Thirsty towns in Arizona’s Central Highlands are pumping out their aquifers faster than they can refill. To get the water they need, Prescott and Prescott Valley have launched a pipeline project to bring water from another aquifer, the Big Chino. Chino Valley has designs on that same source. Across Mingus Mountain, the Verde Valley towns are not happy about these plans.

For years now, the grownups have held endless rounds of meetings, commissioned reams of reports, collaborated, discussed, disagreed, raised their voices and spoken sharply. Can we provide enough water for the people who live here? For those who will live here? The “two sides of the mountain” face off. In the middle of the tussle, playing the role of the child in a hostile divorce, runs the Verde River.

The argument, (cartoon version) goes like this: The Verde Valley towns growl, “You bad sprawly developing people are going to suck up all the water, and the river is going to run dry.” And the Prescott-side of the mountain towns snap back, “There’s plenty of water, the river isn’t going to run dry, we know what we’re doing -- and who are you to talk about sprawl? Who’s pumping the most out of the river channel, anyway?!”

Of course, nobody believes that the whole Verde River, all 135 or so miles of it, will dry up completely. The reality, though, is that pumping the Big Chino could stop the year-round flow of the river’s upper 24 miles, leaving a river of dust and a shrunken or destroyed wildlife habitat for much of the year. Bill Meyer is a retired US Geological Survey (USGS) hydrologist living in the Prescott area who actively follows local water issues. He refers to the most basic, established knowledge of his field: “The literature clearly demonstrates that pumpage from wells constructed in an aquifer that discharges to a river will ultimately reduce groundwater discharge to the river by an amount equal to pumpage.” And all down the course of the river, though to a lesser degree beyond each tributary creek, flow will be reduced.

Of course, some don’t fear the river will shrink. Among these confident souls are the officials who have staked their towns’ futures on a big-ticket pipeline to haul water from the Verde’s underground source to the mains that bring it to our shower heads. They believe the evidence does not suggest anything so dire as damage to the river and that, anyway, they can plan ahead to mitigate any damage. Prescott Valley Town Manager Larry Tarkowski puts his faith in a “comprehensive groundwater monitoring program utilizing 66 monitoring wells” that he says will “provide any indication of possible impacts decades before the impacts are manifested in the river itself,” affording “the best possibility of detecting, avoiding or addressing any such impacts.”

So, the first issue in the river custody battle is, “Will pumping run the Upper Verde dry?” Lurking behind that, a second question: “And if it does—what do we lose?”

Are we losing it?

The Verde is Arizona’s last perennially flowing major river. Yes, we have seen rivers dry up in Arizona. In fact, the Arizona Riparian Council estimates that, in terms of acreage, only 10 percent of Arizona’s original riparian (river-related) habitat is left. The Gila and the Salt would flow year-round if it weren’t for ditches, dams, and pumps; once there was a ferry across the Salt in Tempe. Closer to home, Little Chino Springs used to have an artesian spring that spurted water higher than your head. But no more. There’s a historic marker on the east side of Rte. 89 south of Chino Valley; you can see a dark tank, a tall structure that no longer makes sense, that used to hold that water.

And Del Rio Springs, now that was a big deal, with 7,500 acre-feet a year pouring into Little Chino Creek, north to Sullivan Lake and the Verde (an acre-foot is 325,851 gallons). The abundant water attracted early settlers, and at the Civil War’s end, President Lincoln named the community of Del Rio Springs (briefly) the Arizona Territory's first capital.

In 1900, four months after the Whiskey Row fire destroyed much of its downtown, Prescott acquired Del Rio Springs, along with about 360 acres of other Chino Valley land, water rights included. By the next year steam power was pumping water into a 19-mile pipeline and sending it south to Prescott. Less than a year later, Prescott was selling water to the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe railroad and running tanks up the Peavine railroad—the Santa Fe, Prescott and Phoenix Railway. Bountiful Del Rio Springs supplied drinking water to Prescott and to the waterless towns along what would become Route 66.

Today that water source runs at less than half the volume it had back in its heyday, and Little Chino Creek is “ephemeral”—parts of it dry much of the year. Arizona Department of Water Resources (ADWR) scientists tell us that Del Rio Springs will run dry before 2025. The Big Chino Wash, now flowing only in wet seasons, once ran year-round as Chino Creek. The Smithsonian Institution and the University of California hold records of fish caught in 1897 and in 1950, in now-dry creeks that flowed into the Big Chino and in the wash itself.

Wielding safe yield

Truth is, these bits of the past cannot prove anything the future may hold. Still, no one now disputes that the Prescott area cities and towns are pulling water out of the aquifers below them faster than rain, snow and human recharge can refill them. Because of this “overdraft,” ADWR has designated these aquifers, the Little Chino and the Upper Agua Fria, as the Prescott Active Management Area (PrAMA). That bureaucratic move came with a recommendation for the municipalities to bring pumping and recharge into balance—“safe yield”—by 2025; but that balance counts only pumping, not the water that has historically flowed out at Del Rio Springs and into the Verde. So, legally, we can choose to pump until that flow dries up. There’s no requirement to protect it. Truth is, legally, safe yield is just a guideline anyway.

