unique community opportunity, with cooperation, foresight and forbearance. Responsible leadership helps but cannot be counted on. If the people lead, the leaders will follow. 

Matthew Lindon lives in Snyderville. See his website: Waterandwhatever.com

The post Water and Whatever: The 910 Cattle Ranch and need to save the creek running through it appeared first on Park Record.

Artificial intelligence is the latest rage, but quantum mechanics has been around for more than 100 years. 

Ever since Heisenberg postulated with his matrix, and the wave-particle nature of light that you can’t know position or probability at the same time, we found out that the act of observation actually changes everything.

Einstein famously countered with his thought that God does not play dice with the universe. He was relatively wrong. 

This was another great breakthrough in how we see the universe. Energy and very little matter are not continuous but occurred in interval bursts called quanta. Hence the name. Electrons jump from different, discrete, orbital clouds, giving off signature radiation of both particles and waves that were not predictable or observable.

We live our lives in personal quantum intervals, performing in bursts and resting when tired. We rest the uphill ski and leg as we shred, walk, run or cycle. Sisters and sorority girls cycle at the same time. We appreciate the pause in music and the negative space in art. Rivers run in alternating rapid-pool sequences, and waves in the ocean come in on 8-13 second intervals. Water morphs differently when observed.

Quantum extrapolations predicted alternative universes with folds in the fabric of the space-time continuum and begged for new mathematics beyond Newtonian calculus to solve for the practical results we desperately wanted. And so we applied it to lasers, transistors and quantum computers, turning the black and white, binary digital world into a technicolor quantum world where we are gods. How cool is that?  

Quantum computers are not binary but use quantum particles called qubits and photons to solve for an infinite range of solutions almost instantaneously. 

This may be a great assistance to AI and crypto mining in sensing new phenomena and performing critical matrix operations for better communication and security. The involved photons, which carry the electromagnetic force enabling all chemistry and biology, use fiber optics rather than copper wire to transmit uninterrupted and faster than the speed of light without the heat byproduct that requires so much energy and cooling water. Even our old fiber-optic internet network can be repurposed to create a future quantum network.  

Once again for every problem we create, we find a solution in another dimension and direction. Necessity is the mother. 

Not only that, but the instantaneous entanglement, or influence at great distance, implies a holistic aspect of the universe in which all things are connected non-locally and influence each other. This gives new meaning to John Muir’s theory that all things in nature are “inextricably hitched.”  

This challenges the deterministic, isolationist and reductionist view that we are independent entities and even the religious view that we have independent consciousness and free will. Our passive self-awareness and subjective experiences are not from our own individual brains but are a part of the universal consciousness that we actively co-create. We are all one consciousness in the universe, and our actions and observations influence and are influenced by everything else instantly across great distance. We are one, we are nature, nature is god.  

This gets beyond the deterministic, predictable physics and math we are all used to and accept. It merges mind and matter, cosmos and consciousness. 

We live life magically connected to each other where there is a collective-consciousness and there are no coincidences. We marvel at our interconnected synchronicity and serendipitous meetings with people we have just been thinking about, or find better words and thoughts than the words and thoughts we have been blindly searching for. 

This to me is a quantum leap in our human development, much like fire, agriculture, the wheel, the A-bomb, the industrial revolution, the information age, the internet, cell phones, AI, crypto, shaped skis and suspension e-bikes.  

We also wonder at the similarities of the geometry of the atom and the universe, though the universe is deterministic and Newtonian predictable, while the atom is Heisenberg random and probabilistic.  

Are we just an atom on a hair, on a mite, on a dog (god), in a world, in a solar system, galaxy and universe just like our own? There is so much to know and so much to learn that we should keep our minds open to these universal theories that magically connect physics and math, karma and luck, deja vu and premonitions, accidents and coincidences, sense and sensibility, luck and kismet, love and lust, likes and loathing, ADD and autism, Altzhimer’s and dementia, dreams and desire, philosophy and metaphysics, ghosts and spirits, religion and God.  

Matthew Lindon lives in Snyderville. See his website: Waterandwhatever.com

The post Water and Whatever: From quantum mechanics to God’s ear appeared first on Park Record.

I participated in a panel discussion last month with some of our biggest retail and wholesale water providers, presented flawlessly by the Summit Health Department. 

