FRIANT DAM, just outside Fresno, California, is a sprawling structure, 319 feet tall and two-thirds of a mile across. It’s not the tallest or the longest dam in the United States, but measured by the impact on the river that it constrains, it looms larger than most.
Constructed just after the Great Depression, Friant Dam was devised to control the San Joaquin River, California’s second-longest waterway. The river’s raucous flow, fed by snowmelt from the Sierra Nevada, was corralled in a 4,900-acre reservoir called Millerton Lake (named for the small town it drowned). From there, it was divvied up and shunted into a vast network of canals to supply water for millions of acres of farmland and the Central Valley’s growing cities. For decades, one 60-mile section—beginning 38 miles downstream of Friant Dam and stretching to the San Joaquin’s confluence with the Merced River—ran dry. Parts of the river where water still flowed were blighted with pesticides and fertilizer, creating massive algal blooms and dead zones.
The intensive engineering of the river exacted a huge toll on its native ecosystems. No species suffered more than the Chinook salmon, whose epic migration from the Pacific Ocean to its spawning grounds in the High Sierra was cut short by numerous choke points, not the least of which was Friant’s impenetrable barrier of concrete.
Millerton Lake as seen from the top of Friant Dam. Smoke from the nearby Creek Fire cloaks the Sierra Nevada.
In 1988, environmental groups including the National Resources Defense Council, the Bay Institute, and the Sierra Club used a statute in the California Fish and Game Code to argue that the US Bureau of Reclamation had failed in its duty to maintain flows below Friant Dam to support Chinook salmon. In 2006, a landmark settlement was reached, allocating nearly $900 million to repair 150 miles of river below the dam and to reestablish a self-sustaining population of Chinook salmon.
Rife with compromises, the settlement mandated that a mere fraction of the San Joaquin’s historic flow be restored. The river’s many dams would remain, but alternative passages would be built and new spawning areas added in the lower river. In other words, the settlement sought to give the salmon a chance to survive within a massive water management scheme that favors industrial-scale farming.
Last October, I visited Friant Dam to meet Don Portz, the restoration program manager at the Bureau of Reclamation, to see how, nearly 15 years later, the restoration was coming along. Portz’s job is to ensure that the terms of the settlement are met—namely, that the salmon, which were reintroduced to the river in 2012, can get around the many obstacles on their way up to the stretch below Friant Dam where they can spawn.
We stood at the top of Friant Dam looking out at Millerton Lake, which was swathed in smoke from the Creek Fire. Portz told me that the point of the restoration is not to remake the river of the past but to create something new—a human-mediated river capable of supporting fish while also delivering farmers and cities their share of water. “The goal of all these projects,” Portz said, “is to allow the volitional passage of adult Chinook salmon and other fishes upstream to spawning habitat below Friant and the successful return of their offspring back to the ocean.”
In plain terms, “volitional passage” means that the fish can migrate and complete their life cycle without human intervention. Ironically, accomplishing that goal has required—and will continue to require—major human intervention. Some of the projects planned for the years ahead will rival in scale and complexity the construction of Friant Dam. As California’s population grows, water shortages deepen, and the impacts of climate change intensify, the restoration program is an expensive and resource-intensive gamble. Can the San Joaquin and its salmon really be engineered back into existence?
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Map by Simone Tieber
IN THE MID-19TH CENTURY, an estimated 1 million salmon would swim up the San Joaquin River each year to spawn as part of North America’s southernmost salmon run. They were exquisitely adapted to survive the extremes of the 300-plus-mile journey from the Pacific Ocean and the maze of tidal channels in the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta, along the slow, meandering waterways and oxbow lakes of the Central Valley, to the frigid streams of the Sierra thousands of feet above the valley floor. To endure the grueling migration, the salmon ate voraciously at sea and could weigh up to 50 pounds.
Come spring, the San Joaquin, swollen with snowmelt, would overtop its banks and spill out onto the valley floor. “In June 1847,” wrote the explorer John Charles Frémont, “the Joaquin was nowhere fordable. . . . All the large tributaries, the [Merced], To-wal-um-ne, Stanislaus, and Mo-kel-um-ne, required to be boated and were pouring down a deep volume of water from the mountains, one to two hundred yards wide.” In these vast marshes and shallow lakes, baby Chinook, known as fry, found refuge from predators, and juvenile salmon on their way to sea gained in size and strength. The Chinook swam high into the Sierra foothills—to a minimum of 1,500 or 2,500 feet, depending on the time of year. Historical accounts suggest that they may have traveled much higher. “It is a fact well known to the fish culturists,” reads an 1890 report from the California Fish Commission, “that the winter and spring run of salmon, during the high, cold waters, go to the extreme headwaters of the rivers, if no obstructions prevent, into the highest mountains.” Chinook in the Merced River swam deep into the granite canyons on the western margins of today’s Yosemite National Park, and might have even reached as far as Yosemite Valley, to lay their eggs in the crystalline pools below Vernal Falls.
For centuries, the Miwok, whose territory encompassed several major tributaries of the San Joaquin, relied on the delicate flesh of the kosum—the Miwok word for salmon. Early European explorers found it easier to shoot the hefty fish with rifles than to bother with trying to snag them on a hook or a spear. During the gold rush, Chinook salmon provided miners with an easy-to-harvest food source, and by the 1860s a flourishing fishery had sprung up, with 175 boats supplying 19 canneries in the delta. But the practice of hydraulic mining, which relied on water cannons to blast hillsides into a slurry, unleashed sediment and other toxic materials into the rivers, and this, along with overfishing, agriculture, and logging at higher altitudes, had greatly diminished salmon stocks by the late 1880s. The destruction of the San Joaquin’s salmon fishery followed a human holocaust along the river that had begun in the 1830s, when cholera and smallpox brought by white settlers wiped out an estimated 60,000 people, roughly three-quarters of the Indigenous population of the San Joaquin Valley.
In less than a century, the San Joaquin River was transformed from a free-flowing salmon superhighway into a corridor of agriculture and commerce.
The large-scale water-engineering schemes of the early- and mid-20th century—what writer Marc Reisner called “the worst disruption of salmon habitat you can find anywhere on Earth”—were the fatal blow to California’s salmon runs. The California State Water Project and the Central Valley Project rejiggered California’s natural hydrology on a mass scale, delivering water from the wetter and sparsely populated northern reaches of the state to the arid but highly populated southern reaches. The San Joaquin’s sinuous meanders were straitjacketed in concrete channels, and its massive wetlands and lakes were drained to make way for farms. The final cataclysmic stroke came with the commissioning of Friant Dam in 1942.
In less than a century, the San Joaquin River was transformed from a free-flowing salmon superhighway into a corridor of agriculture and commerce. By 1950, its salmon were all but extinct. George Warner, an employee of the California Fish and Game Department (today’s Department of Fish and Wildlife), recounted trying to save the last members of the San Joaquin’s spring run that year:
Only thirty-six salmon were counted at the ladder, and many of these were so weak they could barely swim from one pool to the next. . . . Some could just make it to the ladder, and I had to use a dipnet to carry them, one at a time, up the bank to release them in the canal. Probably none of the thirty-six lived to spawn.
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“THE DAMAGE DONE in the last century to this river is extensive,” Portz said, peering out at the San Joaquin where it snaked through a parched landscape of golden hillsides. “There’s no easy fix.”
Together we walked Friant’s long promenade, the dam dropping away from us like a tombstone-gray curtain. Tall and affable, Portz has angular features and closely cropped hair. His accent is inflected with traces of upstate New York, where he grew up along the banks of the Hudson River. A self-proclaimed fish geek with a PhD in fish ecophysiology from the University of California, Davis, Portz took a job as a fish biologist with the Bureau of Reclamation almost 20 years ago. While the bureau was focused on operating and maintaining its vast and aging inventory of dams, Portz was devising better ways to help fish get around them. In 2018, he assumed the role of restoration manager. “I think it says a lot about where we want to go as an agency that they entrusted a fish biologist to take over the helm of the restoration,” he said.
Fish biologist Don Portz oversees the San Joaquin River Restoration Program.
Portz gestured to where a concrete channel diverges from the San Joaquin’s main waterway. This is the beginning of the 152-mile-long Friant-Kern Canal, which delivers irrigation water to a million acres of farmland and drinking water to a quarter million people in the southern region of the Central Valley. Though its flow varies depending on the demand of farms, the canal siphons as much as 5,300 cubic feet per second from Millerton Lake—more than 13 times the amount of water flowing through the San Joaquin’s main channel on the day of my visit.
