Snow helps ease Kyle Canyon’s water shortage

Wednesday, Dec. 1, 2004 | 9:45 a.m.

The rain and snow falling throughout the West in recent weeks may not have made much of a dent yet in the drought affecting the Colorado River and Lake Mead, but it has improved the water situation for Mount Charleston.

The Kyle Canyon Water District, an agency operated by the Las Vegas Valley Water District that provides water for about 500 homes and businesses, lifted its water system conditions report from "concerned" to "sustainable."

Sustainable is the best of four water conditions for the village of Mount Charleston. Concerned is one level below.

J.C. Davis, a spokesman for Las Vegas Valley Water District, said the impact is good news but probably will not be immediately noticeable to residents in the Mount Charleston area.

At the concerned level, which was announced in August, Mount Charleston residents were asked to reduce outdoor water use for irrigation and other purposes. At the sustainable level, water is available for all outdoor purposes.

However, residents are restricted from using water outdoors anyway during the winter months because it would freeze on top of the substantial snow cover on the mountain.

Davis said, however, that the improvement is not only a testament to the snowfall, including several feet in the last few weeks, but to conservation efforts by Mount Charleston's residents.

"Their actions have had a positive impact on the water table," Davis said. "That system isn't very large, so as a result it recovered very rapidly."

The Bureau of Land Management, which monitors weather on land it controls near the town, is reporting that more than 19 inches of precipitation have fallen on Kyle Canyon so far this year -- much of it within the last two months.

"We had that record breaking 10 inches of rain in late October," reported Barbara Orcutt, a 31-year-resident of Mount Charleston and owner of the Mount Charleston Lodge. The rain and some light snow came down over a three-day period from Oct. 17 through Oct. 20, she said.

The difference it made to the bone-dry mountain was dramatic, Orcutt said.

"This is the first time I saw it soak in the ground as much as it did this year," she said. "There was almost none in the streams. It just percolated right into the ground."

On Tuesday night she was decorating the lodge Christmas tree while fending off temperatures that could get below zero. She said about 3 feet of snow covers the shady areas around the lodge.

That snow is welcome because it means more goes into the ground when it melts.

"It looks like it's going to be a very snowy winter, thank goodness," Orcutt said. "That always helps us."