Everyone had the proper astonishment of the general, regional and the latest climate conditions — getting warmer and drier at an increasingly rapid rate. We may have been preaching to the choir or talking to the wrong people.  

Conservation is a battle of economic will that should not be foisted on the wholesalers and retailers of water but on the political will of the people. But as Bob Dylan said, “The pump don’t work since the vandals stole the handle.”

These speakers pay their bills by selling water and they can only afford to bang the conservation drum so hard. They do a pretty good job at seamlessly making our water plentiful and cheap, and not vulnerable to the slings and arrows of outrageous climate.  

But they sugarcoated our severe drought as moderate and called for El Nino to save the day, the Great Salt Lake and the Colorado River. It’s all good, until it isn’t. 

We figured out years ago that runoff from the Weber and the Provo rivers peaks now in May instead of June, has done so since 2000, and this year it peaked in April. Both similar river basins deliver 321 acre-feet per year less than they did. That is enough water for 1 million people, or one big lake.  

We knew this was coming, but we do not act until it is a crisis. We are looking optimistically at our exponential climate and water issues with linear solutions. Dylan: “We don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

Isn’t it ironic that our second most valuable natural resource, behind air, is being squandered because demand is high, supply is low, and the price of it is too cheap? 

Water is distributed by the state in a socialized manner to those who want and need it first. The commodity is actually free! So farmers are growing water-hungry hay and alfalfa in Utah at 8,000 feet, cotton in Arizona and rice in California because they were first in line, while downstream users go thirsty.  

The original system was set up to promote Western growth and dependable economic development, order and certainty through the beneficial benevolence of the state engineer. It worked.

Now the only way to influence water use, human nature of fear and greed, or game theory and the tragedy of the commons is to charge what water is worth, not what it costs. The capitalist system and market economy is needed to promote conservation and wise use of our water resources where the age-old system of prior appropriation cannot. It’s contradictory but true that we need capitalism to justly distribute a social resource for the public good. 

Things are changing faster than we thought. The Great Salt Lake and our regional rivers are drying up. But the state did away with the public welfare requirements of water rights this year so they can build more data centers and shirk responsibility for shrinking lakes and rivers. 

That clause may have allowed or forced them to give every water user a haircut and devote enough water or the public good of avoiding toxic dust storms around where the lake has dried up. But eventually the state and the feds would in theory buy up water they already own and control or direct it to where it will do the most public good. Instead we are capitalizing personal profits and socializing public expense. 

Perhaps farmers can use less water to grow hay and sell that saved water for the lake. Dry farming does not have to be a binary yes or no. It can be a scaled usage and maybe we just buy the anemic third crop water. I don’t know whether the feds or state could afford all the water needed to save the lake. 

Or as the price of water goes up, market forces could make it too valuable to squander on low-income crops.

I would call our water situation severe instead of moderate and impose the preordained 40% restrictions because of our physical predicament and to impress upon the public the severity of our situation.  

My position may seem harsh, but I feel the middle is defined by the extremes in these situations and we can no longer afford to be naive or cautiously optimistic.  Appropriate cutbacks should be then enforced because it is better to err on the side of conservation than profligate use.  

Dylan again: “Even a blind man knows when its not raining.”

Matthew Lindon lives in Snyderville. See his website: Waterandwhatever.com

The post Water and Whatever: Drought and Bob Dylan appeared first on Park Record.

After several cool, late spring days in the desert, riding our own private White Rim Trail in the Glen Canyon Recreation Area, we decided to head north and high for some cooler climes. At the top of Indian Canyon, between Price and Duchesne, we found a nice cool and quiet campground on Reservation Ridge at 9,400 feet that we never knew existed. We congratulated ourselves for how to read real maps and for finding the secret camping destinations in Utah, which will take our entire lives to explore. How nice is it that we can still ride and ski something new every day.

After dinner, I took a reconnaissance loop around the campground, and on the advice of some groovy French moto riders, I found an old ATV-logging road. It was technical and rocky, thin and steep, but I put my e-bike in Trail Explorer mode and was able to power up the 45-degree slopes without flipping over backwards. I decided it was ridable and that I would explore it the next morning when my heart was fresh, my eyes were clear and the alpenglow was not fading. Wisdom is earned from years of good and bad experiences.

