Credit Melissa Sevigny
The water at Lees Ferry is so clear sometimes you can spot monster fish lurking beneath the surface. Big brown trout, a European species with spotted sides and a mouth full of teeth. We ve seen a couple, says Samantha Peter, pointing out over the river, a whole bunch of them were right around there. Peter, Jessie Bootz, and Billy Hamill are on a family outing at the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, trying to land the big one. They saw us too quick, huh, Peter jokes. You see them, they see you, Bootz replies.
The kids would rather squish in the mud, but Hamill is still hoping to reel in a brown. If he turns in the head and guts to the park service, he’ll get 33 dollars per fish. Maybe just get the experience, he says, I want to catch a brown trout, and maybe the trip can get paid for, you know?
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3:56
Melissa Sevigny: I actually wanted to start by playing a quote from an interview we did a year ago.
ARCHIVE TAPE: “I’m always the optimist, I still think it’s possible we can drive this virus into extinction.”
Melissa Sevigny: I wanted to ask, do you still feel that way?
Paul Keim: Yeah, I don’t think that’s possible anymore…. I think at this point the virus is too widely distributed, I think the most likely scenario is that as we develop immunity to the virus… that the severity of the disease is doing to decrease. Probably it’s going to be like the common cold, we’re going to be seeing this virus over and over again for the rest of our lives.
3:55
Talk to me the situation today in the Colorado River Basin with drought and climate change.
In the year 2000 Lake Powell was essentially full or nearly full. At about the year 2000 we went into a protracted period of reduced runoff that persists to this day…. If you’re going to keep your use of water high and you’ve got less water is coming in, guess what, the reservoirs begin to you withdraw water out of the reservoirs. That’s why we have reservoirs. So everything was working the way it was supposed to, except that the drought kept going on. At some point it was like, whoa, we got problems here…. And so we keep cutting agreements, which are: how to share the pain of drought? We have an agreement the Law of the River is what it is but you can’t make water up, so if there isn’t enough water to go around you’ve got to deal with it… This new white paper that we produced is essentially an exploration of: what if it stays this dry? What if it gets drier?