ADWR head Herb Guenther says that, at present, PrAMA is “not on target for making safe yield.” But the general law includes an exception permitting PrAMA to import water from beyond its boundaries, specifically from the Big Chino basin. This deeper aquifer holds more water than those within PrAMA. However, not being in an AMA, this water is not protected by even the suggestion of a safe yield requirement. That brings us back to the Verde River, because it is the only natural outlet for the Big Chino basin’s water. And the most recent USGS studies find that the outflow from the Big Chino aquifer supplies 80–86 percent of the baseflow in the Upper Verde River. There’s much more to examine about what science knows of how this groundwater basin works—but first, let's get back to the river.

The river rises

So, what is this river of contention? On a warm December day I rounded up some buddies and went to find the Verde’s birthplace. In this millennium, you’ll find what you’d call a river course beginning at Sullivan Lake, between Highway 89 and Old 89 near Paulden. When you see the roofless stone house, built as a bird blind and serving now as a canvas for paintball splatters and graffiti, you’re there. We wondered, “This is it?” The 40-foot tall stone and concrete dam, stamped “WPA 1938,” holds back mostly 70 years of sediments. The shallow pond floating on them is of a piece with the grassland surrounding it, its size and shape in flux with the weather.

On the downstream side of the dam, though, the gold grass plain splits open in a deep, narrow chasm as if whacked by an axe-wielding giant. Somehow, in some epoch, the haphazard trickle through the antelope meadow gathered into a torrent sufficient to slit through basalt, carving dark palisades on either side. On our December visit the sun, remote and low in the south, never reached sections of the bottom. The flow there is seasonal, and after months without rain the bottom was mostly dry. Artistic ice patterns curved around boulders the size of Yugos and chest freezers.

For the first mile or so the river courses aboveground only during rainstorms or the melting of heavy snows. Then, for a half-mile or more, depending on weather, water seeps up into the bed of the channel, forming the calm pool, ignored by mapmakers, called Stillman Lake. This stretch, with cliffs farther apart but taller than just below the dam, does have perennial water. Much of it, too, was shielded from the sun that December day. The gray-green ice twanged weirdly as we skipped red and black pebbles toward the far bank. Trails are few and obscure here, and private ranchland spreads flat pasture right up to the heart-stopping cliffs. College rock-climbing clubs have planted discreet, mysterious pointers to the more exciting cliff faces.

At its downstream end this pond receives the mini-delta of Granite Creek. If you ever stopped to wonder about the fate of all the grains that weather grinds from the improbable rock heart of the Granite Dells—well, here they are. Over millennia, the creek has washed down tons of granite sand, to drop it into the Verde Canyon. The sand pile backs up Stillman Lake, whose water then flows under it. After a stretch the Granite Creek contribution surfaces again, and in ranchland just a few beaver dams farther, the Upper Verde Springs well up into the riverbed to join it, warmer in winter than the rest of the stream. This is where the river gets serious. It stays serious all the way down to Horseshoe Dam, where SRP (Salt River Project), the complex power-and-water utility, impounds its waters to serve one third of their customers. But from Granite Creek down 24 miles to Perkinsville, where the next year-round creek enters, the river’s baseflow depends entirely on spring water from the Big Chino basin.

What have we got to lose?

So what makes this section of river special? For one, it runs through many human memories, carrying the past and offering changeable, unbeatable wild beauty.

Jim Slingluff, who “wrote the book” on the Verde (really: Verde River Recreation Guide), describes an October trek when he dragged canoes through the marsh grass below Stillman into beaver dam backwaters. “Starting below the first dam and extending for well over a mile, both banks were bordered with thick blankets of four-foot high sunflowers. At times the [water] was only inches deep and four feet wide, while the flower beds were twice that width or more. We were truly paddling the flowers.”

Old West history has played out here. The Verde set the scene for acts in the drama, with its familiar themes of pale-skinned people lusting for shiny metals, of mysterious vanished treasure and of hostilities between first settlers and newer intruders. Canoeist Slingluff relates, “The Spanish legacy for the Verde includes a lost gold mine, called Sierra Azul. In the mid-1700s, Spanish explorers reportedly found a pure, very rich vein of gold at a spot now thought to be some five to ten miles east of Perkinsville. To this day the area is rugged and remote. Discovered by Apaches, the miners were picked off one by one until they abandoned the mine.” To this day too, he adds, the mine remains lost.

Mining spawned boomtowns and then cattle ranching to feed the miners. The river wanders through flat lands, hosting beaver dams, serving the needs of ranchers and farmers, much of it held as US and state forest, before twisting through harder rock where canyon walls close in. Along the way it provides delight to humans with canoes and kayaks, fly rods and binoculars, and to Verde River Canyon Railroad riders. At the canyon's end where the land opens out again, the Perkins family established their horse-and-cattle spread, traveling by buckboard and covered wagon in 1899 to buy the old Verde Ranch, lending their name Perkinsville, and providing the setting for the 1963 movie How The West Was Won.

