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until 11 o'clock at night to keep us posted on what's going, and Greg Walcher and the Governor's office really appreciate that, Second of all, I talked with Bob Storch this morning, who is the forest supervisor for the Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre and the Gunnison National Forests, and as you know, there is a significant fire complex there called the Blacktail Complex, and as of this morning was about 3300 acres, A couple things that are interesting there, One is that., ,there are two elements, The Blacktail fire and the 47 fire, The 47 fire has been moving, the terrain is steep and that's also a special management area because its an area that's been identified as a potential wilderness area, so that is not a whole lot of active management going on at that piece of the fire right now, But given the size of that fire and terrain, the estimate is that the complex will not be contained until May 27th, so you can see we're talking about days in terms of putting a fire line around some of these fires, The other interesting factors that are being observed in the Blacktail fire, is the difference in the fire between managed areas of a forest and unmanaged areas, It appears that when a fire is moving from an unmanaged area to a managed area, the fire is literally stopping, And not only is it stopping, the fllUlles are literally only a couple of feet off the grown, as opposed to going all the way up the tree, And apparently there are a nmnber of photographers in Denver that are going over today, as a matter of fact, to take pictures of that, but it really shows the value of our forest management. These areas over the last 7 years have been managed both through thinning and through prescribed fire, And what we're seeing right now on the ground is that that type of management pays off, So there are some itnportant facts from the Western Slope, Rich - Anyone else? Great, thanks, Brad, - We appreciate you being here, I know you're super-busy, so I'll let you get going again, Thanks again, OK, let's move into our reports, the first one up is Snowpack. Mike Gillespie, Mike Gillespie -1 did bring some handouts, but we're trying to cut back on the quantities we bring, so I'll just rely mainly on the PowerPoint, If! can get this working, OK. May 1 st snowpack, as you see there, pretty dismal looking picture, 19% average, 24% last year, and we'll keep our category of exceptionally below average snowpack at 0 - 25% in there, it's now, most of the state is in that category, 25-50% of average snowpack across the northwest portion ofthe state, it's spreading down the west side of the Continental Divide, upper headwaters of the Colorado and the headwaters of the Arkansas, But elsewhere across the state, just dismal conditions as far as snowpack. So where do we wind up here May 1,t? At 19% of average, Looking back through the last 36 years or so, you see we're at the lowest during that time period, other low years were 1981 with 21 % of average, and 1977 was 43% of average, We'll talk more about the other two dry years of '77 and '81 here, This is the April 1 snowpack, and you saw this last month, And we usually consider April 1 to be the total maximmn accmnulation of snowpack, so when someone asks me what is the snowpack like in a certain year, I always refer to the April 1 snowpack, and this is pretty much how we're going to wind up this year, 52%, maybe not quite as bad as '77, but probably worse than 1981 for sure, Here's a summAry of this year's snowpack by basin, you can see the general trend now, weJve got 5 months lU:cmnulated, and these are percents of average for each individual month, the trend this year has been decreasing as we go through each month, so conditions have pretty much worsened each month throughout this winter, We can see that it really dropped off in May, that's an indication of how quickly we melted what we had, Just below average snowfall alone, We look at some other years, this is 1981, you can see kind of 8