My eyes are bad from banging my head too much, and I do not process well dynamically, so I try not to fall on my head anymore. My heart wore out a while back, so they gave me a pacemaker that topped out at an orchestrated 120 bpm to save the battery.  That is barely enough for pickleball. Hell, I’ll buy the new batteries. But over the years I have convinced them to turn it up to 150 bpm so I can get out and ride bikes, moderately.  Above that, I black out. 

Without my certified Class 1 e-bike, I would not be able to ride at all, and that is unacceptable. Mountain biking is apparently very dangerous, and foolish for me, but am good at it, love it, and I desperately need to get out.

So the next day after breakfast, I took off on the trail that was very steep, challenging and technical. It wound through some great deep, dark, north-facing forests and sunny, south-facing clear cuts. I had to blaze some deadfall now and then to open the trail. It trended generally to the northeast, and I figured it would contour around eventually to the campground entry road or main highway.  

As I got further out, I realized that I was burning up battery power quickly on the incredibly steep climbs, and I was pushing my max pulse rate. I slowed my roll to save power and keep my pulse reasonable. I was running out of water and food as well as sunscreen, ChapStick and toilet paper. 

I soon realized that I had burned more than half my battery and therefore was unable to turn around and go back the way I came. I was committed, or should be. It was a modern-day metaphor of electricity versus effort, resources versus resilience.  

As I became increasingly nervous, at some point it became an official adventure. No one would find me out here. When worried, I usually consider the worst-case scenario and then admit that like a million times before, I could figure it out.  

Comforted by that realization, I powered on. I took some disconcerting wrong turns and got lost a few more times, but generally tended in the right direction. Just before I ran out of juice, I climbed blindly up to the road that led back to the campground. 

Tragedy narrowly averted, I pulled into our campsite, where my wife and dog were eagerly waiting, glad to see me and I, them. 

The point is that I would not be riding a bike without digital assistance, and I would not have ridden this cool new trail without a nice bike and some good bike skills. These allow for the great experiences that make me feel alive and almost 19 again.  

Some of my inclusive analog bike friends will ride with me as long as I gear down, ride in the back and do all the talking so they do not have to struggle to keep up. 

Others are more exclusive and cannot stomach a cheater on trails reserved for those who are healthy, wealthy and wild. 

If life is a highway, let us share the road. I simply relish the opportunity to get out and about, see some nature in my backyard, the backroads or the backcountry. Ride on. I just want to get some moderate exercise that will not drain my battery, deplete my resources, or break my heart. All I ask is a little empathy. Ride a mile in my bike shoes. 

Matthew Lindon lives in Snyderville. See his website: Waterandwhatever.com

The post Water and Whatever: Ride on appeared first on Park Record.

No, this is not another unsolicited harangue on water or waste, traffic or development, growth or greed, but a refreshing new version of better living through chemistry.

Artificial intelligence is the latest rage, but quantum mechanics has been around for more than 100 years. Ever since Heisenberg postulated with his matrix and the wave-particle nature of light that you can’t know position or probability at the same time, we found out that the act of observation actually changes everything.

Einstein famously countered with his thought that God does not play dice with the universe. He was relatively wrong. 

This was another great breakthrough in how we see the universe. Energy and very little matter are not continuous but occurred in interval bursts called quanta. Hence the name. Electrons jump from different, discrete orbital clouds, giving off signature radiation of both particles and waves that were not predictable or observable.

We live our lives in personal quantum intervals, performing in bursts and resting when tired. We rest the uphill ski and leg as we shred, walk, run or cycle. Sisters and sorority girls cycle at the same time. We appreciate the pause in music and the negative space in art. Rivers run in alternating rapid-pool sequences, and waves in the ocean come in on 8-13 second intervals. Water morphs differently when observed.

Quantum extrapolations predicted alternative universes with folds in the fabric of the space-time continuum and begged for new mathematics beyond Newtonian calculus to solve for the practical results we desperately wanted. And so we applied it to lasers, transistors and quantum computers turning the black-and-white, binary digital world into a technicolor quantum world where we are gods. How cool is that?  

Quantum computers are not binary but use quantum particles called qubits and photons to solve for an infinite range of solutions almost instantaneously. 

