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This is super hyperbolic - the higher up you go the more chance there is for there to be water. We had a low snow year so everything around public roads will be drier. End of the summer lots of this stuff is dry anyways.

Did you do any hikes that went up to higher elevations? Have you been through this area before to know what it typically looks like?

I agree its a bad year but this is not becoming a desert anytime soon

It's not that hyperbolic. I used to go up the 120 (i.e. Stanislaus) to go camping, then went on a long pause. When I returned after the previous multiyear drought, before the pandemic (so, around 2019), everywhere I drove half the trees were gone. To be clear, these weren't the touristy areas around Yosemite.

I almost couldn't recognize it. It's been bad since. During the pandemic was when we had those reddish end-of-days skies because of all the wildfires. I'm scared to go back and see what there is now.

I just got back from a long hike in Rocky Mountain National Park outside of Estes Park, CO. Most of the hike was above treeline. We spotted a heard of elk and a local with whom I was hiking told me the elk were up there because the area had some late rain; normally that tundra is all brown by July.

In the late 80s and early 90s I hiked that area every summer. I don't recall the tundra grass ever brown in July.

End of summer? That’s still 2ish months away..

Here in the pnw I’m still waiting for the snowpack to melt in the alpine, 1m+ In places At around 1250m.

It really depends on where you are. The Oxford dictionary defines midsummer as June 27th. But looking at California temperature as an example, I would assume midsummer would be early July. But I am not a meteorologist nor a farmer. So it's safe to assume we're already in the second half of summer in most states.

Midsummer is a holiday, not "middle of summer". Midsummer also happens at the beginning of summer.

Summer is defined at June July August, we are officially just over half way with 50 days left and not close to the end of summer by any definition.

> Majority of the streams are gone.

In Australia that's typical for many reasons. Are you sure they're not just seasonal flows?

Nah, there's a whole ton of hydro that's been entirely consistent until now that is dropping off and messing things up.

Shit the utilities have never even had to bother considering failing is approaching drop dead lines.

Depending on rain August could be fun.

Even here in wet Vancouver Island, British Columbia we have heaps of streams that are mostly gone by July. They are rain fed, the rain goes away, it’s just how some systems work.

I’m not saying everything is fine with the environment. Just, this is to be expected with a large number of streams in the world. Maybe it’s not alarming in each case.

I’m pretty sure the Mississippi River use to seasonally dry up in spots prior to the building of the lock and dam system.

In 2012 it was so low barge traffic came to a halt.

https://nation.time.com/2012/08/23/the-big-dry-up-where-the-... and https://stateclimatologist.web.illinois.edu/2012/11/27/why-t...

Wow really? That is hard to believe given half the US drains through it. I can't find anything on Google on the subject though maybe I am using the wrong search terms.

Or maybe you have no idea what you are talking about and are spreading misinformation?

Are you sure you don’t mean snow fed? Lots of roaring rivers while it’s melting and then once the melt is done many shrink/nearly dry up.

Thou we have a ton of snowpack this year on the coast still

There are both, but we have many lower mountains that rarely get snow, let alone snow pack, but they have seasonal streams that can be quite large at the bottom of the water shed.

A decent example would be the French creek watershed by Nanaimo. I think it’s estimated that only 15% of the flow is from snow, with most of that portion flowing during spring. The rest is rain, mostly from higher up in the watershed.

This watershed doesn’t dry up entirely, but it naturally reduces dramatically by July with many of its tributaries vanishing completely. There are many like it without that 15% melt water, some of which mostly vanish under the bed rock and gravel depositions along the creek beds.

Unfortunately that’s also increasingly true, and it’s causing all kinds of species to die in watersheds that previously even supported multiple seasons of salmon runs. The last paper I read on French Creek suggested even swamps in the watershed were drying too much, killing insects and amphibians. Many streams have lost entire salmon runs due to drying too much, too often. It’s a fragile system. It seems like deforestation plays a major role in these watersheds drying out.

This is straight up hyperbole. No, those areas are not going to deserts in the next few years, or even our lifetimes.

The Western US is a semi-arid desert: https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/pt.6.1.2018080...

We have historic evidence that droughts have destroyed civilizations in that part of the country before. It is happening again.

Very good article, with several illustrative cites going back to 1979.

The west is dominated by the [0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermontane_Plateaus] , much of it losing water since the pluvial lakes like [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Bonneville] reached its greatest height 18000 years ago. "The abandoned shore lines have yielded evidence of past climatic changes second in importance only to those of the Pleistocene glaciated areas."[0]

A lot of snow falls in the winter, but for a century the meltwater has had plenty of mouths to feed. A lot of the distribution plans have been based on only a couple centuries of experience.

Well, there is that ocean on the left coast which theoretically can provide all the water needed to avert problems. There is also that sun in the sky which could provide power for the desalination plants needed to turn that salty sea water into fresh water. The resulting brine contains a number of harvestable minerals as well so given the incentive there would be a possibility to stave of desertification of at least parts of the area - something which was not possible to those previous populations which got decimated by this cycle.

I'm not saying all of the areas I went through are going to desert... but if you look at the extent of the damaged areas, I doubt that you're going to see the same forests come back again in our lifetimes. Take a look at the Pine Ridge area. As far as the eye can see, everything is gone. Driving through Sequoia, huge swaths of the trees are gone. It is 100+ degrees in the summers and no water...

No water is the norm for these trees. A dam system built by humans has no bearing on that.

You should read "Cadillac Desert", if you live in the American Southwestern state--California, Arizona, and Nevada in particular. It has significant implications for the future survivability of large-scale civilization in the region.

Mark Reisner originally wrote the book in the early 1990s, and his predictions have turned out to be quite accurate over the last three decades.