One of the critical early successes, Portz explained, has been eliminating the San Joaquin’s long dry stretch. In all but the driest years, water now flows along the entirety of the river’s length. But the amount of water is still far less than what is called for in the 2006 settlement, which dictates that the San Joaquin eventually be returned to a maximum flow of 4,500 cubic feet per second. The problem is that the San Joaquin’s network of channels and levees was built to handle intermittent flooding but not a constant volume of water. A steady flow of 4,500 cubic feet per second from Friant Dam could cause a catastrophic failure of the earthen dikes or damaging “seepage” into the root zones of orchards planted along the river.
The insufficient flow has meant that fish need a lot of help navigating the San Joaquin’s lower reaches. Since the salmon’s reintroduction in 2012, California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) workers have captured fish in the lower river each spring and hauled them by truck around the river’s various choke points to a roughly 25-mile stretch below Friant. Portz pointed to a pool of water at the dam’s base. No more than a hundred yards across, it is continuously refreshed by cold water coursing from the bottom of Millerton Lake, providing an area where salmon can “hold” through the heat of summer until they are ready to lay eggs in the fall. The surge from the dam’s penstocks also supplies what elevation used to—water cold enough to sustain salmon eggs, which perish at water temperatures higher than 60°F. It was unnerving to realize that the survival of this once-mighty species now depended on such a minuscule pool of water.
Last spring, fish biologists captured juvenile salmon and tagged them with dye and tiny microchips to track their progress through the lower river and delta.
In spite of the limitations, the salmon have shown tantalizing signs of revitalization. In 2014, 60,000 juvenile spring-run salmon, raised in a hatchery on the Feather River, were introduced below Friant Dam. Three years later, something incredible happened: Heavy runoff transformed large stretches of the San Joaquin’s lower floodplain into a massive wetland. In this watery landscape, some of these Chinook salmon made it on their own, without the aid of traps and trucks—volitionally—from the Pacific Ocean to the base of Friant Dam for the first time in more than a half century. The river was so swollen that year that biologists were not able to capture these fish, but their journey was verified through genetic analysis of their offspring, which began to show up in Bureau of Reclamation traps in late fall 2017. The presence of these baby salmon marked another critical milestone—the first time spring-run Chinook had successfully spawned in the San Joaquin in more than 60 years.
There is a lot more being protected here than salmon. It’s other animals and endangered species. It’s ecosystems. It’s water quality. It’s everyone living in the valley.
Portz and I left the dam and headed about a mile downstream to see a short section of the river used by salmon for spawning. At a dirt pullout we met Mike Grill, a CDFW environmental scientist, dressed in well-worn hip waders. The three of us walked over a bridge on Route 206 that vibrated unnervingly with each passing car. Below us, near a massive slab of cast-off concrete, we saw what looked like a ribbon of clear plastic undulating in the blue-green water. Then the outline revealed itself, bone white, defiantly wriggling against the current. “That one is pretty beat-up,” Grill said. “It’s probably done spawning and on its last legs.”
To Grill, the nearly expired fish was an indication of the river’s improving ecological health. Earlier in the season, the CDFW had captured 57 adult fish near the San Joaquin’s confluence with the Merced River and released them below Friant Dam. An additional 285 “brood stock” (biological jargon for hatchery-raised adults) were added to the population of spawning fish. Grill said that in the previous weeks, his team had counted close to 75 fish nests called redds: concavities of river stones cleared by female fish to deposit their eggs. Those numbers, however, were down sharply from 2019, when biologists had counted 200 redds.
Portz suspects that this year’s lower numbers were the result of several factors, including a lower survival rate of juvenile fish in the delta and poor ecological conditions in the Pacific, but that the main variable was low precipitation. By comparison, the number of redds was higher in the 2016–17 and 2018–19 seasons, when surplus snowpack significantly boosted the San Joaquin’s flow. But lower snowpack and rainfall in 2017–18 led to a reduced runoff, which translated to a more arduous upstream journey for salmon.
When the hatchlings emerged in spring, Portz told me, some of them would be captured and tagged with dye and tiny microchips to track their progress through the lower river and delta. “We’re still trying to figure out how to create conditions in the river that are best for salmon,” he said. “But every year we are learning and getting better at it.”
The point of the entire effort is to establish a self-sustaining population of 500 Chinook salmon—a tiny fragment of a population that once numbered in the hundreds of thousands. The hope is that these fish will multiply until their numbers resemble the great schools of the past.
Later that day, Portz and I traveled farther downstream to look at another major impediment for migrating salmon—an antiquated structure called Mendota Dam. We drove an hour west of Fresno, through tangles of new construction in the town of Mendota and then across a large public park filled with rusting picnic tables. A few hundred yards beyond, the river channel appeared. Myriad side channels were hacked into the dirt, each carrying a fraction of the San Joaquin to an individual water district miles away.
Built in 1919, Mendota Dam is an ungainly edifice of concrete. Portz noted the primitive concrete fish ladder extending from the dam’s midsection. “It’s poorly designed,” he said. “Totally useless. No way a salmon is getting up through that.” In all but the largest floods, salmon and other fish become marooned at the base of the dam. To make matters worse, on the upstream side of the dam, its small reservoir was covered in an impassible tangle of invasive bright-green water hyacinth. And juvenile fish easily become lost in the side channels. “They feel all of these canals and say, ‘Hey, that way is to the delta; that way is to the ocean.’ But it’s not,” Portz said.
The bureau is in the process of acquiring land to build a nearly mile-long bypass channel that will be wider than the San Joaquin itself and will allow salmon and other native fish, including sturgeon, to circumvent Mendota Dam and its reservoir entirely. Known as Reach 2B, it is the largest and most technically complicated part of the San Joaquin restoration, as well as the most expensive—carrying an estimated price tag of $336 million.
To ensure that fish choose the correct path and don’t get trapped in the side channels or sucked into pumps, Reach 2B will incorporate an intricate series of passageways, pipes, and screens; nevertheless, it’s meant to be intuitive and easy to navigate. “This is a two-way street,” Portz said. As spawning adults are migrating upriver, juveniles from the previous year are swimming out to the Pacific. “You’ve got to let the fish and Mother Nature do it on their own.”
Portz’s prediction, that with the right human ingenuity the salmon will someday be able to “do it on their own,” seems to be bearing itself out. This past April, he called me to share the news that the restoration team had once again captured adult Chinook at the confluence of the Merced and the San Joaquin. I could hear the excitement in his voice. Despite a disappointingly dry winter and subsequent reduced flows from Friant, returning salmon had, for the fourth time in five years, made it across the delta and up to the confluence. “We’re seeing a lot of resilience,” Portz said, “even in years with less water.”
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BYPASSES WON’T MATTER much if the fish can’t reach them, so recovering some of the Central Valley’s former wetlands is also a crucial part of the restoration. The largest and most promising of these efforts is the Dos Rios Ranch project—a 2,100-acre parcel roughly 50 miles downstream from Mendota Dam that was acquired in 2012 with $21.8 million in federal, state, and local funds.
The Mendota Dam is virtually impassable for salmon. A soon-to-be-built bypass channel is the restoration program’s most complicated project to date.
To date, 1,600 acres of the Dos Rios allotment have been restored. On a chilly, overcast day in February, I drove out to the property to meet with Julie Rentner, president of the Chico-based River Partners, the nonprofit heading up the project. The restoration, she explained, involves breaching and in some cases removing infrastructure such as levees and berms in order to put water back onto the land. A similar effort is underway at the Yolo Bypass. But unlike the Yolo, which provides habitat in the midst of active farms, the Dos Rios project aims to retire farmland and “give it back to the river,” Rentner said.
The property sprawls along the floodplain of the Tuolumne and the San Joaquin—the eponymous dos rios. Former farm fields had been stripped of crops and were dotted with small plastic sleeves, each encasing a hand-planted native grass, shrub, or tree, a mosaic including sedge, willow, and valley oak. “We’re just sort of throwing it all out there and seeing what takes,” Rentner said.
We snaked atop a series of levees to a vantage point upstream of the confluence. The area was once part of a sprawling Mexican land grant known as El Pescador (“the fisherman”), a not-so-subtle historical reminder of the aquatic life that once thrived here. Rentner hopes that the Dos Rios project will be the first in a series of strategically placed wetlands for juvenile Chinook along the course of the San Joaquin, providing critical habitat for them to grow and gather strength. “Wetlands are full of nutrients and insect life,” Rentner said, “all the things young salmon need to prepare for their eventual journey to the Pacific.”