This may be a great assistance to AI and crypto mining in sensing new phenomena and performing critical matrix operations for better communication and security. The photons involved, which carry the electromagnetic force enabling all chemistry and biology, use fiber optics rather than copper wire to transmit uninterrupted, faster than the speed of light without the heat byproduct that requires so much energy and cooling water. 

Even our old fiber-optic internet network can be repurposed to create a future quantum network. 

Once again for every problem we create, we find a solution in another dimension and direction. Necessity is the mother. 

Not only that, but the instantaneous entanglement or influence at great distance implies a holistic aspect of the universe where all things are connected non-locally and influence each other. This gives new meaning to John Muir’s theory that all things in nature are “inextricably hitched.”  

It challenges the deterministic, isolationist and reductionist view that we are independent entities and even the religious view that we have independent consciousness and free will. 

Our passive self-awareness and subjective experiences, then, are not from our own individual brains but are a part of the universal consciousness that we actively co-create. We are all one consciousness in the universe, and our actions and observations influence and are influenced by everything else, instantly across great distance. We are one, we are nature, nature is god.  

This gets beyond the deterministic, predictable, touchy-feely physics and math we are all used to and accept. It merges mind and matter, cosmos and consciousness.  

We live life magically connected to each other where there is a collective-consciousness and there are no coincidences. We marvel at our interconnected synchronicity and serendipitous meetings with people we have just been thinking about, or find better words and thoughts than the words and thoughts we have been blindly searching for. 

This to me is a quantum leap in our human development much like fire, agriculture, the wheel, the a-bomb, the Industrial Revolution, the Information Age, the internet, cell phones, AI, crypto, shaped skis and suspension e-bikes.  

We also wonder at the similarities of the geometry of the atom and the universe, though the universe is deterministic and Newtonian predictable, while the atom is Heisenberg random and probabilistic.  

Are we just an atom on a hair, on a mite, on a dog (god), in a world, in a solar system, galaxy and universe just like our own?  There is so much to know and so much to learn that we should keep our minds open to these universal theories that magically connect physics and math, Karma and luck, deja vu and premonitions, accidents and coincidences, sense and sensibility, luck and kismet, love and lust, likes and loathing, ADD and autism, Alzheimer’s and dementia, dreams and desire, philosophy and metaphysics, ghosts and spirits, religion and God. 

Matthew Lindon lives in Snyderville. See his website: Waterandwhatever.com 

The post Water and Whatever: At the root of all of this, what? appeared first on Park Record.

When we last left our apocalyptic water tale of doom and gloom, we concluded that there was enough water out there and it just depended on us to use it wisely. Well, I found out that is not exactly true. I had the opportunity to speak recently with the first legates of Utah water, the Clyde family, who said, “Maybe not.”  

Steve Clyde is the pre-eminent water lawyer in the state, walking in the formidable footsteps of his father Steve Sr. and mentoring his own hipster son Jonathan as the next generation of lawful water excellence. They have their own law firm called Clyde Snow, founded in 1949, that plays well with the church, the state, the feds and the private sector. 

Steve’s prodigal brother, Tom, is a Woodland gentleman-rancher and Park Record columnist who founded, writes and stars in “The Park City Follies.” He is a wicked telemark skier and a water aficionado, like most skiers and ranchers. He is also a lawyer by profession, and not a bad one at that, who was the Park City attorney for several of our formative years.  

The Clydes are solid, smart people who are serious, righteous dudes with a sense of humor. They are usually the smartest guys in the room, as long as Chris Robinson or John Haney are absent. 

The dirty little secret of water lawyers is that they all quietly wanted to be engineers or hydrologists. Tragically, they could not get through the brain-numbing calculus calisthenics that enable engineering thinking, and they did not look good in flannel shirts.  

They do have a surprisingly good sense of the engineering concepts and numbers, and can even convert from CFS to acre-feet/day in their heads. The Clydes reminded me recently that even though the state of Utah gets/got 60 million acre-feet of precipitation in a year (2 trillion gallons), we can divert only 3 million-5 million acre-feet we can use after evapotranspiration and infiltration. The Great Salt Lake needs 8 million acre-feet to save it.

