Utah Windriders Association

I spoke with a connection in Tooele and she was telling me that the snow in Tooele valley and surrounding mtns. was higher than she's seen in years... She snowshoes in the Stansburry and Oquirrh (sp?) mountains and told me that she thinks that the Rush Valley will get more water than it's seen in many years if it keeps up to avg. from here. (She also works for a water agency)... Not to mention KSL weather talking about 200%+ snowpack in the Tooele watershed. Anybody even snow kite out in Rush Valley?

On the same note of Kenny's "Finding Wind and Strawberry" post... It would be helpful if we could get updates on other SnowKiting sites... For Skyline, Powmow, or other sites... The Annual meeting is a little after the fact for Snowkiting site updates... I'll link them to the weather page. If you do post on a site update, please start a new thread for a different site or add to an existing if you have useful info. thx.

So, it will be 2 inches deep this spring? Ask her where all of the f_ing water goes.

Mike Egan wrote:So, it will be 2 inches deep this spring? Ask her where all of the f_ing water goes.

ok Mike... Actually I did ask about the drinking water, irrigation water, sailing water, and kiting water. However, I'll make a note to ask about that water you referred to as well???

So, she basically confirmed what we've all thought with some differences from another guy at the division of water resources... The first drain on Rush Lake by a longshot is evaporation... 2nd by a longshot drought... 3rd Lowering aquifer's mostly as a natural reaction to draught lowering the water table... 4th in last is usage from wells... They say that they actually allow the wells to fill each year before they can use them, whatever that means.

I asked how long it would take to dry up if we had a major water year in Tooele Valley/Rush Valley and ended up with 10 feet of water in Rush. The answer was that it is a Basin and Range Geology... Bottom of part of a huge lake (Bonneville of course) so the clay prevents a whole lot of fast drainage into needy aquifers if they are there. So in her words, it would take a couple of years... Same guy at the Div. of Water Resources said that the nature of that lake would have 2-3 feet of evaporation a year with the wind that goes through there...

They gave me some interesting data I haven't had before. The actual water wells and tracking graphs. Pretty interesting.

Individual water wells in Tooele and Rush Valley

Featured story ironically about Rush Valley water, scroll to bottom of this link.

This is well #16, which is up stream (south) from Rush. I think that well #17 is right next to it... You can compare the depth of the wells to where the shorelines are of Rush to see how they coincide as far as elevation graph goes. You can almost see the water table going down just like Rush did. I don't remember the year of the fish die off, but it'd be interesting to make the correlation.

Sorry, couldn't find any f__ing water articles for you. But this stuff is pretty interesting... It's actually interesting to compare some of the elevations of the well water to the actual Rush Lake bed and shoreline.