California’s San Joaquin River below the salmon barrier of Friant Dam.
The benefits, however, extend far beyond salmon, Rentner said. Since restoration work began here nine years ago, many dozens of species of birds and mammals have returned, a number of which are listed as endangered. The riparian brush rabbit was rediscovered a few years ago, after it was thought to have been extirpated by the New Year’s Day flood in 1997. (The rabbits survived that and subsequent floods, Rentner speculated, by climbing to elevated parcels specially designed for wildlife in the preserve.) Dos Rios is also located along the Pacific Flyway and provides critical habitat for the endangered Aleutian cackling goose.
While our side of the river was being given back to nature, across the water we could see the self-interested, slapdash engineering that, over the decades, has transformed much of the valley into an agricultural wasteland. Huge slabs of concrete and asphalt had been dumped onto the Tuolumne’s steep riverbank in an attempt to stave off erosion. “It’s well known around here that if you have concrete debris, you give it to farmers on the riverbank,” Rentner said. “Of course, this violates at least eight environmental-protection laws on the books in California, but there is zero enforcement capacity.”
Wetlands like these benefit not only animals, Rentner said, but also the surrounding human communities—even the concrete-dumping farmer across the river. We stood at the epicenter of the New Year’s Day flood, one of the worst in state history, which inundated much of the Central Valley and left parts of the nearby city of Modesto under 15 feet of water. A more robust array of floodplains could have mitigated the damage. Wetlands also moderate a river’s behavior, making it less susceptible to wild swings of drought and flood. And while groundwater monitoring and models are still evolving, permanently retiring farmlands to restore wetlands may be key to addressing two of the Central Valley’s most pressing problems, groundwater overdraft and land subsidence, particularly as climate change bears down. “If we really think about all the public outcomes of moderating floods and improving environmental conditions for wildlife and enhancing water quality,” Rentner said, “it’s likely they will greatly surpass the value of the crops produced in those fields.”
The salvation of the San Joaquin and its salmon, Rentner believes, will ultimately depend on replacing the “siloed and segregated” water policy that has dominated California for decades with a more holistic, ecosystem-based form of management. “Somehow we need to get past the idea that putting water in the river for the fish is ‘too expensive,'” Rentner said. “There is a lot more being protected here than salmon. It’s other animals and endangered species. It’s ecosystems. It’s water quality. It’s everyone living in the valley.”
As inspiring as the work to restore the San Joaquin River is, the truth remains that it is unfolding in a human-ravaged landscape, one that forces Chinook salmon to spawn at elevations lower than what they have adapted to. In the meantime, attitudes about the West’s big dams have started to shift. Numerous dams in the Pacific Northwest—including those on the Elwha, Sandy, and Rogue Rivers—have been demolished, leading to an almost immediate rebound in salmon populations. Earlier this year, Representative Mike Simpson, an Idaho Republican, proposed a $33.5 billion plan to begin removing four major dams on Idaho’s Snake River in 2030. If federal regulators are serious about saving the San Joaquin’s salmon runs, is it time to begin thinking about removing the largest obstacle on the river, Friant Dam?
I followed up with Portz by email to ask this question. He replied with an emphatic no, noting that above Millerton Lake the San Joaquin does not flow unobstructed but is interspersed with a series of other dams and reservoirs. “Spawning habitat is poor, and the risk of stranding for summer holding is high in this stretch,” he wrote. “Dam removal on the San Joaquin River would be cost-prohibitive, eliminate water storage in an already drought-prone environment of the state, and impact thousands of acres of farmland with no guarantee of a fully rebounded, self-sustained Chinook salmon population.”
All of which means that for the foreseeable future, the Chinook of the San Joaquin will be swimming upstream against a nearly insurmountable flow of human self-interest, striving to sustain themselves in the whisper of river we have left them.
Mette Lampcov is a Danish documentary photographer based in Los Angeles. Funding for this story was provided through a fellowship at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Water Desk.
Funding for this story was provided through a fellowship at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Water Desk.
To learn more about today’s San Joaquin and the restoration challenges, go to sc.org/san-joaquin.
Fifteen years ago, a landmark legal settlement brought almost a billion dollars in funding to revitalize a badly degraded San Joaquin River. Take a tour of ongoing efforts by the US Bureau of Reclamation, an unlikely savior, and conservation groups to ease the passage of salmon and trout from the Pacific Ocean to a vital 150-mile stretch of the river below the Sierra Nevada. This interactive map was produced in collaboration with The Water Desk at the University of Colorado Boulder.
The San Joaquin
Reimagining a River
California’s San Joaquin River flows from the Sierra Nevada to the Pacific Ocean. At just over 350 miles, it is California’s second-longest waterway. But by the measure of the ecological damage it has sustained, it has no rival.
This map is a visual narrative of that history and the ambitious effort to restore the river and its iconic species, the Chinook salmon.
Scroll to continue.
The San Joaquin
Reimagining a River
California’s San Joaquin River flows from the Sierra Nevada to the Pacific Ocean. At just over 350 miles, it is California’s second-longest waterway. But by the measure of the ecological damage it has sustained, it has no rival.
This map is a visual narrative of that history and the ambitious effort to restore the river and its iconic species, the Chinook salmon.
Scroll to continue.
The San Joaquin
America’s Most Endangered River
In 2014, the environmental group American Rivers named the San Joaquin “America’s Most Endangered River.” The river has been devastated by dams and water diversions delivering the bulk of the river’s flow to the region’s farms and cities.
This change has been devastating to migratory fish populations like salmon, steelhead, and sturgeon and other species dependent on wetland ecosystems.
The lower San Joaquin flows through a mosaic of farmlands in the Central Valley. Water Education Foundation
Friant Dam
The Great Barrier
Friant Dam is the ultimate barrier to salmon on the San Joaquin River. Constructed in the late 1930s as part of the Central Valley Project, the dam dramatically altered the hydrology of the San Joaquin, shunting most of the river’s flow into the Friant-Kern Canal, which today delivers water to more than a million acres of farmland and a quarter of a million people in the Central Valley.
Construction of Friant Dam, a centerpiece of the Central Valley Project, began in 1939 and finished in 1942. Friant Water Authority
Friant Dam
The Great Barrier
Friant Dam is the ultimate barrier to salmon on the San Joaquin River. Constructed in the late 1930s as part of the Central Valley Project, the dam dramatically altered the hydrology of the San Joaquin, shunting most of the river’s flow into the Friant-Kern Canal, which today delivers water to more than a million acres of farmland and a quarter of a million people in the Central Valley.
Construction of Friant Dam, a centerpiece of the Central Valley Project, began in 1939 and finished in 1942. Friant Water Authority
Millerton, California
A Town, Drowned
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, steamboats could pass up the San Joaquin River as far as this now-vanished settlement. Before its impoundment, the river could reach spring flows of 10,000 cubic feet per second or more.
The former riverside town of Millerton was submerged under the reservoir that bears its name. Millerton Lake State Recreation Area
Millerton, California
A Town, Drowned
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, steamboats could pass up the San Joaquin River as far as this now-vanished settlement. Before its impoundment, the river could reach spring flows of 10,000 cubic feet per second or more.
The former riverside town of Millerton was submerged under the reservoir that bears its name. Millerton Lake State Recreation Area
Upper San Joaquin River and Tributaries
Denied Access
The construction of Friant Dam cut the San Joaquin River in two, denying Chinook access to their historic spawning grounds in the river’s high-elevation tributaries. This loss of habitat led to a calamitous crash in salmon populations.
Thousand Island Lake, a favorite destination of backpackers, marks the spectacular headwaters of the San Joaquin. Flickr User Marty B
Upper San Joaquin River and Tributaries
Denied Access
The construction of Friant Dam cut the San Joaquin River in two, denying Chinook access to their historic spawning grounds in the river’s high-elevation tributaries. This loss of habitat led to a calamitous crash in salmon populations.
Thousand Island Lake, a favorite destination of backpackers, marks the spectacular headwaters of the San Joaquin. Flickr User Marty B
Bureau of Reclamation Restoration Area
A Landmark Restoration
In 2006, a landmark settlement was reached between environmental groups and the Bureau of Reclamation requiring the agency to restore a self-sustaining population of Chinook salmon below Friant Dam.
Fifteen years on, the effort has met resistance, particularly from agricultural interests in the valley. But the San Joaquin and its salmon have also shown tantalizing signs of rebirth.