That would mean that in order to save the Great Salt Lake, we would have to use no water at all for anything — agriculture, golf courses, lawns, laundry — for two years.  There simply is not enough water for everything anymore. 

The same bleak numbers apply to the Colorado River, which now gets 10% of the water it was originally dedicated to deliver. 

This latest 20-year exponentially compounding drought and our current six-month, record-smashing heat wave are more of a symptom of the real sickness: climate change. It is because Utah uses more water per capita than any state and we put too much carbon in the air.  

So the real answer is to grow less grass for cows and golf courses, stop burning stuff and voting for people who say silly things like “drill baby drill.” For now, it is a question of political will and communal discipline to create a pivotal culture change for the long-term public welfare. 

Sure, we could cut down all the frivolous forests and pave the Cottonwood Canyons to increase our water supply, but what kind of dystopian world would that be?  There may be nuclear-powered desalinization plants, to augment the river, or saltwater pumps from the ocean to augment the lake, in our future. 

That will be when the price of water gets high enough to justify the fair market economics of spending trillions on these solutions. We need to fit into the world and the climate we have more than forcing it to fit us. Dominion over all means restraint and responsibility, not repression or domination.  

Beneficial use of our water resources is for the common good of the majority. Salt Lake dust storms and the dry Colorado River are not beneficial use for the public welfare and we must emphasize that concept, not ignore it. Since supply is decreasing, we need to demand less. 

The Clydes remind me that we are in this together, all for one and one for all. We need leaders like we had back when we started numbering World Wars and Depressions. Leaders with the charisma, backbone and foresight to meet the seminal challenge of our generation — climate change, which is coming to fulfillment before our very eyes.   

It is about time we start listening attentively to the scientists, engineers, meteorologists, hydrologists, economists and all the experts, even if they are lawyers.  We need people who can communicate and lead the masses using a slide rule and the rule of law, the Socratic and scientific methods. Like the Clyde family.

Matthew Lindon lives in Snyderville. See his website: Waterandwhatever.com

The post Water and Whatever: The consequences at the doorstep appeared first on Park Record.

OK, let us address the elephant in the room. Is this, the winter of our discontent, about weather or climate? Weather is about yesterday and next week. Climate is about the last millennium and the next decade.  

The climate is changing, quickly. Quicker than we predicted. Exponentially. Is this anecdotal or Armageddon?

This winter-that-wasn’t has been a catastrophe for skiers and the local industry, even for Vail Resorts and Alterra, which are somewhat insulated from climate by selling season ski passes in the summer.  

Is this an anomaly or is this the way it is going to be? Will the ski town economy remain vibrant or be replaced with other recreation, lifestyles or at worst, toxic dust clouds from the Great Salt Lake and the Colorado Plateau? Can we fix this or should we move?  

Park City has been getting hotter and drier for decades at a rate of roughly 1-3 inches of declining snowfall per year since 1990. The 2025 water year ending Oct. 1 was the driest in 85 years in Park City, rivaling the Dust Bowl of the dirty ’30s, with only 13 inches of precipitation, or 60% of average, and nothing falling all summer.

Then we had 7 inches of rain by New Year’s, so the calendar year looks average and we conveniently forgot the 20-year drought. This weather and thought pattern has been predicted for the past 30 years by Brian McInerney of the National Weather Service and advocates like Save our Snow as indicative of our new rain hydrology.

The past five months in a row were an unbelievable 10 degrees warmer than average, with some days almost 30-40 degrees above normal. We were breaking daily temperature records by 5-10 degrees and had the unprecedented warmest winter ever by 2.5 degrees. 

We are losing as much as a month at each end of ski season. This is anecdotally evident to us all, for even a blind man knows when it is not snowing.  

Average Park City temperatures are up 3-5 degrees over 125 years and summer morning low average temperatures are up 5-10 degrees over the past 50 years. 

Normal weather changes are being compounded by climate change and are exponential now and not linear, as historically predicted. This pattern was modeled by Dr. Simon Wang, of Utah State University, 20 years ago with the weakening and vacillating of the polar vortex and jet stream due to the poles heating much faster than the equator. Now the West gets the winter high pressure, and the east gets the low, the cold and the storms. We knew this was coming.

