By Cara Guerrieri Photos by Nathan Bilow
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Each spring, as if by magic, 83,400 acres in the Gunnison Valley seem to turn from yellowed grass to bursts of green shoots in the blink of an eye. Behind that transformation, of course, are ranchers up and down the valley like Hannah Cranor, vice president of Cranor Ranch. “We literally chase the snow with irrigation water,” Cranor said. “With our short growing season, only about 98 days, we have to take advantage of every single one of them. And it’s a lot easier if you don’t let the subsurface water from snowmelt dry up. On our ranch, that means we’ve only got about a week to get the ditches cleaned, the headgates checked and repaired, and the water turned on.” Of those tasks, the biggest is cleaning
the ditches so that irrigation water flows unobstructed. Spann Family Ranches manager Doug Washburn said cleaning ditches takes him a full two weeks of backbreaking work with a pitchfork pulling out ‘trash,’ and he doesn’t just mean sticks and grass and roots. “Oh, you wouldn’t believe the junk I find in ditches and headgates. Flipflops, paddles, life vests, once even a busted-up canoe.” With hundreds, perhaps thousands, of miles of ditching in the county, every inch of which needs the debris cleared out, that’s a lot of collective pitchfork time for area ranchers. “We use everything in our arsenal to get the ditches and headgates cleared,” said lifelong rancher Burt Guerrieri. “We burn, we use backhoes, shovels, chainsaws, ditchers