Something is going terribly wrong here."
This is the uneasy feeling Jule Schultz walks around with. A marine biologist by training, he now works on river science in Spokane.
Only the river isn’t rivering. And the science, for now, is a mystery.
"You think you can depend on the flow of a river," he told me. "It’s completely disorienting when all of a sudden, it stops."
That’s what happened last week, on Aug. 9. About 10 miles east of downtown Spokane, more than a mile-long stretch of the seemingly formidable Spokane River just stopped flowing.
The boulder-strewn bed went dry. The same phenomenon happened last year — believed to be the first such flow break for the Spokane dating back more than a century.
The Spokane is not some seasonal creek; it's one of the major tributaries of the Columbia River. The riverbed is 100 to 300 feet wide. It’s deeply unsettling for part of a Northwest river this big to simply stop.
As one groundwater ecologist wrote to the city of Spokane: "I recently moved to Spokane from Texas. Please look at stories of dying rivers from around the American West — and don’t let the Spokane River become just another sad, cautionary tale."
Schulz, who works for an advocacy group called Spokane Riverkeeper, said "we don’t have great evidence for what’s happening."
The river is linked with an underlying aquifer. It’s also dammed in spots, with its flows and groundwater stores claimed by farms, cities, subdivisions, industry and recreational users.
Clearly there isn’t enough water in the system right now for everybody.
It’s exacerbated by weak snowpack and a drought. The snow season upstream in Idaho was described by a federal land agency as "the winter that never arrived."
Strangely, after disappearing for a mile and a half, the Spokane kicks back to life again. Spring fed from the aquifer, it starts winding toward downtown Spokane again before going over the famed Spokane Falls. But the gauge there this week registered only 723 cubic feet per second — 15% below the minimum summer flow target of 850 cfs for a healthy river.
By state law, though, the river itself sits behind the other water users on the water rights priority list. So this flow target has no teeth.
"There’s dead fish and dead crayfish everywhere," Schulz said of the dry section. "Last year, after a while, it started to reek."
It won’t be until after Labor Day until the full river starts flowing again. That’s when a dam upstream is set to release more water from Lake Coeur d’Alene.
Some residents see the river’s retreat as existential. But it’s not clear what, if anything, anybody is going to do about it.
"It's shocking to see this beautiful and vital river run dry overnight," one resident wrote on a petition asking the city, Spokane County and other surrounding cities to act.
"Who is siphoning off the water?" wondered another. "What will happen when the giant robot corporations demand ALL the water supply?"
"This is a pivotal moment to address water conservation," urged another. "This isn’t going to go away, nor is it a 'fluke.' "
Mauri Pelto, a glacier surveyor, said less snow and more heat is stressing water storage systems across the Northwest.
He’s noticed it with the demise of most of King County’s remaining glaciers, in and around Mount Daniel northeast of Snoqualmie Pass. These feed into Cle Elum reservoir, which provides irrigation to 700 square miles of farmland. This reservoir is now sitting at half its typical volume for this date.
“Snow is like income into your bank account,” Pelto said.
He’s been surveying Cascade Mountain glaciers for 43 years. There was no big heat wave this summer, yet Northwest glaciers continued to shed thickness and mass — some of them shrinking for the 15th year in a row.
"Columbia Glacier looked awful," he reports. Columbia Glacier is in a basin between mountain peaks in Snohomish County. "It’s a dramatic loss. It's lost half its thickness in 40 years, but half of that was lost only in the last five years."
Pelto has become a sort of glacier coroner. He keeps a list of glacier “casualties." Nine Cascade glaciers have succumbed to warming in the past four years alone. He thinks he’ll be pronouncing another one dead at the end of the melt season in September — Foss Glacier, also up on Mount Daniel. This means the glacier has become fragmented, and is no longer a coherent "river of ice" that moves and flows.
It's the frozen version of what’s happening with the Spokane down in the lowlands.
As Pelto wrote last year about the death of a different ice river, called Ice Worm Glacier: "This is likely the longest detailed annual record of observations of a glacier leading up to loss, providing a unique record of a glacier disappearing, that will become a common story.
It’s fitting that Pelto and his ice survey crew were ushered out of the Cascades last week by fire crews heading in to battle the Three Queens Fire, up near Lake Kachess.
Just two states, Washington and Oregon, are home to one-third of all wildfire acreage burned in the United States so far this year. On Monday there were 16,000 fire personnel working in the two Northwest states, with 830 engines and 85 helicopters, fighting 34 large, uncontained fires.
None of these calamities are easy to address. In order, it’s probably easiest to save a river from drying (just use less water). It's harder to keep the forests from burning. And hardest to stop glaciers from melting.
Combined they make a sound: Northwest nature is squealing. Do we even hear?
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