Peak runoff to the Great Salt Lake is now in May, not June or July anymore, and in April this year.  The total runoff volume has been diminished by 1-2 acre-feet per square mile per year for 100 years. That is enough water for a million people and a great big lake.  

Statewide snowpack is less than 50% of average this year and the lake should expect less than 30% of average runoff. It should hit its historical low next fall and could see ecosystem collapse within five years. That is not to mention the increased toxic lake bed dust clouds in the Wasatch that make people sick last for weeks, reach Park City, exacerbate early runoff, and diminish the historical lake effect snows.  

The lake collapse was predicted 30 years ago, using early AI, by Dr. Upman Lall of the University of Utah. Instead, we pumped extra runoff water,from the ample 1983-84 snowpack to the West Desert to evaporate. We would love that water back now for the unintended consequences of climate change. 

The lake is only 11,000 years old, reached the record low in the 1960s, and has never dried up. There are 150 terminal lakes in the world experiencing collapse. None have been saved. 

Meanwhile The state Legislature was praying and fasting for another big runoff year like 2023 to save us, while simultaneously proposing expanded authority and funding for more water-use development. 

The lawmakers voted to remove the legal protection of the natural streams, public welfare benefits for the lake, to avoid lawsuits and ease development approval. 

The state could buy the 8-million-acre feet (the size of Flaming Gorge reservoir) needed to recover the lake from farmers and other users, at a cost of $2 billion to 3 billion, but they have not yet allocated a 10th of that amount for the problem. 

Proposals now include draining the north arm to the south arm of the lake to supress dust, but some of the people and all of the the birds live up north. The state has turned to private sector philanthropy for a solution, and the Romney family has given them $100 million, but this issue requires even deeper pockets. 

We can blame the cows and alfalfa farmers, but this also on us with our thirsty lawns, green golf courses and exponential population growth. 

I believe that the only way to save the lake is to have the church step up and help. They have the money, water, authority, dominion, overpopulation and the most to gain from saving our little Vatican City II from ruin. It would be like the seagulls eating the crickets to save Zion. 

The Colorado River, likewise, is expecting less than 30% of its average annual runoff volume while Lakes Powell and Mead are only 25% full. The river was originally allocated for 17-million-acre feet in the Colorado Compact of 1922, and now only flows 5 million-acre feet. This year we will be lucky to get 2 million-acre feet, and something has to give.  

Lake Powell is looking at minimum power pool this year, where they cannot make electricity and we have to burn more carbon — compounding the problem yet again. Dead pool could be in three to five years, where we lose control of the outflow to the Grand Canyon and downstream compact deliveries to the other states. 

Western governors met in Washington, D.C., with the feds and their lawyers to renegotiate the compact and devise a plan for cuts by the end of the year, since their state representatives punted and just blame Arizona.  

The compact was originally created to avoid the feds and lawyers. This is the tragedy of the commons mixed with Russian roulette and game theory — the only way to win is to cheat. What we really need is some quantum entanglement, synchronized cooperation, to battle our basic human survival nature of greed and fear. Meanwhile we continue to privatize water profits and ethics while socializing the cost and morality.

The Supreme Court doesn’t want water law cases, and forget Congress, so we could give this problem to the President. Legal or not, federal take over of the Colorado Basin may be the only way to stop people from growing hay, cotton or rice in the desert and we could all be great again.   

Grow cotton in Alabama and rice in Vietnam. California could desalinate seawater and Arizona could stop pumping their share into the ground. Colorado could stop stealing its headwaters, and Utah could stop cooling AI/Bitcoin data centers in the high desert (put them in Alaska). As far as Wyoming, New Mexico, Las Vegas, Mexico, the Native Americans, the fish, the river, the riparian habitat, the littoral environment and the public trust, well, no one seems to care. 

Let’s face it, the issues with the lake and the river are symptoms of the larger sickness of climate change here now and accelerating at unimaginable rates. It is simply too hot and dry these days to do everything for everybody. 

Solutions for the lake and the river range from creating free and fair markets for water so we all pay the true price, cost, value and worth of this commodity, while maintaining the self-evident, inalienable right of minimum human water needs. This would encourage adjustment of the prior appropriation doctrine of “first in time, first in right,” “use it or lose it” for more equitable and economic water distribution.  