Restoration scientists check a rotary screw trap for migrating salmon. San Joaquin River Restoration Program
Bureau of Reclamation Restoration Area
A Landmark Restoration
In 2006, a landmark settlement was reached between environmental groups and the Bureau of Reclamation requiring the agency to restore a self-sustaining population of Chinook salmon below Friant Dam.
Fifteen years on, the effort has met resistance, particularly from agricultural interests in the valley. But the San Joaquin and its salmon have also shown tantalizing signs of rebirth.
Restoration scientists check a rotary screw trap for migrating salmon. San Joaquin River Restoration Program
Reach 1A
New Spawning Grounds
The 25-mile stretch of river below Friant Dam is a key part of the San Joaquin restoration. Known as Reach 1A, this stretch of river is supplied with cold water coursing from the bottom of Friant Dam and provides restored salmon populations with viable spawning habitat.
A verdant stretch of the San Joaquin known as Reach 1A is critical spawning habitat for Chinook salmon. Jeremy Miller
Scout Island
A Vital Refuge for Fish and People
Along Reach 1A are small areas of riparian vegetation that once filled the lower reaches of the San Joaquin River. These areas provide habitat for spawning salmon and dozens of other species of birds, mammals, and plants. They are also coveted by locals, who flock to the river in large numbers during summer to escape the heat.
Recreationists enjoy the cold waters of the San Joaquin River on the outskirts of Fresno. Jeremy Miller
Scout Island
A Vital Refuge for Fish and People
Along Reach 1A are small areas of riparian vegetation that once filled the lower reaches of the San Joaquin River. These areas provide habitat for spawning salmon and dozens of other species of birds, mammals, and plants. They are also coveted by locals, who flock to the river in large numbers during summer to escape the heat.
Recreationists enjoy the cold waters of the San Joaquin River on the outskirts of Fresno. Jeremy Miller
Mendota Dam
Giving Salmon a Way Around
Mendota Dam, built in 1919, is among the most serious barriers facing salmon and other migratory fish species in the lower river. It is also the site of the priciest and most complex project of the San Joaquin River restoration. When complete, Reach 2B will incorporate a large bypass channel that will allow spawning salmon upstream and juvenile fish to avoid the dam.
Mendota Dam is an antiquated structure on the lower San Joaquin that blocks the passage of salmon and other migratory fish. Mette Lampkov
Eastside Bypass
Loosening the Straitjacket on the San Joaquin
Over the years, engineers transformed large stretches of the river, including the Eastside Bypass, from a meandering waterway into a linear water conveyance system. These changes had drastic consequences for salmon as well as dozens of other wetland species. In low-water years, salmon must be captured and hauled in trucks around these choke points to Reach 1A, below Friant Dam. While the restoration does not call for the removal of the bypass altogether, it seeks to make it more navigable for fish.
Along much of its lower section, the once sinuous riverbed of the San Joaquin has been hemmed into linear concrete canals. Jeremy Miller
Eastside Bypass
Loosening the Straitjacket on the San Joaquin
Over the years, engineers transformed large stretches of the river, including the Eastside Bypass, from a meandering waterway into a linear water conveyance system. These changes had drastic consequences for salmon as well as dozens of other wetland species. In low-water years, salmon must be captured and hauled in trucks around these choke points to Reach 1A, below Friant Dam. While the restoration does not call for the removal of the bypass altogether, it seeks to make it more navigable for fish.
Along much of its lower section, the once sinuous riverbed of the San Joaquin has been hemmed into linear concrete canals. Jeremy Miller
Confluence with Tuolumne River
A Watery World
One can get a sense of the pre-engineered San Joaquin in the writings of John Muir. In a journal entry from November 1877, Muir wrote of a watery landscape in which “salmon in great numbers … [made] their way up the river for the first time this season.” Muir also noted the presence of “mud” from hydraulic gold mining operations miles upstream, hinting at the multitude of impacts to come.
The confluence of the Tuolomne and San Joaquin Rivers was once part of a Mexican land grant called El Pescador (the fisherman). David Rumsey Map Collection
Confluence with Tuolumne River
A Watery World
One can get a sense of the pre-engineered San Joaquin in the writings of John Muir. In a journal entry from November 1877, Muir wrote of a watery landscape in which “salmon in great numbers … [made] their way up the river for the first time this season.” Muir also noted the presence of “mud” from hydraulic gold mining operations miles upstream, hinting at the multitude of impacts to come.
The confluence of the Tuolomne and San Joaquin Rivers was once part of a Mexican land grant called El Pescador (the fisherman). David Rumsey Map Collection
Dos Rios Wetland Restoration
Remaking the San Joaquin’s Wetlands
Today, at the confluence of the San Joaquin and Tuolumne Rivers, an ambitious restoration project is underway to restore the kind of wetland habitat that Muir would have seen nearly 150 years ago. The Dos Rios Ranch Preserve, overseen by the nonprofit River Partners, seeks to restore a 2,100-acre parcel of wetland. Since acquiring the property in 2012, River Partners has restored 1,600 acres of the Dos Rios allotment.
The Dos Rios Restoration encompasses 2,100 acres of riverside farmlands being transformed into wetland habitat. River Partners
Dos Rios Wetland Restoration
Remaking the San Joaquin’s Wetlands
Today, at the confluence of the San Joaquin and Tuolumne Rivers, an ambitious restoration project is underway to restore the kind of wetland habitat that Muir would have seen nearly 150 years ago. The Dos Rios Ranch Preserve, overseen by the nonprofit River Partners, seeks to restore a 2,100-acre parcel of wetland. Since acquiring the property in 2012, River Partners has restored 1,600 acres of the Dos Rios allotment.
The Dos Rios Restoration encompasses 2,100 acres of riverside farmlands being transformed into wetland habitat. River Partners
San Joaquin–Sacramento River Delta and Beyond
Challenges Beyond
The perils for salmon extend beyond the river and into the great estuary, or delta, formed at the confluence of the San Joaquin and Sacramento Rivers. Massive pumps delivering water to the aqueducts of the State Water Project have altered the river’s salinity and harmed migrating salmon, which depend on water chemistry for navigation. Collapsing marine ecosystems in San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean—driven by climate change, overfishing, and pollution—have also seriously imperiled the recovery of the San Joaquin’s salmon population.
A coproduction of Sierra Magazine and The Water Desk
Written and produced by Jeremy Miller and Geoff McGhee/The Water Desk
Supported by a grant from The Water Desk, part of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Map sources: United States Bureau of Reclamation; River Partners
Ed Johnson smokes a cigarette in Hasty, Colorado, on Sept. 22, 2020. “I am hightailing it out of here,” he said. In the morning, he planned to start driving to South Carolina and move in with his brother. Johnson said he is not leaving because of the water issues in the area, even though the water has been bad for as long as he could remember. “It tastes like there is sweat in it,” he said. “That is nothing new. No, I’m leaving because this place is just plain hard.” RJ SANGOSTI, THE DENVER POST
Sunlight tunneled into the room and danced with smoke from Ed Johnson’s cigarette. He sat thinking of his mother.
In 2013, he moved back to the two-bedroom home in Hasty, on the southeastern plains of Colorado, to take care of her. Johnson, 62, remained in the house after her death in 2016.
The home is located at the entrance of John Martin Reservoir in Bent County. The town has a small general store, a post office, a bait shop and a campground that hosts guests visiting the reservoir mostly in the summer months. Several homes, similar in size to Johnson’s, are gridded along blocks of dirt roads that make up the township.
In the 1940s, the Arkansas River was dammed south of town to build the reservoir, a place locals call the Sapphire on the Plains. The reservoir was tied up in a 40-year battle until Colorado and Kansas came to an agreement, in 2019, to provide an additional water source to help keep the levels high enough for recreation and to support fish.
Forty years may seem like a long time to develop a plan to save fish and improve water levels for a reservoir, but southeastern Colorado is used to long fights when it comes to water.
Pelicans gather on a small island exposed by low water levels at John Martin Reservoir in Hasty, Colorado, on Oct. 3, 2020. In 2019, Colorado and Kansas came to an agreement to provide an additional water source to feed the reservoir, which the Colorado Department of Wildlife calls a conservation pool. It took 40 years for this agreement to come to fruition to help with fish loss and keep the reservoir levels high enough for recreation. RJ SANGOSTI/THE DENVER POST
For nearly a century, leaders in southeastern Colorado have worked on plans to bring clean drinking water to the area through the proposed Arkansas Valley Conduit, but progress on the pipeline project stalled after a major push in the 1960s. Pollution, water transfers and years of worsening drought amid a warming climate continue to build stress for water systems in the area. Adding to that, the area continues to see population decline combined with a struggling economy.
