Hiking in Shenandoah National Park – Ominous news from abroad – Beginning of a crisis with water supply from the Colorado River – Evening statistics
It was a quiet hike today with AD, RH, and JI, starting at Beahm’s Gap, taking the Hull School Trail down to the Thornton River, crossing the river, re-ascending to Skyline Drive and the Appalachian Trail via the Thornton River Trail, taking the AT to the Neighbor Mountain Trail, and descending by way of the Byrd’s Nest shelter to Beahm’s Gap. RH went back to the cars, but I went with AD and JI about a mile more back and forth along the Rocky Ledge Trail before returning: about 11 miles and 2600 feet of elevation gain. It was a particularly comfortable temperature for hiking, in the high fifties and low sixties. The wildflowers in this area are not as varied as in many other sections of the park, but we saw a good deal of starry chickweed, blue violets, yellow violets, and white violets. Here and there we saw bloodroot and wild geranium and ragwort as well. It took us a while to identify the ragwort, because it was still budding, and its purplish buds give no indication that the flowers they will eventually produce are bright yellow.
At this point about half of the population in the U.S has received one dose of vaccination and over 30% are fully vaccinated. The daily death toll is between 700 and 800, whereas it was up to 3,400 at some point in January. But new “hot spots” keep emerging in other regions of the world. Formerly the U.S. and Western Europe bore the brunt of the disease; now the greatest concentrations are in Eastern Europe, South Asia, and Latin America. The death toll is now over 3 million worldwide (it was under 2 million just three months earlier) and the true number is believed to be higher because of concealment by various countries’ governments.
In the midst of all of the concern about the virus there is a news item that may go unnoticed but which will have greater ramifications in the years to come. The man-made lakes that store water for many Western cities dependent on the Colorado River are shrinking to historic lows. It has long been a matter of astonishment to me that so many cities with massive populations have been built in an area with little direct supply of water. In Washington we receive nearly 40 inches of rain a year; in Phoenix, whose greater metro area population is comparable to ours, the annual rainfall is 9 inches and the area has undergone periods over 100 days without any rain at all. The main source of water is the Colorado River, which is relied upon by no fewer than seven states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. Since 1963, the only times that the flow of the Colorado River has reached the ocean has been during the El Niño phases; in other years hardly any water gets past Lake Powell. California, at least, has cities that could obtain an alternate source of water through desalinization of the ocean water; the process is expensive and its environmental impact is not negligible, but at any rate it is a possible solution. For cities such as Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Tucson, there are no other water sources.
Today’s statistics as of 9:00 PM – # of cases worldwide: 141,292,672; # of deaths worldwide: 3,023,138; # of cases U.S.: 32,371,423; # of deaths; U.S.: 580,631.