Finally, we would be incentivized to address climate change and alternative energy instead of subsidizing oil wars and burning more carbon. We might even grow less hay, lawns and golf courses, and turn off the tap while we shave and brush our teeth if the price is right. 

We might want to vote green to save the planet and make money doing it at the same time. We need to recognize our water, lakes, rivers and most other natural resources for the best beneficial use by all. There is enough water out there. We just need to choose wisely how to use it. 

Matthew Lindon lives in Snyderville. See his website: Waterandwhatever.com

The post Water and Whatever: What the winter that never was suggests appeared first on Park Record.

I am not 15 anymore, but my feet, nose and ears keep growing, along with my belly. 

I have started wearing T-shirts under my sweaters these days as the first step of winter layering, allowing me to acclimate and assimilate outside and turn the heat down a notch inside and sleep cool. 

I bought a new pair of winter slip-on snow loafers and my feet have grown a full size since the last new ones 10 years ago. 

My ski boots have amazingly kept pace, getting stretched and packed down from years of sloshing. 

I even bought a new pair of skis since it has been 10 years since I found the last ones in the wrapper for $100. This time it cost $200, but I blame that on inflation and, of course, Joe Biden. 

I liked the green Zebra graphics, camber, shape and flex as much as the price. I like them long for cruising or pow and thin underfoot so I can step on them and turn. When I brought them home, I found out they were good, popular all-mountain skis and “playful.” Like me.  

I am frugal but not stupid, safety is my priority, and so I bought the best and lightest 400-gram, purple Euro AT bindings for $900. They said it was the tariffs, so I blame The Donald. 

But it’s been more than a few long years for me with minimal skiing. First there was Covid for a few years, then we went south for a few winters. Then my head, heart, eyes, shoulders and lungs went south on me for a few years. 

Then it became so corporate and crowded that all I would do is go up there and yell at people. It takes me five minutes to drive to the resort and if it takes seven, I am furious. Perhaps it was me and I needed some time off to recoup, recharge and reinvent.  

It hasn’t been so bad since I found other cool things to do. I wrapped up my career as a hydrologist with a few legacy projects and now I want to be a writer when I grow up. But skiing is what I love and have dedicated my life to. It’s time for a second chance.

I missed skiing. That first run of the year when you remember how fun it really is to go fast outside, on the hills, in the woods, in the cold sun. The feel of bottomless powder blowing over your head and making it a three-dimensional sport and not just a frictionless plane. 

The joy of meeting friends on the mountain on a Sunday morning for group shredding, laughing and lunch. Coffee breaks in the morning with the boys on a Tuesday when no one is around. Skiing backwards with kids and getting them to appreciate this carefree and social, athletic and natural endeavor and lifestyle.  

Skiing in storms so wicked it tears at your face and vision, or snow falling so soft and silent that you can’t hear yourself think, or days so cold that trees crack and your spit freezes before it hits the ground. The last run of the year on corn, so soft it borders on mashed potatoes, in T-shirts, with lathered sunscreen and tattered brimmed hats.

So, with all the new lifts and gondolas, there is a new me. No longer rising before first light and charging up early after all my research and chores, I will sleep until I wake and saunter up at 10 o’ 12. 

Traffic will be defeated, and parking will reopen with people leaving already. It won’t be first shots or face shots or frozen corduroy, but it will be calm, kinder and gentler like it used to be. 

The sun will be up, the air will be warmer, the masses already in the back bowls, leaving the rest of the mountain to me and mine. 

After a few fast fresh and athletic runs, I can stop for coffee, a beer or lunch and schmooze with some friends or work the room. Then a few social runs after lunch before the light fades and the lack of will, effort and ability prevail. 

Then home before the crush for a dog walk, a nap in my long-johns and a cocktail before dinner. This is my quest, this is my test, no matter how small, no matter how tall. 

Be like the Marines: adapt, adjust, improvise, overcome and show resilience and resourcefulness. Semper Fi. Make It so. Let it be. I don’t know, whatever, never mind.

Keep Park City cool and kind.

Water and Whatever

Matthew Lindon lives in Snyderville. See his website: Waterandwhatever.com

The post Water and Whatever: OK, let’s try this winter thing on again appeared first on Park Record.