The water needed for the conduit will be sourced from melting snowpack in the Mosquito and Sawatch mountain ranges. Under the Fryingpan-Arkansas Project Act, passed in the early 1960s, the water has been allocated for usage in the Lower Arkansas Valley. The water will be stored at Pueblo Reservoir and travel through existing infrastructure to east Pueblo near the airport. From there, the conduit will tie into nearly 230 miles of pipeline to feed water to 40 communities in need.
Renewed plans to build a pipeline to deliver clean drinking water to the Lower Arkansas Valley are bringing hope for many people in southeastern Colorado. But in an area that is inextricably linked to its water, the future can seem unclear.
One thing that was crystal clear were Johnson’s plans for the next morning.
“I am hightailing it out of here,” he said.
His black sedan was parked outside, and his belongings were piled past the windows. In the morning, he planned to start driving to South Carolina. “I’m gonna move in with my brother,” he said.
Johnson said he is not leaving because of the water issues in the area, even though the water has been bad as long as he could remember.
“It tastes like there is sweat in it,” he said. “That is nothing new. No, I’m leaving because this place is just plain hard.”
Hasty can feel like one of those places where time stopped. “You stand outside the post office, and you hear the same people say the same things,” Johnson said. For him, that was the hardest part of living there.
LEFT: A truck drives past Valley Grocery in Hasty, Colorado, on March 9, 2021. RIGHT: Bill Yates drinks a cup of coffee at Valley Grocery. Yates, at 81 years old, believes he may be the living resident who has lived in Hasty the longest. “For as long as I can remember, water has been an issue around here,” Yates said. RJ SANGOSTI, THE DENVER POST
“Always talk and never action,” he said.
“Look at this dirt. You know how many times I heard them say they were going to pave the roads (in Hasty)?”
Johnson figured the plans to fix the drinking water were the same. Just talk with no action, and, for him, he’d had enough. Hasty, and its 144 residents, are now minus one.
“Deliver on that promise”
“It was nearly 100 years ago, in the 1930s, that the residents of southeast Colorado recognized that the water quality in the lower valley of the Arkansas River was quite poor,” said Bill Long, president of the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District and a former Bent County commissioner.
Water systems in the district, which includes Pueblo, Crowley, Bent, Prowers, Kiowa and Otero counties, have two main issues affecting drinking water.
The first is that a majority of those systems rely on alluvial groundwater, which can have a high level of dissolved solids. This can include selenium, sulfate, manganese and uranium, which are linked to human health concerns.
Second, the remaining systems in the water district rely on the Dakota-Cheyenne bedrock aquifer that can be affected by naturally occurring radionuclides. Radium and other radionuclides in the underlying geologic rock formation can dissolve into the water table and then be present in drinking water wells, also carrying health risks.
In 1962, residents in southeastern Colorado thought President John F. Kennedy was delivering a solution to their drinking water problem during a ceremony in Pueblo. Congress had passed the Fryingpan-Arkansas Project Act, and Kennedy came to Pueblo to authorize the construction of a pipeline to deliver clean drinking water.
President John F. Kennedy delivers remarks in Pueblo, Colorado, to commemorate the Fryingpan-Arkansas Reclamation Project in 1962. ROBERT KNUDSEN, WHITE HOUSE PHOTOGRAPHS, JOHN F. KENNEDY PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM, BOSTON
Kennedy said, “I hope that those of us who hold positions of public responsibility in 1962 are as far-seeing about the needs of this country in 1982 and 1992 as those men and women were 30 years ago who began to make this project possible. The world may have been built in seven days, but this project was built in 30 years.”
Residents of the 1930s began working on ideas to deliver clean drinking water to southeastern Colorado. By the 1950s, they were selling gold frying pans to raise money to send backers to Washington, D.C., to encourage Congress to pass the Fryingpan-Arkansas Project Act. But it wasn’t until 1962 that the pipeline authorization became a reality.
Fast forward 58 years, and two more politicians came to Pueblo to address a crowd about the same pipeline project. This time, on Oct. 3, 2020, it was at the base of Pueblo Dam. Because of funding shortfalls, the Arkansas Valley Conduit was never built after it was authorized in 1962.
The Colorado communities could not afford to cover 100% of the costs, as initially required, so in 2009, the act was amended to include a 65% federal share and a 35% local cost share. Additionally, in 2020, Congress appropriated $28 million more toward the project, according to the water conservancy district.
That October day, Sens. Michael Bennet and Cory Gardner took turns talking about the importance of the project. They told a small crowd that when the pipeline is built, it will provide clean drinking water to 50,000 residents in southeastern Colorado.
LEFT, CENTER: Shovels and chairs are lined up at the base of the Pueblo dam during a groundbreaking ceremony for the Arkansas Valley Conduit in Pueblo, Colorado on October 3, 2020. RIGHT: Colorado Senators Michael Bennet and Cory Gardner attended the groundbreaking ceremony Both senators spoke about the importance of the conduit that would provide clean drinking water to 50,000 residents in Southeastern Colorado. RJ SANGOSTI, THE DENVER POST
With dignitaries beside them, the two senators drove shiny new shovels into dirt to mark the day the Arkansas Valley Conduit construction began.
“In 1962, President Kennedy came to Pueblo, Colorado, and promised that we would build the Arkansas Valley Conduit. Here we are in 2020, and we’re beginning construction for the first time to actually deliver on that promise,” Gardner said.
The water conservancy district estimates the pipeline project’s cost will range from $546 million to $610 million.
“This is important to those 40 communities. They can no longer afford to treat their drinking water,” Gardner said.
Bennet said, “We got an important decision to make in this country about whether we’re gonna have a rural America or not. You can’t have a rural America if you don’t have clean water.”
In a statement, the Bureau of Reclamation said “a reliable source of clean, safe water is needed for the area’s health and welfare.”
Physical construction of the pipeline won’t start until 2022, according to the water district.
Map provided by Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District and done by the Bureau of Reclamation. The map was modified to add locations referenced in the story.
“They are the ones with the knowledge”
“Uncle Frank was a big shot on the Fryingpan project. He met Kennedy when he came to Pueblo,” said Steve Milenski, referring to JFK’s visit in 1962.
Frank Milenski stands by the Catlin Ditch near Rocky Ford, Colorado, on Nov. 3, 1985. Damian Strohmeyer, Denver Post file
Milenski’s wife, Sandy, helped him maneuver his electric wheelchair into place at the dining room table before taking a seat next to him. The Milenskis talked about their family’s long history with water, and both took moments during the conversation to peer out of a window from their red brick ranch-style home near Las Animas, in Bent County.
Milenski was a longtime cowboy who grew up in Rocky Ford and was in the area most of his life. At 74 years old, he was living with Parkinson’s disease.
With help from his wife and friends, Milenski wrote down stories about working at a feedlot in Rocky Ford and about being a cowboy. They were stories he wanted to pass down.
The sun sets over cattle at Rocky Ford Livestock in Rocky Ford, Colorado, on Oct. 13, 2020. Steve Milenski said he was a cowboy for the feed yards in Rocky Ford when he was younger. RJ SANGOSTI, THE DENVER POST
“In 1964, I got out of high school and drifted into the real world of digging post holes, driving trucks and breaking horses,” he wrote in one of the stories. He talked about learning to drive at 8 years old while helping his father feed cattle.
In another story, he wrote about the pain he had from Parkinson’s. “My personal belief is that pain and Parkinson’s disease go hand and hand with each other,” he wrote.
Milenski served during the Vietnam War in 1967 and ‘68. It was one of only a few times he was away from the Arkansas Valley, he said.
Milenski believed that his Parkinson’s was a result of his time in the Vietnam War, but still he and his wife wondered if his exposure to groundwater in the Arkansas Valley also played a part.
Steve Milenski heads into the kitchen to join his wife Sandy in Las Animas, Colorado, on Oct. 12, 2020. At 74 years old, he was living with Parkinson’s disease. Steve believed that his Parkinson’s was a result of his time in the Vietnam War, but still he and his wife wondered if his exposure to groundwater in the Arkansas Valley also played a part. RIGHT: Sandy Milenski holds a photo of her husband Steve working as a cowboy when he was younger. RJ SANGOSTI, THE DENVER POST
“It worries me a lot. It’s starting to show up in people’s health,” Sandy said, referring to the groundwater.
