The Stress Map.

Reading the Map

Every thesis we've published lives somewhere on this map. The Thermometer They Can't Erase — the USDA drought archives going dark, the climate data asymmetry — that's the orange and red stretching across the western states. The Cascade — RV delinquencies, subprime stress, the consumer breaking — that's the blue bleeding across the Sun Belt and rural Midwest.

Toggle between layers. Watch what happens when you turn on Compound Stress — the purple zones where drought severity meets consumer delinquency meets wildfire risk. Those are the places where three forces are squeezing simultaneously. A rancher in central Arizona dealing with water curtailment, a truck payment he can't make, and a fire season that's starting two months early. His bank is pricing risk with less data than Munich Re because the USDA archives went dark.

The compound zones are where mispricing lives. Not because any single factor is extreme — but because the interaction between factors isn't priced. Municipal bonds in Maricopa County don't carry a "drought + recession + wildfire" premium. They carry separate, uncorrelated risk factors that the rating agencies model independently. Reality doesn't work that way. Drought makes fires worse. Fires destroy property tax base. Property tax decline hits muni bond coverage. Consumer stress means fewer buyers for the damaged properties. The cascade compounds geographically.

The Colorado River Basin

Zoom into the Southwest. The Colorado River Compact allocates 16.5 million acre-feet per year. Actual flow since 2000 averages 12.4 million. That 4.1 million acre-feet deficit is roughly the entire combined allocation of Arizona and Nevada. The states drawing from this river — Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California — contain some of the fastest-growing metro areas in the country. Phoenix. Las Vegas. Denver. Salt Lake City.

The growth assumes water that increasingly doesn't exist. That's not a climate opinion — it's hydrology. Tree-ring data going back 1,200 years shows the 20th century allocation period was abnormally wet. The legal framework was built on an outlier.

The Ski Industry Canary

Park City, Utah. March 14, 2026. A skier navigating a brown hillside with a single snow stripe, paying $2,414 per night at the Montage and $351 for a lift ticket. This is what Year 27 of a megadrought looks like at one of the most expensive ski resorts in the country.

The ski industry is the RV of climate risk — a purely discretionary, weather-dependent market. When snowpack isn't there AND the consumer is stressed, the compound effect hits resort towns that built their entire economy around winter tourism. Vail Resorts, which operates Park City, is a public proxy for both climate reality and consumer discretionary spending.

The map doesn't predict the future. It shows where the present is already under compound stress that single-factor models aren't capturing. The entities with proprietary data see this topology. The entities relying on public data — the ones affected by the erasure — don't. That gap is the edge.

This is not investment advice. This is geography.