Sun 061313 16pgs fathersday

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LOOK INSIDE:

Volume 5, Number 18 | June 13, 2013

It’s a bird... It’s a plane...

No, it’s Mark Burrows! The Carbondale photographer pointed his camera down at this crowd from as high as 50 feet at last week’s First Friday. To see the final result, and some more First Friday action, please turn to page 5. Photo by Jane Bachrach

Thompson Divide: A ditch runs through it By Barbara Dills Sopris Sun Correspondent (Editor’s note: This is the first in a two part series about the Sandy Ditch and the possible impacts of gas drilling in the area). I’ve done some reporting on the Thompson Divide for The Sopris Sun these past few months, but, as a relative newcomer to Colorado, Nordic skiing at Spring Gulch was the closest I’d been physically to the areas in Thompson Divide currently leased by the gas companies for future development. That changed recently when I got an

early morning invitation from Judy FoxPerry to walk the Sandy Ditch. A few hours later, I was hoofing it up Marion Gulch, water bottle and camera strapped on, to meet Judy, her son Ned, and a few of his former Colorado Rocky Mountain School classmates at the ditch. The Sandy Ditch runs through what is referred to by gasmen, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), and the Forest Service as the Lake Ridge unit. To Judy and her husband Will, who grow hay on land below Thompson Divide that’s been in Will’s family for over 50 years, and to many

Mon - Fri: 7am-4pm

Sat & Sun: 8am-4pm 1091 Hwy 133 Carbondale 963-FOOD (968-3663)

other ranchers and growers in and around Carbondale who raise livestock or crops of one kind or another, the Lake Ridge unit is a primary source of the clean water on which their livelihoods — and lives — depend. I wanted to see first-hand how that water flows, literally and figuratively, from the high-country to ranches, kitchens and restaurants here in the valley. The Sandy Ditch is but one small channel in a complex web of water and watersheds that are threatened by drilling in the Thompson Divide. Similar, larger ditch systems descend from other points in the

1/2 OFF!

Thompson Divide to sustain ranches and farms elsewhere near Carbondale, including Sustainable Settings and others in the Crystal River Valley. The Sandy Ditch offers a useful example of potential impacts in part because of its fragility, but also because of the devotion with which the Perry’s and others before them have tended it for generations. Judy had given me brief directions to where they’d be working — park here, walk there, follow the creek, two gates, turn right at the ditch, it’ll take you about an

THOMPSON DIVIDE page 3

COLD SANDWICHE*S & SMOOTHIES !!!

*MUST PRESENT THIS COUPON. ONE COUPON PER PERSON PER DAY. GOOD 6/13/13 - 6/20/13


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Sun 061313 16pgs fathersday by The Sopris Sun - Issuu