Snow a bit scarce, but reservoirs OK

Clouds skirt the lower elevations of the Elkhorn Mountains west of Baker City Tuesday afternoon. Clouds have been abundant this winter, but they have been rather stingy with their moisture. Snowpacks are below average across Northeastern Oregon, with a couple of notable exceptions in southern Baker County. (Baker City Herald/S. John Collins)

Even as they’ve obscured the mountains for days on end.

That’s where clouds are supposed to deposit most of the moisture which, after all, is what clouds are made of.

Specifically, clouds are supposed to dump prodigious amounts of snow on the county’s high ground.

And that snow, even though you can neither swim nor fish in it, constitutes the most important, and by far the largest, reservoir in the county.

When that snow melts in spring and summer, it keeps streams flowing, refills lakes and replenishes aquifers.

As of this week, the area’s snowpack lags about 11 percent below the long-term (1971-2000) average.

That means most reservoirs should refill, or nearly so, despite the substandard snowpack.

Phillips, the largest of those reservoirs wholly within Baker County (we share Brownlee and Oxbow with Idaho), hasn’t been so full in the first week of March in a decade.

As of this morning the reservoir, about 17 miles southwest of Baker City, was impounding 40,858 acre-feet of water, about 55 percent of full pool.

That’s the most for March 2 since 2000, when the reservoir held 44,718 acre-feet.

For a more proximate comparison, one year ago Phillips was at 38,028 acre-feet. And the snowpack at that time was 9 percent below where it is now.

And Phillips filled last June.

But Jeff Colton isn’t yet ready to predict a repeat.

“I don’t know how it’s going to turn out,” said Colton, who, as manager of the Baker Valley Irrigation District, oversees the release of water from Phillips.

He’s happy, though, that the district’s board of directors decided to save as much water as possible last fall.

“That was a pretty smart thing to do,” Colton said. “You just never know what the next year’s going to bring.”

What it brought was El Nino.

That’s the periodic northern migration of warm surface water in the Pacific Ocean, a phenomenon that usually results in warmer and drier winters in the Pacific Northwest.

Which it has done this winter.

Well, sort of.

El Nino has also produced some perplexing snowpack patterns in Baker County, said Travis Bloomer, a snow surveyor for the U.S. Natural Resource Conservation Service office in Baker City.

Snowpacks are below average at all of the higher-elevation survey sites across Northeastern Oregon, Bloomer said.

At Anthony Lakes, elevation 7,125 feet, the water content in the snow is about 27 percent below the long-term average.

Snow is more scanty still at Aneroid Lake, 7,300 feet up in the Wallowas, 42 percent below average.

Yet when Bloomer measured snow Tuesday at a couple of lower places in southern Baker County, he was surprised to find the water content surpassed average.

Doubled it, in fact, at 4,600-foot Eldorado Pass, along Highway 26 between Unity and Ironside.

“It was shocking to us to go to Eldorado and see all that snow,” Bloomer said.

He found something else so unusual that he took a few photographs of it: cheatgrass, green and tender, growing beneath 17 inches of snow.

“Very, very strange,” Bloomer said.

The other snowpack outlier is Dooley Mountain, about 15 miles south of Baker City.

The water content at survey site, elevation 5,430 feet, is 45 percent above average.

That statistic pleases Colton.

Although Dooley is downstream from Phillips Reservoir, a bounty of spring snowmelt is beneficial anyway. Here’s why:

If Dooley’s meltwater keeps the Powder River flowing high, then Colton doesn’t need to release as much water from the reservoir to meet irrigators’ needs during the spring.

And that means there’s more water available in summer when the snow is gone.