Welcome to the winter that never was. After enduring a hot summer in 2025 and the record dry water year ending Oct. 1, we experienced a record wet October that would make the calendar year look average and inspire hope for the coming winter.  

That was not to be, as our hope was dashed against the exposed rocks on the mountains over the next three months. Although precipitation was copious in December, it was too warm to snow and to make snow. If it was colder, we would have been buried in several feet of early, natural powder, setting the stage for a lucrative Christmas and a happy new year of skiing. Bah humbug. Not this year.  

I took another look at the Prism geospatial database out of Oregon State, which calibrates nicely with an accepted global average annual temperature rise of 1-2 degrees in the United States over the past millennium. 

We have seen a 2-3 degree rise in average annual temperatures in Park City over that period and a 5-10 degree raise in summer morning low temperatures, with most of it just in the last 50 years.  

Now that is real change we all can wrap our heads around. These temperatures are not rising at a steady rate but rather exponentially. Dr. Simon Wang showed this to us 20 years ago at a climate conference at Utah State, with the repositioning of the winter jet stream and the atmospheric rivers, and Dr. Upman Lall showed us an AI model of the drying of the Great Salt Lake as well, but no one would listen.

Recently, I took a look at the monthly average temperatures for the last 10 and 30 years, long enough to have a valid sample set yet still capture the most recent trends. 

The 135-year data set created by Prism shows similar results that are washed out a bit by pre-industrial numbers at the turn of the last century. While our average annual temperature has risen almost a degree, just over this shorter period, the average November has risen 2 degrees and December has risen 3 degrees.   

Astonishingly, the November 2025 average temperature in Park City was 10.5 degrees higher than the 10- and 30-year average and was 11.4 degrees higher in December 2025 than the decadal average. 

January, by comparison, was only 5.1 degrees warmer than average but felt like a complete anomaly to the average January temperatures that have actually been dropping in the last 10 years. There is no denying that even anecdotally, it is getting warmer.  

We are losing weeks, if not months at the front and back end of the ski season.  We are breaking records by 5-10 degrees now. Even a blind man knows when it is not snowing.

This may not seem like much, but this is an entire monthly average over only 10 and 30 years. This occurs at a critical time of year when plus or minus a degree or two can make or break the entire ski industry. If they miss Thanksgiving or don’t fill beds for Christmas, the season is toast.  

Additionally, June and July monthly temps have increased an average of 2 degrees in 10 years. Thankfully January–May average monthly temps have dropped a degree and high temps have dropped 2-3 degrees, although morning low average temps continue to rise for every month. It is good to know that in the heart of the winter, the daily temps remain cool and robust.  

But another analysis I undertook shows that the spring runoff season peaks in May now and not June, and we have lost almost a month on the back end of the ski season.  

Local Brian McInerney, formally of the the National Weather Service, and I have been preaching this locally for years as The Water Guys. Now we are saying I told you so. It’s not a minor challenge or a nagging issue to contend with. It is a major problem for us all, in our first world town, and throughout the second and third worlds. 

It makes me wonder what all these developers are thinking with their $5 billion investments wallowing in the mud in the middle of January. I wonder if we will have snow for the Olympics, let alone Christmas.  

Water flows to money but not so much with snow. Perhaps we should rethink the timing of the ski season and have Martin Luther King Jr. Day be the new Thanksgiving and Presidents Week be Christmas and New Year’s. We try to open the resorts with 10 inches of snow but close them every year in the spring with 100. What is wrong with this picture?

The ski industry has put the risk of climate change on us by making us commit to passes by Sept. 1, thereby exonerating themselves from the bad snow year they know is coming. I would be nice if they had a little more skin in the game. They are suffering this year with losses from condos and concessions, but it could be a lot worse.  

I did read a local resort’s strategic plan and the word skiing was not even mentioned until the second half of the publication. Maybe they see the writing on the wall by promoting other recreation and lifestyles, or maybe they see an opportunity to bait and switch.  

Either way they sell a commodity that won’t exist for very long, taking the money and run. The climate is changing and we should change with it. 

Matthew Lindon lives in Snyderville. See his website: Waterandwhatever.blogspot.com.

The post Water and Whatever: Our never winter follows a longstanding pattern appeared first on Park Record.