Green River, Utah – This spring, it’s a dislocating experience to climb one of the big rises of Interstate 70 overlooking the vast desert badlands of western Colorado and eastern Utah.
They aren’t there.
A brilliant green sheen covers what’s usually an endless expanse of perpetually parched tan and gray earth.
The shale, which usually looks more like the wrinkled, cracked hide of an old elephant than soil, is amassing blossoms.
Big, bold clusters of orange globemallow are ablaze along highway shoulders. Plump white sego lilies protrude from the ground, thousands per acre.
And from a distance, patches of desert look more like golf fairways.
“I’ve been looking for a spring like this for 75 years,” said Waldo Wilcox, a Book Cliffs rancher who just retired to Green River. “It’s never been this green. It’s the prettiest I’ve ever seen.”
A wet winter and a cool, moist spring have briefly transformed the landscape.
Research climatologist Nolan Doesken of the Colorado Climate Center said most of the region received well-above-normal precipitation, and some places, near the Grand Canyon, got up to three times the long-term average. Annual averages in the Four Corners region run from 6 inches a year to 22 inches.
“I knew an old-timer who, when he was asked how long has the drought been here, he’d say, ‘forever,”‘ Wilcox said. “But we had a wet, warm winter. The storms come just perfect.”
For the previous six years in the Four Corners and along the Colorado-Utah line, the storms hardly came at all. Normal desert dryness deepened into record drought.
The sky was a miser. The wind was a thief.
People waded in ankle-deep dust. They watched whole piñon forests succumb to beetles and turn to rust. They saw fire blacken vistas that had defined their world.
So the green of this spring is like balm applied directly to the soul.
The magic is fleeting. It could stay about this fresh and colorful through the end of May, or perhaps, with more rain, into June, federal land managers predict.
“I sigh when I see it,” Doesken said of newly lush Colorado scenery. “But you can’t count on it. When we’ve got it, we should rejoice.”
Just last summer, scientists were worried that even sagebrush, a durable desert mainstay, was dying off on some 600,000 acres in Utah and on untold thousands of acres in Colorado.
“It’s coming back,” said Karl Ivory, a natural resource specialist at the Bureau of Land Management’s office in Price, Utah.
And, near Goblin Valley, just southwest of Green River, he’s seen 4- to 5-foot-wide Russian thistle plants, which eventually will become giant tumbleweeds.
Ivory says that, altogether, he doesn’t believe desert plant life is more dense this spring than it was at one point in the early 1990s and another time in the early 1980s. But the unusual and striking green cast over the landscape between Price and the Colorado state line is a bumper crop of wild wheat grass.
“It’s just filling in all the bare areas,” Ivory said.
Also near the state line, knee-high needle-and-thread grass waves in the breeze. The area looks more like a prairie than barren desert.
The antelopes are resplendent with this smorgasbord.
At an I-70 rest stop looking south toward Moab, Larry Hansen lets out a low whistle and intones: “I’ve never seen it look like this.” He says he’s been driving this stretch for nearly 60 years.
In southwestern Colorado, Disappointment Valley scarcely lives up to its name this spring. The wild horses there are “looking fat and happy,” with all the galleta and blue grama grasses they can eat, says BLM ecologist Leslie Stewart.
She just floated down the Dolores River, and its banks were like gardens, she said. The river had been too low to run for half a decade.
In southeastern Utah, people boating on Lake Powell are treated to green velvet rims on the ledges of red-rock cliffs.
“It’s pretty exciting,” said Cara Gildar, another ecologist in the BLM’s Dolores office.
She has traveled from western Colorado to southern Arizona to take it all in.
“I’m seeing plants here I’ve never seen before. The plants are really big and happy,” Gildar said.
Claret-cup cactus is abloom. It’s still a little early for some cactuses. Indian paintbrush is thriving. Noxious weeds, like locoweed, are also having a field day.
Detestable, invasive cheat grass, which always flourishes, is even more abundant, although its tender, green phase is ending in many places. Its nodding heads are quickly turning into unpalatable but pretty pools of purplish-red color.
Jim Dollerschell, a range specialist with the BLM in Grand Junction, said the desert just west of there – Rabbit Valley and beyond – hasn’t been anywhere near this verdant for a decade.
“I think you’ll see it really green through late May,” he said.
He’s observed more leaf growth on desert brush than he’s seen for 10 to 15 years.
Purple and yellow-blossomed mustard plants abound. All sorts of tiny green stems are forming ground-hugging latticework underfoot.
When it all dries out, it could fuel the biggest desert fires in years, Dollerschell said.
But right now it is rare, soothing verdure.
“It takes more than one good year to end a drought, but it’s a start,” Dollerschell said. “You couldn’t ask for a better spring.”
Staff writer Electa Draper can be reached at 970-385-0917 or edraper@denverpost.com.