A bald eagle has a meal on Saturday on Park Ranch Holdings land near the Dangberg Historic Home Ranch.
Photo by Sarah Drinkwine.
During the first atmospheric river of 2025, the National Weather Service recorded 3.91 inches of rain in Fredericksburg over the first 10 days of February and only .91 inches in the Gardnerville Ranchos just four miles to the east.
The contrast was even more obvious further north where Genoa received 2.37 inches while Minden-Tahoe Airport had a whopping fifth of an inch for the same period.
While Douglas County officials issued sandbag locations on Jan. 31 before the storm, they were rendered mostly unnecessary by the thirsty soil conditions after a dry January.
Natural Resource Conservation Service snow telemetry indicated some pretty good spikes in the amount of water locked up in the snow pack at Carson and Ebbetts passes. Ebbetts Pass, at the top of the East Fork, added 14 inches of snow since Jan. 31, increasing the snow water equivalent from 52 to 66 percent. Carson Pass went from 56 percent snow-water equivalent on Jan. 31 to 75 percent after adding 15 inches to the snowpack.
There’s a new storm in the wings that could arrive today or Thursday, though keep in mind that Mother Nature doesn’t have a weather app.
Last week, county commissioners heard an update on a water study being conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey.
We didn’t see much that we hadn’t heard before. Water levels in East Valley wells have been declining for years, exacerbating the concentrations of arsenic and nitrates in the water in Johnson Lane and Ruhenstroth.
Most of the water pumped out of the aquifer goes to irrigation in dry years, with the last peak approaching 20,000 acre feet during the 2015-16 drought. In wet years like 2017, that drops to around 5,000 acre feet, well below the annual municipal pumping rate of 12,000-13,000 acre feet.
Unlike cows and crops, we don’t drink water out of the river in Carson Valley. Our drinking water comes out of the ground. But as the study has shown so far, those water levels are affected by the amount of water in the river in a couple of ways. If there’s plenty of irrigation water, ranchers don’t pump and the aquifer recharges through infiltration.
Conditions weren’t that different last year at this time, so there’s time to recover to at least average. Like any gamble, the weather bet often doesn’t cooperate with the bettor.