The drought in the West is bad and it’s gonna get worse
In the same area of the mountains where the snow was 80 percent, river flows dripped out at 30 percent of their average. … [T]here’s not much water when there’s this level of aridity. Paddling, for me, is a benchmark, a tangible way to understand what all those drought maps and numbers mean. And these days, the bottom-scraping springtime runs feel like a creepy indicator of how bad things will be downriver, where those waterways are used to grow food, maintain ecosystems, fight wildfires, and provide drinking water.
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