Granite Peak draws water with little oversight

RIB MOUNTAIN - Granite Peak Ski Area drew more than 135 million gallons of water during the 2016-2017 ski season, with little oversight from state regulators and with an unknown effect on the environment, USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin has learned.

The news organization obtained records on the Rib Mountain ski area’s water use as local activists expressed concerns about plans to expand both the Granite Peak water intake system and its overall number of ski runs.

The water is taken from a tributary of the Big Rib River and pumped into holding ponds near the base of Rib Mountain. From there, it’s pumped up the hill and into snow guns, where it’s frozen and sprayed on the skiing and snowboarding runs when the weather doesn’t provide enough natural snow.

When the snow machines are running, they create a haze around Rib Mountain before the snow granules eventually settle to the ground and are pushed into position. It takes about 1 million gallons of water converted to snow per acre to coat all of the runs, according to Peter Biermeier, a consultant hired by Granite Peak to manage its expansion project. Currently, the ski area leases 405 acres, 265 of which are skiable, according to its website.

But Granite Peak’s system for monitoring its water intake is largely unregulated by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. The ski area isn’t required to submit regular records to show that it’s conforming to the limits imposed upon Granite Peak in legal documents, such as its property lease with the Wisconsin State Park system.

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Environmental activists such as Nancy Anderson, who helped form the anti-expansion group Leave Rib Mountain Alone, noticed the oversights late last year as her fellow activists dug into records relating to Granite Peak.

“We’re extremely concerned,” Anderson said. “We feel we’re not getting information. (Granite Peak) is not putting it out to the public.”

It took members of Leave Rib Mountain Alone months to get the water records, and they seemed to be incomplete. Anderson shared her findings in late 2016 with a USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin reporter, who then sought more records from the DNR.

Those records show that since 2001, when the ski area began taking water from the small side channel of the Big Rib River, its water use has grown each season. The water withdrawn from the channel reached an all-time high during the 2016-2017 season, when Granite Peak used more than 135 million gallons from the river, starting in November and withdrawing until March 9. That's equivalent to the same amount of water used in 1,060 homes combined for a full year.

A new intake system was proposed in late 2016, and since then, environmentalists and local activists opposed to the expansion have questioned the hill’s use of water, whether the DNR is providing sufficient oversight and what the new water intake system might mean to the region’s water supply and its long-term health.

Compounding these concerns, oversight of the ski hill’s water use by the DNR appears to be inconsistent — and in some ways, nonexistent. The DNR’s data on the hill’s water use comes exclusively from numbers self-reported by Granite Peak.

Water withdrawals are growing

Granite Peak Ski Area on the north side of Rib Mountain State Park is the tallest ski resort in the Midwest, and boasts the region's two longest and highest high-speed chairlifts. The ski area's economic impact amounts to about $27.5 million in the Wausau area each year, according to Dick Barrett, executive director of the Wausau/Central Wisconsin Convention and Visitors Bureau, who presented the figures during a Dec. 7 expansion meeting at Granite Peak. On average, the hill attracts 132,802 people a year. Granite Peak's owner, Charles Skinner , rents the 405 acres for the ski area from the state, according to the lease.

Most of Granite Peak's snow-making occurs in November, December and January each year, according to a USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin analysis of its water use between 2000 and 2017. But depending on weather conditions, the hill may also draw water for snow in February, so that the runs will remain covered through the end of the season in April. During the 2016-2017 season, the ski hill was still withdrawing as of March 9, taking 1.7 million gallons that day alone.

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The first season Granite Peak withdrew water from the Big Rib River was in 2001, when it installed an intake structure to help boost its snow-making capacity. The amount of water it used jumped from around 13 million gallons during the 2000-2001 ski season to nearly 116 gallons during the 2001-02 ski season.

USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin obtained water use data going back to 2000 and conducted interviews with environmental lawyers and activists, representatives of Granite Peak Ski Area and the Department of Natural Resources over the course of four months.

Before the installation of the water intake system, Granite Peak relied upon water purchased from the town of Rib Mountain. The use of water from the river greatly increased the resort’s ability to make snow to coat the runs, allowing the ski area to open earlier in the season and close later.

In late 2016, the ski area proposed a new water intake system, one that would allow the ski hill to pump water into the holding ponds much faster. The new system would have the ability to draw nearly 17 million gallons a day from the river. The ski area’s largest one-day withdrawal last season was 5.5 million gallons.

The increase in capacity has environmentalists such as Bill Davis, the president of the John Muir chapter of the Sierra Club in Madison, wondering why the state set 140 million gallons as the allowable threshold, and why it isn’t being re-evaluated as a part of the application for the new intake structure. The Granite Peak lease is nearly 17 years old now.