Before folks of European descent walked this continent, people of the Pueblo culture that archaeologists call Sinagua built dwellings beside the river we now call Verde. A mesa rising in the lower Stillman Lake canyon bears the remains of homes high up its cliff, beyond reach of harmful critters, including the two-legged kind. These people left petroglyphs and haunting stone structures, obscure in purpose. Dan Campbell, Verde River Program Manager for the Nature Conservancy, likes to go to the mesa before daylight on December 21. On that solstice day only, if you sit with your back to the rock bearing the 13 moon designs and sight toward Little Thumb Butte, you see the sun track exactly up the side of the butte and along its upper edge before breaking free into blue sky.

Verde vitality 

But a history with humans is only a sidelight to the center-stage story of this desert river. Dan Campbell says that the Verde ties with the San Pedro as “the most important river in Arizona for wildlife.” The Verde nurtures an uncommonly rich diversity of animal species—but then, this is what desert rivers do. In rainier places, ponds and puddles and year-round streams foster forests and underbrush, to provide a wealth of niches for different kinds of wildlife. Where there is only one fulltime river, all God’s creatures must cluster for water and shelter. The US Fish & Wildlife Service advises that “90 percent of Southwestern desert wildlife rely on riparian areas for at least part of their life cycle.” Migrating birds need such an oasis along desert stretches of their flyway, so they join the natives in their various seasons. The Verde’s a birdwatcher Mecca.

A number of the Verde’s species are declining in population or are under pressure from non-natives. The sharp decline of similar habitat around the state puts extra value on maintaining all the river’s wildlife housing. As the Nature Conservancy puts it, “A disproportionately large number of species depend on a decreasingly small area for their existence.” The Verde is home to a veritable shopping list of endangered or threatened birds, fish and plants.

How to dry up a river: the Bathtub Model

The water that wells up into the Verde’s bed downstream from Granite Creek finds its way there after flowing underground for some 35 miles, toward Sullivan Lake. Look left as you drive Highway 89 north from Chino Valley into Paulden and you’ll see the Big Chino Wash grasslands stretching northwest toward Seligman. Now look north; the cliff you see marks a displacement fault where the valley wall jerked upward repeatedly, through the millennia, to form Big Black Mesa. To the southwest rose the Juniper and Santa Maria mountains.

Pulling motions of the earth’s crust dropped the wash relative to these rising blocks, forming what geologists call a graben. Eons of rains and earth tremors rolled chunks of mountain down into this depression, keeping it always full of cobbles and gravel, sand and silt. Rain falls and snow melts on the uplands at the edges of the Big Chino valley, soaking down into the rock rubble and the limestone that lines the basin’s bottom.

“It’s easiest to think of it as a full basin. And it happens to have, like a bathtub, an overflow outlet. That outlet is the river, and the [river’s] baseflow is just the water coming off the top of this underground basin.” That's how Dan Campbell describes the plumbing of the Big Chino basin, which has been the subject of two recent USGS studies, and a number of water people reach for the bathtub image to visualize the studies' conclusions. “It’s not a matter of how much water is in the basin,” Campbell continues. “It’s a matter of how much water can you take out until there isn’t enough left to go out that spout. And I think that if you simplify everything that those two geologists have given us, it is that there’s a finite amount of water, and that taking any of it will express itself as exactly that much not coming out the other end.” Scientists Meyer and Wolfe voice the conclusion of several geologists about the impact of this situation on the river's headwaters. "The question isn't if this loss will occur; the only question is the timing of the loss"—how soon, that is, we can expect to see it happen.

The late Laurie Wirt, principal author of one of the USGS studies, expressed it this way to Yavapai County’s Water Advisory Committee in May 2006 just weeks before her death: “Semiarid Big and Little Chino valleys are undergoing rapid growth, their populations solely dependent on groundwater. Although the basins contain considerable amounts of groundwater, from a historical perspective, groundwater overpumping in excess of safe yield inevitably leads to reduction or loss of perennial streams.” The evidence in these studies leaves people who are concerned about the river feeling skeptical—or worse—given the cities' willingness to proceed with the pipeline without a clearer understanding of the consequences.

"The city is going to pump vast quantities of water, taking it away from the river, without having a plan to address the impacts. This is like jumping from a plane without a parachute. Waiting until they 'see' the decrease in the river will be too late," says Center for Biological Diversity's Michelle Harrington.

(Next month: A close look at the science, the Dueling Hydrologists, and the cities' plans.)

Comments (2)

None : Julie Well done. My late husband and I loved the Verde headwaters area. Never knew that the pools had a name (Stillman Lake.) Once the city of Prescott valued this area -- those stone buildings at Sullivan Lake were built as part of a city recreation area. Alas, the rapid silting (and the advant of WWII) doomed the park. Now nobody who's an official seems to give a tinker's damn February 10, 2007 ... : Richard J. Nelson P.E. : http://Camp Verde Dear Candace:Speaking as a practicing Civil Engineer of 45 years,I highly commend your articles on WATER,the Verde River and associated acquifers.These issues are huge and require patience and unbiased scrutiny by all! June 15, 2007

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