IronBender:
Is most of your annual water there from snow?
Yes. We're at about 4000+ feet with essentially no effective precip after early May. Typically about 70 to 80% of our total precip comes as winter snow,with our irrigated flood meadows counting on about 2 months of spring run off to get things watered up and growing. Lots of alfalfa pivots around too, but deep water use is exceeding recharge. Thus a moratorium on high capacity wells, and the powers will have to figure out some method to address that issue.
By about July plant life has sucked up available moisture and our world goes mostly brown in both the meadows and desert. Life does go on later, however, as one moves up into our highest elevations where we transition into pine/fir forest.
That's a spectacular pic, once again 1minute.
RE: the bold statement above.
And it's getting worse with the intrusion of juniper into traditional sage/grassland areas. Each one of the junipers is way thirstier than a sagebrush or some bunchgrass taking up the same footprint, and they're sucking up water all some long. Keeps any "excess" water to a minimum that should be going into groundwater. Fire suppression efforts have done wonders for juniper intrusion.
Ironbender, I'm a few hours drive south of 1minute. Pretty similar habitat. I'm not sure how bad it is up his way, down here it's very noticeable. I hunted about an hour NW of here in '98. I drive by that area every time I have to go to "the big town" for doctors and such. When we first moved here I was amazed at the change.
Picture is from a couple of years back near my place. All those little junipers lower down are less than 20 years old. And that should all be sage and grassland similar to the bottom of the valley.. Imagine what it will look like in another 50 years if nothing is done?
Didn't mean to step on your thread 1minute. It's just a concern of mine as we're on a well and have "issues" during drought years as it is. It's not going to be easier on our well if there's more trees sucking up what little moisture we get.