Drought and Drama
A road trip
It’s been a while since I last posted. We’ve been on the road for the last couple of weeks, traveling across the country from North Carolina to California, and this is the first chance I’ve had to sit down and write about it. If you’ve read my earlier travel stories, you’ll be expecting a mixture of travel drama and water stories, and both found us.
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After last summer’s road trip sleeping in the back of the Subaru, we decided to upgrade to a van, and ordered a conversion from a builder in Asheville, North Carolina. Now it’s time to pick her up - her name’s Layla, after our late beagle - and bring her home, stopping to see friends and family along the way.
We find a flight, using miles, from our local airport, Paine Field in Everett, to San Diego and from there to Charlotte. Perfect, except we almost don’t make it. A phone call from a friend just in time let’s us know that our ferry has been cancelled, meaning we have to drive across the bridge at the north end of the island, adding ninety minutes to the journey time. Fortunately, lines are short at this regional airport, and we make it with time to spare. After a night in Charlotte we drive to Asheville to pick up Layla.
Day 1. Layla is everything we imagined, and more. After a tour of the van and an exchange of the necessary paperwork, we spend the rest of the day unpacking what we brought and what we shipped, and shopping for supplies, and head off for our first night. It’s a test, with the temperature dropping to eighteen degrees with even a few snow flurries. Thanks to the diesel heater, Layla passes with flying colors.
The snow flurries are a tease, as, just eighteen months after the catastrophic flooding from hurricane Helene, most of western North Carolina, with adjacent parts of Tennessee, is in a historic drought.
Day 2 brings the first issue with the van. The electric step is misbehaving. One of the guys from the builder went to high school with the service manager at the local Mercedes dealer who gets us in tomorrow. We spend the day on more errands.
It’s another cold night, nineteen degrees, and again we’re toasty.
Day 3 finds us at the Mercedes dealer all day while they fix the sensor on the step that our builder disturbed. There’s also a leak in the fuel tank from a screw. That gets patched. The builder picks up the tab and we’re on our way for a third night in the van.
Day 4 takes us deep into Tennessee, where the “Adultery is a sin” billboards are trying, and failing, to outnumber those for sex shops.
In two days the temperature has risen from 18 to 80, and the warmth uncovers a new problem. The cab AC is not working. One stop and a number of calls leads to an appointment in Little Rock tomorrow.
The drought in Tennessee is “only” moderate.
Day 5 finds us passing the Bass Pro Shops Pyramid in Memphis before we cross the Mississippi into Arkansas.
The promised AC appointment in Little Rock evaporates.
We spend the night at the home of Brenda’s skating coach from her competition days in Hot Springs, once claiming to be the Vegas of the East.
All of Arkansas is in moderate to exceptional drought. Flow in the Arkansas River, which starts in the Colorado Rockies, is low.
Day 6. We suspect low freon in the AC, so stop in Clarksville, AR, to buy a recharge kit. A fellow customer lets us use his discount code and helps us. We discover the AC compressor is not kicking in. The roof AC unit keeps us cool enough, so we decide to leave it till we get home.
We cross into Oklahoma as the temperature climbs into the nineties. After Oklahoma City, Interstate 40 roughly follows the path of historic Route 66, with signs on the highway imploring travelers to visit the small towns on the old route. Boarded up storefronts, closed gas stations, and dilapidated motels tell the story of towns ghosted by the Interstate.
We pass through the almost ghost town of Geary to our stop at Roman Nose State Park, where the main attraction, Watonga Lake, is completely dry.
All of Oklahoma is at best abnormally dry and at worst in extreme drought.
Day 7 takes us across Western Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle to our stop in New Mexico. The temperature reaches a hundred degrees, and it’s very windy. We see a forest fire. Tractor-trailers are struggling, and apart from us and couple of other vans, no camping rigs are on the road. We divert from the highway for a while so we can slow down and avoid trucks, passing through towns yet to recover from the dust bowl. Occasional center-pivot irrigation systems further stress the already critically depleted Ogalalla aquifer. The Canadian River, rising in New Mexico’s Sangre de Cristo Mountains, is mostly mud.
The Texas Panhandle is in moderate to severe drought.
Our stop for the night, Santa Rosa Lake in New Mexico, a reservoir on the Pecos River, is low, it’s outflow a trickle.
Day 8. We have time for a couple of hours in Santa Fe before our next stop at Heron Lake just south of the Colorado border. The San Juan River, a tributary of the Colorado River, flows across the Northwest corner of New Mexico, entitling the state to a share of the river’s water. But the northwest corner is not where the water is needed. The Bureau of Reclamation built the San Juan-Chama Project, a system of diversion dams and tunnels to move water from the San Juan watershed under the continental clivide to the Rio Grande watershed where most of the demand is. That’s the water we see in Heron Lake.
New Mexico is in moderate to exceptional drought.
Day 9 takes us to Durango, Colorado to spend a few days with our daughter. It’s supposed to be ski season, but it’s T-shirt weather. The local hill is grass, with just couple of patches of snow.
Western Colorado, including the headwaters of the Colorado River, is in severe to exceptional drought.
Day 12 finds us back on the road. The route takes us past the Four Corners National Monument, on Navajo land. We spent some time chatting to a Navajo potter. His poster says his sons are apprenticing with him. I ask how that’s going.
“That all changed when they went into the service. They joined the US Marine Corps. They were deployed to Afghanistan...” He trailed off and changed the subject.
“I’ve lived in Cortez all my life. There used to be beanfields but they were converted to alfalfa. Now they’re fallow for lack of water, and the creek is dry.”
A long drive brings us to the Arizona side of Lake Havasu on the Colorado River across from California. California’s Metropolitan Water District takes water from the lake and sends it via the Colorado River Aqueduct 242 miles to Southern California.
Lake Havasu is home to pontoon boats, jet skis, ski boats, speed boats, and cigarette boats.
Once was enough.
Arizona is abnormally dry; the Four Corners region is in extreme drought.
Day 13 takes us to Guajome County Park in Oceanside, California, for tomorrow’s Ironman 70.3. Brenda in still recovering from a surgery, so is not competing this year, but we’re here to cheer on her teammates.
On the way, we cross the Coachella Canal, which takes water from the Colorado River near Yuma and brings it to the Imperial and Coachella Valleys.
Thanks to a heavy Sierra Nevada snowpack, California is the first state we’ve visited that is not in drought, although much of Southern California reliant on the Colorado which is not doing so well.
Day 14 we spend at the beach watching the race.
The only problem with Southern California is that twenty million people had the same idea first.
Day 15 After a morning at the beach, we head back over the hills to Lake Cahuilla, terminus of the Coachella Canal, in La Quinta. It’s 100 degrees in the campsite with no shade, so we elect to stay with the friend we came to visit who lives just a golf cart ride away.
We’ll be back on the road in a couple of days, and back home in two weeks, when I’ll write to you again. To make sure you don’t miss it, please consider subscribing to Mostly Water.
Travel by drought is a genre I didn't know I needed!
"Tennessee, where the “Adultery is a sin” billboards are trying, and failing, to outnumber those for sex shops." 😂
All of the dry lakes and extreme drought conditions is quite alarming....are people paying attention? Data centers don't help the bleak situation. Thanks again for another great read, John!