New Stream Gauges and Weather Stations Poised to Help Wyoming Tribes Endure Flooding and Drought

ETHETE, Wyo.—Travis Shakespeare and Lokilo St. Clair of the Northern Arapaho tribe were driving through central Wyoming’s Wind River Indian Reservation in May 2010 to check the integrity of bridges during a wet spring full of snow and rain that sent water roaring through rivers across the reservation.  When they came upon 17-mile Bridge, it was already up to its shoulders in water. “Did you feel that?” St. Clair asked Shakespeare as they drove across the span over the Little Wind River.  Shakespeare, who was driving, said he hadn’t.  “Man, the bridge sagged,” St. Clair said.  When they returned to the bridge later that morning, the water was swamping the metal guard rails on either side. About an hour later, tribal and state authorities closed the road. By noon, the bridge abutments had washed away, but a few people were still driving across it. “You could see the cars dip down as they crossed the bridge,” St. Clair recalled recently.  Amazingly, the bridge was the only casualty. “We were very fortunate no one got hurt,” Shakespeare said. Last October, Shakespeare, a hydrologist, was once again at the foot of 17-mile Bridge, this time to explain how the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho, the two federally-recognized tribes sharing the reservation in central Wyoming, are building a more comprehensive emergency warning system. He was joined by Harvey Spoonhunter, a tall, lanky man who is Shakespeare’s uncle and also a member of the Northern Arapaho Tribe. Spoonhunter runs the tribe’s Office of Homeland Security, which has used money from federal grants to purchase and install new stream gauges and weather stations across the reservation.

The two men were standing on the bank of the Little Wind River, through which billions of gallons of snowmelt from the Wind River mountains rush annually. In years with particularly robust snowpack, rapid warming that speeds snowmelt or heavy spring rains, runoff can overwhelm rivers, flood the basin downstream and threaten the tribes. But as rising temperatures deplete the snowpack and shrink mountaintop glaciers, the two tribes are facing a paradoxical reality: both flooding and drought could get worse in the coming decades. “We are really being affected by climate change,” said Shakespeare, who remembers seeing snow atop the Wind River mountains all year round as a kid. As he and Spoonhnuter stood overlooking the Little Wind River last fall, there was almost no snow on the peaks in the distance, and the reservation was experiencing a drought after a dry, hot summer. While the fall is usually dry in this part of the West, changes to the water cycle, like thinning snowpack that melts off earlier in the year and a higher proportion of moisture falling as rain have made water—a precious resource and spiritual force on the reservation—increasingly difficult to plan for. “Water doesn’t always just come normally,” said Orville St. Clair, a member of the Eastern Shoshone who serves on the Water Control Board at the Office of the Tribal Water Engineer. (St. Clair is also Lokilo’s uncle.) Until early February, this winter’s snowpack that feeds the tribes’ rivers was below the historical median, federal data shows. “I think, if things don’t turn around, we’re going to have a dry year,” St. Clair said. A wetter spring has returned snow levels in the Wind River mountains to their median, but water remains a concern on the reservation. 

Between 2022 and 2023, the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho received almost $6.3 million from the Bureau of Indian Affairs to develop and implement climate adaptation plans and infrastructure. The grants will be used on five new stream gauges, five new weather stations, plans to revamp the tribes’ emergency notification system and dozens of other infrastructure projects.  Adding five more stream gauges will more than double the tribes’ inventory of the devices, and five new weather stations will enhance National Weather Service (NWS) forecasts in the area, filling in some of the system’s blind spots. In the past, those gaps have left tribal members feeling vulnerable to severe weather. Spoonhunter recalled an extreme weather event in 2015, something resembling a tornado, that quickly ripped through the reservation but evaded NWS detection. After that, “people started talking and saying we need some kind of warning system,” which sparked his search for ways to improve the reservation’s infrastructure, he said. If all goes according to plan (the tribes were able to draw down their grant before President Trump’s federal spending cuts), the gauges, weather stations and a revamped emergency warning system could be online by the end of this year.

A Better Picture

Data from new stream gauges and weather stations will function like the additional pixels that increase the resolution of a photo. Small-scale improvements from the gauges and stations translate into more detailed regional forecasts from the NWS to warn the tribes of impending floods or other extreme weather events. Both tribes are partnering with Disaster Resiliency Experts, a Riverton, Wyoming-based company that works with communities to prepare for extreme weather, to purchase and install the new equipment. “It’s really been a blessing to get to work with them to do what we can tangibly to help our neighbors,” said Tim Troutman, the company’s founder and a retired NWS employee. To improve their monitoring and early warning systems for extreme weather, members of the Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone contacted Troutman in 2022. He estimated that more than 160 tribal members gave feedback before the tribes applied for federal grants to purchase new equipment.

Once the new stream gauges are installed, and the new weather stations go up, the tribes will have more data on snowpack, temperature, wind speed, air pressure, dew points, river levels, soil moisture, water table height and more, Troutman said. That data will allow the tribes and the NWS to monitor drought, flooding or blizzards, any of which “could be life threatening,” Troutman said, as many people on the reservation live in poorly weatherized mobile homes. People outside the reservation could also benefit from more stream gauges and weather stations on Wind River. If temperatures spiked in early spring, stream gauges between Lander and Riverton and the Wind River mountains will alert mountain communities of the rising meltwater coming their way and “will help people make those preparations to move to higher ground,” Troutman said.