If you want to make informed decisions, as a voter and a resident, this is probably the single most important thing you need to get educated about.

It’s hyperbolic trash though. What is happening to the Colorado river has been predicted as a possibility since the dams were built.

It has absolutely no implications for the survivability of large scale civilizations in the area because the vast majority of the water goes to farming. Residential and office usage is willing to pay far more than farmers and uses significantly less.

The flow rate of the Colorado river could drop by another 70% and still support everyone living here (socal, az, nv). The instance things get a little dire, farmer rights will be stripped away by the voters, they’ll pay market rate like everyone else, and the problem will be solved overnight.

> It’s hyperbolic trash though.

This is rude, and unnecessary. If your own counter-argument is actually sound, why are you bothering to label Reisner's as trash? It doesn't make you more believable--it mostly just undermines your credibility, because you apparently don't trust the soundness of your arguments to stand on their own.

Have you read the HN comment guidelines? I'll quote something that you might want to consider:

> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

Right now, I have zero interest in engaging with you, because of the unpleasantly combatitive way you've chosen to approach the topic. What would even be the point of trying to have a discussion with someone who believes it's OK to speak to strangers like this?

Consider rewriting your comment, and maybe we can talk about the actual merits of Reisner... As it is now, good luck, and I hope you learn a better way to interact with the world.

Water rights aren't going away without a fight. It's not something voters really understand. In the west, it's a super complex topic. There's a reason politicians go to "hey, don't water your lawn this year! No water at restaurants unless you ask for it!" mode whenever there's an issue now. That sort of worthless virtue signaling is the only thing they can really accomplish vs big water/ag. And the Republicans will weaponize rural water rights as just another thing to use against the libs.

Even if you can redo water rights (which won't happen), what happens when farmers lose their water? People aren't going to be stoked about not having easy access to beef, almonds, etc. And the farm subsidies would have to massively go up even more, which Republicans will fight tooth and nail for while pretending to defend the small farmer.

What isn't hyperbole is that cyclical mega droughts is part of our new norm and this is going to become an issue every year, alongside wildfires. None of it will be solved overnight, and it will probably get much much worse in our lifetimes. Welcome to the future lol.

When it's between having almonds or the taps drying up, people will absolutely redefine water rights. Ultimately democracy is a numbers game, and there's far, far more people living in cities than there are farmers.

The speed of the response to Covid (initially...) was a good demonstration of how fast society can react when threatened with imminent danger. We went from "liberal democracies will never limit freedom of movement" to a broadly consensual "nobody can leave their house" in 2 weeks. How fast do you think the citizens of LA will change their mind about almond farming when their taps dry up?

What we learned during covid is that propaganda has jaw dropping power and that a large fraction of the population is vulnerable to it. The citizens of LA will change their minds about almonds when the media tells them to.

The citizens of LA will blindly follow whichever tyrant is closest to their values, media or not. The media is far weaker than it's been in decades, and cults of personality amplified by marketing way more powerful.

But democracy isn't really about numbers, just power and propaganda. It's never been one person one vote. The urban rural divide has been going on for decades if not centuries, and still the rural areas have disproportionate power and the cities almost none (at the federal level). Various systems from the electoral college to campaign finance to the bilateral congress to the courts serve to purposely dilute the individual electoral power of each citizen,transferring power to political dynasties instead... to the point that what we have is way closer to a corrupt oligarchy than any meaningful sort of democracy.

Ultimately the citizens of LA don't have any meaningful political power outside of Sacramento. Water is a multi state thing and the urban dwellers have loud voices but no meaningful representation. They can yell all they want, but most of the country by area doesn't care about them. By population they should win every issue, but they haven't for decades because we don't actually have a democracy.

You don't even have to directly deal with water rights. The state could easily make it completely impractical to farm with onerous regulation and taxes - something liberal states love to do in general.

The "state" is not a unitary actor that somehow magically intuits and implements the desires of a majority of voters. All state policy, but especially legislation, is a massive hodge-podge of independent actors motivated by all sorts of factors, and very often in direct opposition to each other's interests. All those actors are just as selfish, ignorant, stupid, greedy, angry, racist, corrupt, and venal as the rest of the human race.

The state's legislative apparatus will always do (and ONLY do) that which is achieved by the outcome of all the competing interests and their efforts at lobbying, contributing, marketing, persuading, bribing, intimidating, etc, etc. Occasionally there may be room for the individual conscience of a principled actor. But most often the ethics of individuals don't mean anything in the face of the economic, political, and cultural forces that shape state policy.

Even with direct ballot intiatives, we've just shifted the target of all those lobbying efforts from the statehouse to your house. The mass of voters might be less immediately corrupt and power-hungry than professional politicians in the legislature, but we're also more ignorant, stupid, distracted, and impatient than the pros.. And since ballot initiatives because a thing, we've managed to create about as many serious problems as we've been able to solve.

There is no such thing as "easily" when it comes to making laws--unless you're a dictator with a firm grip on power.

I'll give you another piece of 'hyperbolic trash':

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Water_Knife

;-)

Provide some evidence. Reisner's work is extensively researched and is well respected, generally.

You have just showed up with your own hyperbole, and nothing to back it up.

Reservoir levels have zero relationship to trees. Conflating all of these things just comes across as “city person went outside and fit every observable into existing tiny model of world”.

If you consider drought a common cause, then a potential relationship is there.

we've just wrapped up a record breaking snowfall, el nino i believe. it takes time for water to rebuild, unfortunately the question is if the consumption will outpace the accumulation.

North is different. Union Valley Reservoir is full. American River is high.

You're right, there was a definite difference north of Yosemite. I think that is what was most striking to me.

if anyone wants to learn to build their own camper van, i've documented my entire build out and navigation on a similar trip as op:

http://vanlifecoder.com/