“For something as dynamic as a water body, every 10, maybe five years, they need to take a look," he said.

During the 2015-2016 season alone, the ski area withdrew more than 149 million gallons from the town of Rib Mountain and the river combined, according to documents.

The DNR has conducted no environmental studies on the impact of Granite Peak's water withdrawals on the habitat and the flow of the river, according to documents the news organization received from an open records request.

Biermeier, the expansion project manager for Granite Peak, told USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin in December that the ski area isn’t harming the environment by withdrawing water from the river, and if it were to stop, it would be at risk of losing business to other resorts in Wisconsin that are able to withdraw more water. But activists worry that the ski area may be doing more harm to the environment than good to the economy as water intakes increase.

Why water loss matters

Another concern environmentalists and activists have raised is precisely how much water is lost during each ski season. The DNR says that water loss is any water used that is not returned to the water basin.

Because lakes and rivers are the public's property, the public has a right and duty to protect them, said George Kraft, a professor of water resources at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point and director of the Center for Watershed Science and Education. Agriculture, to which central Wisconsin also devotes hundreds of millions of gallons of water, typically has a higher rate of loss than snowmaking, Kraft said, since much of the snow melts at the end of the season. But Kraft said any type of water loss can affect river flows and wildlife.

"What it comes to is the waters of the state belong to all of us," he said. "The waters are held in trust for everyone. When someone uses water, there has to be an understanding that they won't use water to the detriment of others."

Most of the water used to cover the 75 ski runs will return to the central Wisconsin water basin in the spring. But even by the most conservative scientific estimates, tens of millions of gallons will also be lost to evaporation and other factors. That’s enough to raise questions among environmentalists like Anderson and the Leave Rib Mountain Alone group about the long-term effects of the expanded intake capacity, especially because the withdrawals occur in the winter, when water levels tend to be lower.

“Some creatures may over-winter in the mud,” said Bill Davis, the president of the Bill Muir chapter of the Sierra Club in Madison. “Some can’t tolerate being frozen, like salamanders. ... If you reduce the flow, the effect is you’re moving those guys closer to the shore. That’s just an example of what can happen.”

Granite Peak and the DNR estimate that around 10 percent of the water withdrawn from the river is lost each season. This number comes from a study done in 1985 at the Santa Fe Ski Area in New Mexico by the U.S. Forest Service and the New Mexico State Engineer Office. By that estimate, more than 13 million gallons of water were not returned to the water basin after the 2015-2016 ski season.

But environmentalists point to other studies, such as one in 1990 at six ski areas in Colorado that found average water loss under a variety of conditions can range from 7 percent to 33 percent. That means that Granite Peak potentially lost up to 53 million gallons during last year’s ski season.

Citing those studies, the Wisconsin Valley Improvement Co. has raised concerns about the accuracy of water loss estimates at Granite Peak. The WVIC, based in Wausau, was founded to help ensure that the flow of the Wisconsin River remains constant.

WVIC vice president Peter Hansen and senior environmental specialist Ben Niffenegger testified at a Feb. 7 DNR hearing for the intake system that no studies have looked into the specifics of water loss for ski areas in the Midwest.

Water reporting woes

Environmentalists and activists alike are worried about the laxness of the requirements placed upon Granite Peak's reporting process. USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin sought public records on the water usage numbers from the DNR, which in turn had to request the numbers from Granite Peak. The ski area is not required to submit water usage data regularly, unless a member of the DNR specifically asks for the information. Environmentalists have said this raises a red flag for them.

Another one of Skinner's properties, Lutsen Mountains ski resort in Minnesota, came under fire in 2011 when Minnesota Public Radio reported that water withdrawals had been larger than its permit allowed. The resort was withdrawing from the Poplar River, which is home to several species of fish that used the portion of the river Skinner was withdrawing from for spawning. The Minnesota DNR granted a permit for 12.6 million gallons a year, but Lutsen Mountains was withdrawing more than 100 million gallons as of 2010, according to the news report.

In Wisconsin, the DNRapproved the new withdrawal system in March and construction will likely begin in 2018.

Anderson was not surprised by the news of the withdrawal approval, but she said that she hopes the decision is appealed and there are more studies done on the effects of the withdrawal on the local environment.

"We should be concerned about the watershed, our water resources, our natural resources," Anderson said. "Because right before our eyes, it's going away. It was preserved for a reason."

Contact Going Out reporter Laura Schulte at 715-297-7532 or leschulte@gannett.com; on Twitter @schultelaura.