Water in a Dry World
From the desert to the forest and back again: a lifetime learning that the Southwest will always be a landscape with much to offer but little to spare.
I have lived most of my life in a desert, though civilization invested a great deal of effort and money in keeping this fact from me. It was not until I moved to Moab, Utah after spending the better part of twelve years on Vancouver Island that I began to genuinely appreciate how much water shapes the land and the destinies of the people living on it.
Before moving to Canada, I lived beside 80% of Utah’s population within the urbanized strip known as the Wasatch Front. This approximately 120 mile stretch of sprawl extends from Ogden in the north to Provo in the south. Salt Lake City rests halfway between these two points.
Utah’s major cities and their suburbs are spread beneath the rim of the Great Basin along the western face of the Wasatch Mountains. Before humanity began diverting most of the water to serve its own needs and climate change began taking its toll on the snowpack, the streams and rivers that flow into the basin from the nearby summits and canyons between them sustained the now dying Great Salt Lake.
