SAN JUAN COUNTY, Utah — Most people in Utah rely on the tap to get the water they need daily.
But a large population that resides in the southeast corner of the Beehive State is dependent on Mother Nature directly — and lately, she isn’t providing enough.
The Navajo Nation, which encompasses part of Utah, New Mexico and Arizona, is facing a crisis that is forcing its population to relocate or adapt.
Monument Valley is on any wanderer’s bucket list, with towering red-rock monoliths surrounded by a surreal stretch of desolate landscape. Hundreds of thousands visit each year.
For residents of the area, however, the balance between mere survival and thriving is delicate, even in a good year. But now, the "good" years are in the rear-view mirror and an uncertain and rough road is in the headlights.
"We understand there’s a climate change. We’re going through that," said Ernest Harry Begay. "We’re taught that everything is within the reservation. It was put here for us."
Begay is a licensed counselor on the Navajo Reservation. He helps people with physical and mental health challenges using Navajo traditional methods like healing songs and prayers.
He and other elders noticed that the weather here began to change dramatically beginning about 40 years ago.
"And along the way, planting kind of left us. The cornfields — they're not there, simply because there's really no water," Begay said.
We asked, does it seem like that's accelerated in recent years?
"Yes, it has," Begay said. "The monsoon season comes — it just comes like a bang, and it's gone, so that's good. [But] it should come earlier, and then the snow should be here also, but that's not happening."
Begay remembers decades ago when five feet of snow would turn the dominant red rocks white during the winter. Now, it is a memory. No one in this remote desert has seen significant snow in years.
The muddy San Juan River, which meanders across the Navajo Nation, was a major water resource that the Diné people used to use. But they say the dropping water level and the 2015 Gold King Mine wastewater spill have driven them away from accessing their rights to water from that source — and the waning annual rains aren’t making up the difference.
"When we had snow, when we had rain, we had herbs we could use for our healing," Begay said. "We could get them. Now some of them don’t even grow."
Around 37,000 of the 174,000 people living in the Navajo Nation — 21 percent — don't have running water or indoor plumbing.
We asked Begay if those concerns will eventually require people to leave.
"Yes," he replied. "No electricity, also. So people are really concerned about that, and we need those things if we're going to function properly and live properly, the way it should be. But that's not happening."
How is that affecting Diné people and the way of life in this area?
"We are not eating properly. Natural, organic food that we used to have, it’s not here," Begay said. "It’s not here, it'’s not growing, so all these sicknesses have come in."
Once-active windmill-pumped wells are abandoned and left to waste, either after becoming contaminated or bone dry — adding to the desolation of the landscape and to the desperation of the people.
This region that's now a bone-dry patch of sand was once a rain-fed field of corn, but it was abandoned a decade ago — now a memory only preserved in photos.
"You don't see the cornfields, you don't see the squash, the cantaloupe, all of that right now — [we] don't see that," Begay said. "So there is a big change. And the climate change is behind that."
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Part 2 of this report will air Tuesday. It includes an interview with a teacher who is working to preserve the Navajo Nation's farming way of life while keeping up with climate change.