Milenski, a man who liked telling stories from his past, began to tell one about hunting turtle doves when he was a young man. He recalled telling the same story to his son. It was a memory about hunting near Rocky Ford, cleaning and dressing the birds in an irrigation ditch, and cooking them over a campfire. “You can’t do that anymore. The ditch is full of chemicals,” he told his son.
The irony that people in the area who work in agriculture are not able to return home to clean drinking water was not lost to Milenski. He emphasized that many people in agriculture deal with water on a daily basis as part of their livelihood. “They know more about water than most water managers,” he said.
“You have to give the freedom back to the farmers. They are the ones with the knowledge,” Milenski said.
Milenski died at home on Jan. 20, leaving his family with the stories he wrote down. He dedicated the handmade book filled with his stories and poems to his children. In a passage he wrote to Sandy, he said: “Two people are automatically admitted to heaven: a cowboy for putting up with all the weather and nature’s spiteful ways, and his wife for putting up with him.”
A flag marks where Steve Milenski was laid to rest at Valley View Hillcrest Cemetery in Rocky Ford, Colorado, on March 9, 2021. Before Milenski passed away from Parkinson’s disease, he wrote down stories about his life. In a passage he wrote to his wife Sandy, he said, “Two people are automatically admitted to heaven: a cowboy for putting up with all the weather and nature’s spiteful ways, and his wife for putting up with him.” RJ SANGOSTI, THE DENVER POST
“They wanted the water”
“We’ve had enough,” said Roger Wilson. Somehow, they just knew the timing was right, he said. Wilson and his three brothers decided to auction off their parents’ farm in Olney Springs.
The auction list included 40 acres of farmland, the three-bedroom house, several outbuildings, tractors, tools, 40 shares of irrigation water from the Colorado Canal, and another 40 shares from Lake Meredith Reservoir.
A painting of Jesus walking on water is the only item that remains in the home where Roger Wilson was raised in Olney Springs, Colorado, on Oct. 12, 2020. The family is auctioning off the farm after Wilson’s father, Walter, died in 2019 of heart complications while sitting on his recliner in his three-bedroom farmhouse where he and his wife Emma raised four boys. Emma died of Parkinson’s disease and dementia a year later in 2020. RJ SANGOSTI, THE DENVER POST
“My dad must’ve had a separate set of wrenches for every piece of farm equipment he owned,” Wilson joked as he sorted five-gallon buckets full of his father’s tools while they got ready for the auction. Sockets went in one bucket, while open-ended wrenches went into another.
LEFT: Roger Wilson prepares to auction off his parents’ farm in Olney Springs, Colorado, on Oct. 12, 2020. “Everything sold,” Wilson later said about the auction. “Crowley County Water Association bought the house, the farmland and everything on it,” he said. “They wanted the water.” CENTER: “My dad must’ve had a separate set of wrenches for every piece of farm equipment he owned,” Roger Wilson joked as he sorted his father’s tools while they got ready for the auction. RIGHT: Roger Wilson heads back to his house for lunch after spending the morning preparing items for auction at his parents’ farm. The auction list included 40 acres of farmland, the three-bedroom house, several outbuildings, tractors, tools, 40 shares of irrigation water from the Colorado Canal and another 40 shares from Lake Meredith Reservoir. RJ SANGOSTI, THE DENVER POST
“Everything sold,” Wilson later said. “Crowley County Water Association bought the house, the farmland and everything on it. They wanted the water.”
He wasn’t sure what the association’s managers planned to do with the home or the farmland, but he guessed they would hold onto the water rights until the time came when they really needed it. Crowley County has sold much of its water to the city of Aurora for municipal use.
Wilson said most of the town showed up for the auction. Things like that become big news in small towns like Olney Springs.
Doug Kenney, director of the Western Water Policy Program at the University of Colorado Boulder, said when a farmer has to downsize, for whatever reason, there are big consequences.
A dried-up and abandoned farm in Crowley County, Colorado, on Oct. 3, 2020. Crowley County sold much of its water to the city of Aurora for municipal use. RJ SANGOSTI, THE DENVER POST
If a rural community sees water sold off voluntarily by farmers who no longer find the lifestyle viable, that can be “a real problem for all those that depend on the jobs, revenues and even the cultural identity that comes with living in a farm town,” Kenney said.
LEFT: A resident put up a sign asking people to pray for the town outside their home in Olney Springs, Colorado, on March 9, 2021. Olney Springs is one of six water systems in Crowley County that plans to have a delivery point, known as a spur, to the future Arkansas Valley Conduit. RIGHT: Copper pipes and wiring are stripped from an abandoned home in Olney Springs. RJ SANGOSTI, THE DENVER POST
Richard Pasquarello walks past a hand-painted sign with stenciled letters that welcomes travelers on Highway 96 into the town of Olney Springs, Colorado, on March 9, 2021. Olney Springs is one of six water systems in Crowley County that plans to have a delivery point, known as a spur, to the future AVC. RJ SANGOSTI, THE DENVER POST
“The solution to pollution Is dilution”
A hand-painted sign with stenciled letters welcomes travelers on Highway 96 into Olney Springs. The highway cuts across four blocks that make up the width of the small town with around 340 residents.
Olney Springs is one of six water systems in Crowley County that plans to have a delivery point, known as a spur, on the Arkansas Valley Conduit. The plans for the pipeline call for two spurs in Pueblo County, three in both Bent and Prowers counties, and one in Kiowa County. Out of the 40 total participants, the remaining 25 are in Otero County.
Located along the Arkansas River about 70 miles east of Pueblo, La Junta is the largest municipality in Otero County. With its population around 7,000 and a Walmart Supercenter, a Holiday Inn Express and Sonic Drive-In, La Junta can feel like a metropolis when compared to Olney Springs.
La Junta is one of two Arkansas Valley Conduit participants, along with Las Animas, that uses reverse osmosis to remove potentially harmful and naturally occurring toxins from the water. Reverse osmosis is a process that uses pressure to push water through a membrane to remove contaminants. According to the Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Reclamation’s Arkansas Valley Conduit Environmental Impact Statement, reverse osmosis can treat source water to meet standards, but the brine from the process “is an environmental concern, and operation costs are high.”
AVC PROJECT PARTICIPANTS
Story continues below table
Pueblo County Boone Avondale
Crowley County 96 Pipeline Company Crowley County Water Association Town of Crowley Town of Olney Springs Town of Ordway Town of Sugar City
Bent County Hasty Water Company City of Las Animas McClave Water Association
Prowers County City of Lamar May Valley Water Association Town of Wiley
Kiowa County Town of Eads
Otero County Beehive Water Association Bents Fort Water Company Town of Cheraw East End Water Association Eureka Water Company Fayette Water Association Town of Fowler Hancock Inc. Hilltop Water Company
Holbrook Center Soft Water Association Homestead Improvement Association City of La Junta Town of Manzanola Newdale-Grand Valley Water Company North Holbrook Water Patterson Valley Water Company Riverside Water Company City of Rocky Ford South Side Water Association South Swink Water Company Town of Swink Valley Water Company Vroman Water Company West Grand Valley Water West Holbrook Water
Source: Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District
The other participants use conventional methods to treat water. The environmental impact statement said those methods can be as simple as adding chlorine for disinfection and filtration or adding chemicals to remove suspended solids, but that those treatments “…cannot remove salt or radionuclides from water.”
Tom Seaba, director of water and wastewater for La Junta, said out of a total of 24 water districts in Otero County, 19 were in violation with the state due to elevated levels of radionuclide.
Four of the 19 came into compliance with the state’s drinking water standards after La Junta brought them onto its water system. The remaining 15 are still in violation with the state, according to Seaba.
La Junta spent $18.5 million to build a wastewater treatment plant that came online in 2019 to help meet water standards for its community. But the city’s water treatment came with its own issue: selenium.
After La Junta treats its water using reverse osmosis, the water system is left with a concentrate, which is safe drinking water. However, it’s also left with a waste stream high in selenium. “That wastewater has to go somewhere,” Seaba said. It goes to the city’s new wastewater treatment plant.
LEFT: Inside the water treatment facility in La Junta, Colorado, on Sept. 23, 2020. La Junta is one of two Arkansas Valley Conduit participants, along with Las Animas, that uses reverse osmosis to remove potentially harmful and naturally occurring toxins from the water. RIGHT: Outside the water treatment facility in La Junta. Tom Seaba, director of water and wastewater for the city, said that after La Junta treats its water it is left with a waste stream high in selenium. Seaba is looking to the future Arkansas Valley Conduit as a possible answer. “The solution to pollution is dilution,” he said. RJ SANGOSTI, THE DENVER POST
“Same city, different department, same problem,” said Seaba, explaining how the waste now becomes a problem for the treatment plant. “They’re the ones that will end up taking the hit for a high selenium content being discharged into the King Arroyo (stream) first and then into the Arkansas River.”