Given the pace of climate change in the region, it’s important to get this done quickly, Troutman said. “Conditions have been changing.” The new equipment will also enhance the tribes’ natural disaster warning system, which currently relies on visual assessments of streamflow, NWS forecasts and collaboration with emergency management agencies outside the reservation system. Flood warnings are triggered by members of the Tribal Water Engineers Office who monitor NWS forecasts and visually inspect dams each May. Now, the warning program will be “a lot more user friendly for us,” St. Clair said. Once the new gauges and weather stations are in place, several parts of the early warning system will be automated: stream gauges will use lasers to detect rapid rises in water level and alert the Office of Homeland Security, the police and the Tribal Water Engineers Office. Members of both tribes will also be able to opt in to email, text and phone-delivered emergency weather alerts—systems that are being put together “as we speak,” Troutman said.  As another redundancy, the Northern Arapaho have purchased 3,500 radios that warn of hazards for all Northern Arapaho buildings and residences on the reservation. The Eastern Shoshone are purchasing 1,500 of those radios for the same purpose.  “With these tools, we’ll be more disaster resilient,” Spoonhunter said. St. Clair hopes the new stream gauges will aid the tribes in their push for water sovereignty. The tribes have “futures water rights,” a legal term for rights to water that they currently do not use. Getting a better picture of just how much water is coming down the mountains will help the tribes decide how to put that water to use, St. Clair said. “And then, under tribal water code,” laws that say water can be used for irrigation, recreation, spiritual, riparian and other benefits, “we will manage water more effectively,” he said.

Connecting Over the Climate

Later that day, Shakespeare drove his truck up to Washakie Dam, which feeds the Little Wind River and is named for the famed Eastern Shoshone leader who signed his people’s first treaties with the United States. The water was low, but deep blue, backdropped by mountains tinged with smoke from wildfire to the northwest. As he walked along the water’s shoreline, Shakespeare spoke about the personal stakes of his work. “I love the water. Me and the water have a good connection,” one that was forged during decades of personal strife, he said. Shakespeare is fifty years old, and carries memories of many of his friends who never reached that age. Shakespeare himself almost didn’t make it. “I spent 25 years of my life drinking and, you know, in that time I learned a lot and I also did not learn a lot. In that amount of time, you know, sometimes you step on some toes,” he said. Research by the National Library of Medicine published in 2019 that surveyed a little over 1 percent of the reservation’s population found obesity, hypertension and diabetes rates well above the averages of the nation, Wyoming and other Native communities.  Today, Shakespeare is over 10 years sober. As much as anything else, he sees his work as a way to give back to his community and to the land beneath his feet. “Being out here in the water, being out here in the environment, you know, it’s a perfect place to commune with what we have: the Earth. The Arapaho, we call it biito’owu’,” he said, taking a pause, his voice shaking. “It means a lot.” Over the last century and a half, the Wind River reservation has been vastly reduced from tens of millions of acres to around 2 million, and its citizens have endured high poverty rates, a string of empty promises from federal agencies and sovereignty-breeching rulings from state and federal courts.  Someday, Shakespeare wants to see his people’s connection to water and land return to something at least approaching the tribe’s relationship with the environment before European settlers migrated west and claimed the land for themselves. But engagement from the reservation’s everyday citizens is not easy to foster, he said. Climate change is the biggest threat facing the reservation, Shakespeare said, but he guessed that only a few hundred of its citizens shared that view. “We’re working on that,” he said.  Earlier that day, he had a chance to do that. While he and Spoonhunter stood on the bank of the Little Wind River, two cars peeled off the road. A woman with short hair got out of one and introduced herself as Shawna Friday. She asked Spoonhunter and Shakespeare for their names and business on her land. She was nervous; in September, someone had trespassed on and damaged some of her property with heavy machinery, she said, and her family had been skittish ever since. 

Spoonhunter knew some of the other passengers of the vehicles, and while he took a walk with them, Shakespeare listened to Friday’s story.  “We’re here discussing irrigation, climate change and our stream gauges that we’re going to be putting in here for flood and early warning systems,” he told her.  “Needs to be done,” Friday responded, somberly. Friday, whose mother is a member of the Eastern Shoshone, was living on this road in the southern part of the reservation during the 2010 flood, and she and Shakespeare began talking about how it had altered the terrain near her home. The river had formed a new oxbow lake, a still body of water formed when a curvature gets cut off from the main flow. The force of the water in 2010 was so severe that it ripped an olive tree out of the ground near Friday’s property, she told Shakespeare.  She should have been evacuated, he told her. “Nobody said nothing,” Friday said, and even if there had been a system in place to alert her, “there was no plan” to get her out. She asked how the new system would reach tribal elders, people with medical needs or older folks who are less mobile and less connected to the internet, like her mother, who does not own a cell phone. “We’re sitting ducks now,” she said. Shakespeare offered to provide emergency transmitter radios. There was a warning and evacuation plan in place in case Ft. Washakie Dam, which feeds the Little Wind River, ever failed, added Spoonhunter when he returned, addressing another of Friday’s concerns. “Your knowledge is very valuable to us,” Shakespeare told Friday as the conversation came to an end. He told her each tribe is working on starting its own climate resiliency office, and they were scheduling listening sessions where members of the reservation could express their concerns about life on their land. Friday was unable to make that meeting—it conflicted with her classes in elementary education at Central Wyoming College—but she expressed interest in attending future gatherings. “We need to have a plan,” she said.