The Las Vegas Pipeline That Lost

In nineteen eighty-nine, the Southern Nevada Water Authority filed applications to pump billions of gallons of groundwater from rural valleys in eastern Nevada and pipe it three hundred miles south to Las Vegas. The pipeline would draw from Snake Valley, Spring Valley, Cave Valley, and several others, pulling ancient water from the aquifers that feed the springs in this desert. Las Vegas, the fastest-growing city in America through much of the nineteen nineties and two thousands, argued it needed the water.

The people who lived in Snake Valley, ranchers, tribal members, small-scale farmers, argued that pumping the aquifer would dry up their wells, kill their springs, and end their livelihoods. The State of Utah, which shares Snake Valley across the Nevada border, raised jurisdictional objections. The Western Shoshone argued that the springs were part of their treaty-protected homeland. Environmental groups pointed out that the springs fed rare desert wetland ecosystems with no other source.

What followed was thirty years of litigation, administrative proceedings, environmental impact assessments, and political maneuvering. The water authority spent more than three hundred thirty million dollars on the project before it was finished.

A Nevada state court ruled against the authority in two thousand thirteen, finding that the proposed pumping methodology was arbitrary and capricious under Nevada water law. The authority appealed. In March two thousand twenty, a district court judge in White Pine County upheld the earlier ruling, finding that the permitted withdrawal would prevent the basin from ever reaching hydrological equilibrium and would result in the eventual depletion of the aquifer. Six weeks later, in April two thousand twenty, the Southern Nevada Water Authority's board of directors voted unanimously to withdraw all groundwater importation applications and shelve the project indefinitely.

The springs in Snake Valley still flow. The aquifer that Absalom Lehman's ranch drew from, that the Western Shoshone camped beside for thousands of years, that the bristlecone pines on Wheeler Peak depend on in an indirect chain of hydrology, is still intact. The water authority has not formally abandoned the idea, only deferred it.