Water flows out of a pipe into the King Arroyo stream from the treatment plant in La Junta, Colorado, on March 9, 2021. “Same city, different department, same problem,” said Tom Seaba, director of water and wastewater for the city of La Junta. He was explaining how the waste now becomes a problem for the treatment plant. “They’re the ones that will end up taking the hit for a high selenium content being discharged into the King Arroyo first and then into the Arkansas River.” La Junta is one of two Arkansas Valley Conduit participants, along with Las Animas, that uses reverse osmosis to remove potentially harmful and naturally occurring toxins from the water. RJ SANGOSTI, THE DENVER POST
According to the environmental impact statement, “La Junta’s wastewater discharge makes up about 1.5% of average annual flow in the Arkansas River.” The study goes on to say that during drought or low-flow events, the wastewater discharge can contribute up to half of the streamflow downstream from the gage.
Seaba is looking to the Arkansas Valley Conduit as a possible answer. “The solution to pollution is dilution,” he said. The water from the pipeline will not have a selenium problem, Seaba explained. By blending water from the conduit with the selenium waste from reverse osmosis, La Junta hopes to reduce costs and stay compliant with Environmental Protection Agency standards to discharge into the river.
The environmental review studied a section of the Arkansas River from where Fountain Creek runs into the river east to the Kansas border. The study found that a section of the river was impaired by selenium. “High amounts of selenium and other metals are toxic to fish. High levels of selenium can also result in human health problems,” the report noted.
A braided section of the Arkansas River, seen from the air, flows east toward Kansas in Pueblo County, Colorado, on Oct. 3, 2020. RJ SANGOSTI, THE DENVER POST
Seaba said “the expectation of systems to discharge water that is several times lower than what is naturally occurring can be frustrating and also exceptionally expensive. That cost can be a very difficult burden for citizens and systems that are in a recognized, economically depressed area.”
“I sure don’t drink it”
The EPA sets a maximum contaminant level in drinking water at 5 picocuries per liter of air for combined radium and 30 micrograms per liter for combined uranium. If contaminant levels are above those numbers, the water system is in violation of drinking water regulations, which the state enforces.
According to data provided by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, the Patterson Valley Water Company in Otero County, one of the 40 pipeline participants, had the highest result of 31 picocuries per liter for combined radium in 2020. In that same county, Rocky Ford, another pipeline participant, had a high result of 0.2 picocuries per liter for combined radium. According to the state health department, Rocky Ford’s combined radium sample numbers were last recorded in 2013.
A truck is parked on Main Street in Rocky Ford, Colorado, on March 9, 2021. RJ SANGOSTI, THE DENVER POST
Manzanola, also in Otero County and a pipeline participant, topped the list with the highest result of 42 micrograms per liter for combined uranium in 2020. In contrast, 19 other pipeline participants, from across the valley, had results of 0 micrograms per liter for combined uranium, according to the most recent numbers from the state health department.
Levels of the two carcinogens are sporadic throughout the valley. The average of the highest results of all 40 participants in the pipeline for combined radium is roughly 8 picocuries per liter and combined uranium is roughly 5 micrograms per liter. According to Seaba, averaging the members’ highest results might seem unfair to some individual water systems because it brings their numbers up, but what those averages do show is that water in Pueblo Reservoir, which will feed the future conduit, is approximately three times less affected by combined radium and combined uranium than the average of current water used by pipeline participants. In 2020, the highest result of combined radium in the Pueblo Reservoir was 2.52 picocuries per liter, and the highest result of combined uranium was 1.7 micrograms per liter.
The EPA warns that long exposure to carcinogens like radium and uranium can lead to an increased risk of cancer, along with other health issues.
Data provided by Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment
“I sure don’t drink it,” said Manny Rodriquez. “I don’t think anybody in town drinks the water.”
Rodriquez, who grew up in and still lives in Rocky Ford, was not sure if the water at his apartment was in violation of the state’s clean drinking water act or not. State data showed at that time his water was not in violation. Colorado is required to notify residents if their water system is in violation of the clean drinking water act.
Rodriquez watched as his girlfriend Shasta Nieto gave the couple’s 3-week-old baby Jakobe a bath in the kitchen sink at Rodriquez’s apartment.
Shasta Nieto gives her 3-month-old baby, Jakobe Rodriquez, a bath in the kitchen sink at her boyfriend’s apartment in Rocky Ford, Colorado, on Feb. 18, 2021. Nieto and her boyfriend Manny Rodriquez, Jakobe’s father, grew up in the area. Rodriquez, who has other children, said he buys bottled water for his family to drink, but they have no option but to bathe with the tap water. “I don’t think anybody in town drinks the water,” Rodriquez said. RJ SANGOSTI, THE DENVER POST
“(In the shower), sometimes I look up and wonder what is spraying on me,” he said. While Rodriquez buys bottled water for his family to drink, he said they have no option but to bathe with the tap water.
It can be hard for residents to keep track of it all. Especially in Otero County, where at the start of 2021, the county had 421 outstanding water violations listed on the state health department’s website.
MaryAnn Nason, a spokesperson for the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, used an example to show how violations can add up: “If a public water system has two entry points that fail for both combined radium and gross alpha (measures of radionuclides), and they have those same violations for 10 years each quarter, that is going to appear as 160 violations on the website. But really, it is one naturally occurring situation that exists for a relatively long time,” Nason said.
For some residents like Ruby Lucero, 83, it makes little difference to her if her water is in violation with the state or not. She plans to buy her drinking water no matter what the results say about her tap water.
Lucero opened her change purse and pulled out exactly $2.80. She knew the amount well. It is what she spends every week filling up eight one-gallon bottles of clean drinking water at a water fill-up station outside of Rocky Ford Food Market.
“I’ve been doing this for over 20 years,” she said. For Lucero, buying clean drinking water has become just part of normal life living in Rocky Ford.
The environmental impact statement said, “The largest increase in median dissolved-uranium concentrations occurs between Rocky Ford and La Junta, where it more than doubles.” The statement goes on to say the probabilities of exceeding the primary drinking water standard for uranium in groundwater are high in counties like Otero.
Ruby Lucero, 83, fills up eight one-gallon bottles of clean drinking water at a water fill-up station outside of Rocky Ford Food Market in Rocky Ford, Colorado, on Feb. 17, 2021. “I’ve been doing this for over 20 years,” she said. For Lucero, buying clean drinking water has become just part of daily life in Rocky Ford. RJ SANGOSTI, THE DENVER POST
“The struggling farmer”
In the past decade, Otero County has seen a 2.9% drop in population. Residents have a ballpark difference of $38,000 in the median household income compared to the rest of the state, and the county is not alone. All six counties that are part of current plans for the Arkansas Valley Conduit are seeing economic hard times.
Adding to those factors is drought. Years of drought keep hitting the area’s No. 1 industry: agriculture.
This roadside market sells the melons that Rocky Ford is known for during melon season, but otherwise is empty as seen on March 9, 2021. In 1878, the area started celebrating its agricultural history with the annual Watermelon Day. RJ SANGOSTI, THE DENVER POST
Glenn Hirakata, a fourth-generation farmer in Otero County, knows all too well the effect drought is having on his family’s farm. Hirakata and his cousin Michael co-own Hirakata Farms in Rocky Ford, where they are known for growing mostly melons. During the season, the farm has between 80 and 100 employees.
“We have basically one shot every year to make a crop,” Hirakata said.
But drought has made that one shot harder.
Farmworkers take a break to eat lunch at Hirakata Farms in Rocky Ford, Colorado, on Sept. 23, 2020. During the season, the farm has between 80 to 100 employees. RJ SANGOSTI, THE DENVER POST
“You can plan out everything, how you wanted it to go, but as you see the water situation dwindle, you have to make adjustments. It will keep you up at night,” he said. “As the snowpack dwindles and the runoff starts to slow down, you’ll start losing your irrigation water. Your crops will start burning up. Why put money into a crop, and then just let it fail? You have to make a decision. We ended up leaving some ground open, not planting every acre.”
In 2020, the cousins made a decision not to plant on 30% of their available land due to drought.
Looking out his truck window at land where nothing was planted, Hirakata said, “We’ve lost water at an earlier stage than normal. We are all out of water right now.”
