Nevada’s Carson River running dry
Ranchers, farmers are facing a dire situation
RENO, Nev. – Devere Dressler sees the Carson River as an old neighbor in decline.
The sixth generation rancher remembers when the river was flush with suckerfish, minnows and trout. Now, he spots a trout here and there, but can’t recall the last time he saw a suckerfish or minnow.
“I don’t see them anymore,” he said. “It’s disturbing to me.”
Dressler has lived and worked in the Carson River Basin for 71 years. The West Fork of the river splits the ranch he and his wife operate southwest of Gardnerville, Nevada. Last year was a dry year, he said. But this year is the driest he can remember.
“This is the worst I’ve seen. I’ve never seen snow go away,” he said. “I was always able to visualize snow in the Sierra in July and August. This year, it disappeared in June.”
Like thousands of ranchers across the American West, Dressler is navigating the profound impacts of drought on his business and way of life.
As he has watched the river and land dry up around him, he has cut back his head of cattle by one third. He has let some of the 1,200 acres he runs them on go dry.
“I don’t want to take too much water out of the river. I leave it in for the other users, and my biggest concern is the wildlife,” he said. “Next year, if we have a repeat dry year, we may have to reduce our numbers more. Time will tell.”
As Nevada’s pastureland dries up, ranchers like Dressler are pulling out of federal grazing areas because of poor conditions, according to Chris Moreno, environmental scientist for the Nevada Department of Agriculture.
Forced to bring their livestock back to ranches instead of grazing them on federal land, these ranchers now need feed – and hay is exorbitantly priced at $300 a ton.
“Folks are just selling off whatever
(livestock) they can because they can’t afford feed,” Moreno said.
First in time, first in right
With virtually no water held in upstream reservoirs on the Carson River, Dressler and other agricultural producers are fully dependent on what Mother Nature gives them.
And for the past two years, it has not been much.
This year, flows on the river are pushing hard against 1977 and 2015, the two driest years on record for the Carson and Truckee River basins, according to Ed James, general manager of the Carson Water Subconservancy District.
Some Nevada agricultural producers haven’t received water allocations since June, where water rights can be boiled down to “first in time, first in right.”
The state allows people to appropriate water based off seniority and availability. The priority is linked to the earliest date water on the property was first used for a “beneficial” use, such as agriculture. The earlier the priority date on a water right, the more “senior” the claimant’s right to use water.
On the Carson River, senior water rights date to 1849. That means someone
with water rights dating to 1910 on the Carson River would still be considered to have “junior” water rights.
This year, only those with senior water rights are still getting water. Most junior water rights users lost water about a month earlier than usual – June instead of July, according to James.
“Seniors get the water and juniors don’t get anything, unless they are next to a senior water user (and get some runoff),” Dressler said. “And if you’re a good irrigator, you’re not going to let much get by. A junior water irrigator is out of luck.”
Abandoned dam project
There was a time when the Carson stood to have year-round upstream storage like the Truckee River. But when a federal project was abandoned, so were plans for storage on the Carson.
On the Truckee River, just north of the Carson, upstream storage is plentiful. That river stores water in Lake Tahoe; Independence and Donner Lakes; and Boca, Stampede and Prosser reservoirs. Stampede has a capacity of 226,500 acre-feet; Boca holds 40,000 acre-feet.
In the 1950s, Congress allocated $52 million for “agricultural enhancements” in the region. Dubbed the Washoe Project, it included plans for Prosser Creek and Stampede Dam on the Truckee River and Watasheamu Reservoir on the Carson. The Watasheamu would have stored 160,000 acre-feet on the Carson.
Prosser and Stampede were completed. But by 1966, the Washoe County Water Conservation District had a hard time finding enough farmers interested in the proposed Watasheamu Dam’s supplemental irrigation waters, according to the Bureau of Reclamation.
Reclamation reevaluated its plans for building Watasheamu Dam on the east fork of the Carson River, and by the 1980s the project was abandoned.
Now, the Carson has just a handful of small reservoirs upstream that combine to hold a total of 10,000 acre-feet of water.
It could get ugly
A sea of dry, cracked mud and sand spreads expansively beneath a brown sky.
A boat launch and pier jut uselessly into the air.
“Welcome to the bottom of the Lahontan,” James said on a recent tour of the Carson River Basin.
Located in Silver Springs, dozens of miles from the Carson’s headwaters in the Sierra Nevada, Lahontan Reservoir is the largest storage area on the Carson River. The reservoir sits two-thirds of the way between the river’s headwaters and terminus, but it is too far downstream to help many of the ranchers who rely on the Carson.
Lahontan, which also takes in water from the Truckee River, can hold up to 300,000 acre-feet of water. In August of 2019 it held about 239,000 acre-feet; a year later, that had dropped by half. Now, it holds less than 4,000 acre-feet.
Usually 60 feet deep, the reservoir is nothing but a small pool of water now. No water is touching, or even near, the dam. The last time the reservoir was this low was 2015, the second-driest year on record for the Carson.
“If we have another dry year next year,” James said. “It’s going to be really ugly.”