LandDesk
Photo by Stephen Eginoire
Upstream battle How the use-it-or-lose-it mentality leads to water inequality in the West by Jonathan Thompson
I
wrote the essay below – about my parents’ farm’s ditch in the North Fork Valley of Western Colorado – in 2018, which was one of the region’s driest years on record. The essay is every bit as pertinent today, an equally dry time for most of the Western Slope, even if some details have changed: My sister owns the farm now—along with the robust water rights—and my parents moved into town. And recent rains have kept most of the ditches flowing in the valley, at least for now. But the water inequality persists. Just look at the drought map of Colorado: Everywhere east of the Continental Divide is drought-free, while the entire Western Slope is in some stage of drought, much of it in the dried-blood “exceptional” stage, the driest it gets. As the West gets drier, the water inequality will only get worse. My parents have a small garlic farm in Western Colorado in the valley of the North Fork of the Gunnison River. They bought the place just over a decade ago, along with a couple of shares of water from the ditch which runs through their property. It’s a nice little plot of rural Colorado with good dirt and nice views, but it wasn’t until this terribly dry summer that they realized how valuable
the land is. The Farmers Ditch, diverted from the North Fork near Paonia, has some of the most senior rights in the valley. They are water-rich in an arid world. Since white settlement began here back in the late 1800s, the communities of the North Fork have revolved around coal and agriculture. Three underground coal mines churned away for decades, their bounty loaded upon mile-long trains headed for power plants in the Midwest and beyond. Paonia and the surrounding mesas have long been renowned for fruit, vegetables, and, for a time, marijuana. After surging to a peak just over a decade ago, coal began its hasty, nationwide decline, and now only one of three mines in the North Fork is still operating. Meanwhile, small-scale agriculture has taken over as one of the main economic pillars of this idyllic valley: Cherries, peaches, hops, and hemp. Agricultural interests also are a strong political force rising up in resistance to proposed oil and gas drilling because of its detrimental effect on the water, which is becoming more and more precious in a warming world. Thanks to the dramatically sere appear-
ance of the natural landscape, the North Fork Valley provides a stark visual reminder of the importance of large-scale irrigation in these parts. A ditch along a hillside becomes a sharp divide between the dry, sparse, dusty dobie-land above the ditch; and green, grassy, cottonwoodand cattail-strewn land below it. This is true even where no active irrigation is taking place; the ditches are generally so leaky that they create artificial wetlands in areas that are distant from fields or crops or lawns. Most of the irrigation water comes from the North Fork, which begins at the confluence of Muddy Creek and Anthracite Creek. Paonia Reservoir sits just above the confluence, on Muddy Creek. Typically the reservoir fills up during the spring and early summer, during which the natural flow in Anthracite Creek is adequate to fill all of the downstream ditches. When Anthracite starts to wane, water is released from the reservoir to keep the ditches flowing, usually into August and sometimes even until late October. In late June or early July the river’s total flow reaches equilibrium with the volume diverted from it, causing the river through Paonia to dry to a tiny, warm4
telegraph
July 29, 2021 n 7