From the truck, you could see rows of empty dirt going east to west as far as the eye could see. Hirakata said a year before, near the same time, the field was full of watermelons.
In 2020, Hirakata Farms made a decision not to plant on 30% of its available land due to drought. A Hirakata Farms field is pictured on Sept. 23, 2020, in Rocky Ford. RJ SANGOSTI, THE DENVER POST
“As far as the agriculture and the farming side, the (pipeline) project doesn’t have a lot of effect on us. It mostly helps municipalities, but I’m not sure if I’ll ever see it finished in my lifetime,” he said.
The Arkansas Valley Conduit project falls fairly low on the long list of things Hirakata thinks about when it comes to water on the farm. The proximity of Rocky Ford Ditch, which runs near Hirakata Farms, acts as a constant reminder of what is high on his list.
“The ditch down here below us sold off to Aurora,” he said.
The Rocky Ford Ditch’s water rights date back to 1874, making them some of the most senior water rights in the Arkansas River system. In the early 1980s, Aurora was able to buy a majority of those water rights. Over time, Aurora acquired more shares and has converted them to municipal use.
“It’s not if it’s going to happen, it’s when. The Front Range keeps growing and growing, and the pressure for water grows with it. Who will they go to? They will go to the struggling farmer,” Hirakata said.
A dust storm blows through southern Otero County on March 10, 2021. RJ SANGOSTI, THE DENVER POST
“Little bites of an apple”
From a ridge at Kevin Karney’s ranch in southern Otero County, you can see all the way into New Mexico.
At the ranch, Karney tucked himself tight up to a fence as a strong wind blew from the west. A mixture of dust and wind caused his eyes to water while he watched one of his heifers give birth. Karney said it was moments like that when he knows he is doing things right.
Kevin Karney feeds cattle as his ranch in southern Otero County on March 10, 2021. The fourth-generation rancher is the current chairman of the Arkansas Valley Conduit committee for the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District. RIGHT: Kevin Karney ear tags a new calf. RJ SANGOSTI, THE DENVER POST
The former Otero County commissioner and current chairman of the Arkansas Valley Conduit committee for the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District is passionate about agriculture being the cornerstone of southeastern Colorado.
The fourth-generation rancher, and water manager, has been fighting to keep water from being transferred out of agriculture. Recently, he opposed the transfer of water from the Fort Lyon Ditch to Colorado Springs Utilities. Fort Lyon Ditch, nearly 100 miles long, is the largest ditch in the state, and Colorado Springs, one of the largest communities in Colorado, wants the ditch’s water to support its growing municipality.
“Take little bites of an apple. Cumulatively, over time, it’s gone,” Karney said.
The cumulative effect of these water transfers has Karney worried that over time, there may be little water left for agriculture in rural Colorado.
Michael Ortiz works part-time at Kevin Karney’s ranch in southern Otero County on March 10, 2021. Ortiz moves a new calf as a dust storm blows through the area. RJ SANGOSTI, THE DENVER POST
The future in the Lower Arkansas River Valley is also worrisome to water experts like Doug Kenney.
“In a region where water is scarce, water issues are typically a zero-sum game,” said Kenney, director of the Western Water Policy Program. “Those with power — either financial, political or legal — will prevail over those without.
“Over the last 50 years, one of the biggest issues has been the transfer of water out of agriculture into municipal uses, which raises all sorts of socioeconomic issues that the water management rules are poorly equipped to deal with. In an era of water scarcity, it’s about competition, and it’s about winners and losers,” Kenney said.
Back on the ranch, Karney worries those transfers can lead to more “buy and dry scenarios” for the Lower Arkansas River basin. When water is bought and transferred out of an area and leaves it dry, agriculture loses, he said. Without agriculture, Karney feels that rural populations will continue to dwindle, and there may be few people remaining to benefit from the pipeline project.
Kevin Karney checks on a newly born calf at night on his ranch in southern Otero County on March 10, 2021. The fourth-generation rancher is the current chairman of the Arkansas Valley Conduit committee for the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District. RJ SANGOSTI, THE DENVER POST
“We in rural (southeastern Colorado) don’t depend on Amazon. We depend on each other,” he said. The rancher hopes the benefits of the pipeline are not lost. “The conduit is important to us as ag producers because it supports our municipalities. Our services are there — our gas stations, our hospitals, our schools and grocery stores,” Karney said.
He is positive that the pipeline project is more than a pipe dream. Unlike Hirakata, who questioned whether the conduit will be finished in his lifetime, Karney believes the project will be finished according to plans, which call for completion in a 15-year period. Thirty million dollars will need to be appropriated each year during those 15 years.
“We still have a heavy lift before us”
Planned off the main trunk of the Arkansas Valley Conduit, a pump station near Wiley will push water along a spur to support Eads in Kiowa County. Water that ends up in Eads will have traveled the longest distance of the pipeline project. The majority of the pipeline will be gravity-fed, but this section will need to be pumped uphill.
LEFT: Tumbleweeds are caught up in a barbed wire fence as the sun sets in Eads, Colorado on October 12, 2020. Eads is one of 40 participants planning a spur to the future AVC. RIGHT: A car drives through the town of Eads, Colorado on October 12, 2020. RJ SANGOSTI, THE DENVER POST
The journey is a good representation of Eads’ battle with water. Not only is clean drinking water needed, but the area is also desperate for relief from years of drought exacerbated by climate change.
When looking at the U.S. Drought Monitor map at the start of 2021, Eads is easy to spot. On the map, a dark circle surrounds the town. The circle is shaded a burnt red color, representing exceptional drought condition — the highest level. Exceptional drought is defined by the U.S. Drought Monitor as an area seeing dust storms, widespread topsoil removal and high agricultural and recreational economic losses.
“These folks are so stoic,” said Dawn Beck, a physician’s assistant at Eads Rural Health Clinic who grew up in a ranching family in rural Colorado. “Their entire livelihood is based on outcomes that they really have no control over.”
This animation consists of close-up images acquired by the Sentinel 2 satellite about a year apart over Eads, Colorado. One image is from Jan. 14, 2020, when skies were clear. The other is from Jan. 15, 2021, when a sprawling dust storm all but obscured the skies over the struggling high plains agricultural town. The scene is about 16 miles across. (Copernicus Sentinel 2 data processed by Tom Yulsman)
If patients talk about their mental health, Beck just listens. She said they have a cowboy mentality.
“You can see it in their eyes and in their behaviors,” she said. “They went through a drought before. They will get through this again. They are very resilient. They are able to pick themselves up, brush themselves off and move forward. They don’t dwell on things. They really do think positive about the future.”
It is a positive future that Long, president of water conservancy district, hopes the pipeline will help ensure for communities like Eads in rural Colorado.
Will Crow, 16, stocks water at Crow’s Stop and Shop Food Market in Eads, Colorado, on Feb. 16, 2021. Will is the grandson of the owners of the market. The owners said they sell a pallet of water every week and sometimes more in a town with a population of less than 800 people. RJ SANGOSTI, THE DENVER POST
Long said that Eads is different from a majority of the other participants in the project because it is not located along the Arkansas River.
“Their opportunities are even fewer than those opportunities that may exist in communities along the river,” he said. “There’s no irrigation right out of the river.”
The domestic water that will be delivered via the conduit is even more important for a town like Eads, said Long. “It’s very difficult to attract new industry when you have a limited supply of very poor water.”
Long believes the conduit will make a huge difference to support communities in the Lower Arkansas River Valley.
A storefront window in an abandoned building is shattered and left on the ground, seen in Eads, Colorado, on Oct. 12, 2020. Eads is one of 40 participants planning a spur to the future Arkansas Valley Conduit. RJ SANGOSTI, THE DENVER POST
“Economic development and future growth are extremely difficult with the current water supply,” Long said. “If you don’t have good water, you don’t have much of anything.”
Long has been working on the Arkansas Valley Conduit project for nearly 18 years.
“After such a long fight, to finally be where we are feels good, but honestly I can say it doesn’t feel as good as I thought it would. Only because I know we have so much work still to do, and I know how difficult the past 18 years have been,” Long said. “We still have a heavy lift before us.”
This story originally appeared in The Denver Post on June 27, 2021.
River rafters, fishermen and SUP users float on the Gunnison River on June 20, 2021. The Boatable Days Web Tool developed by Kestrel Kunz, American Whitewater’s Southern Rockies associate stewardship director, along with the Upper Gunnison River Conservancy District and Trout Unlimited, forecasts flows for an upcoming boating season based on historic wet and dry years and will help river managers better manage rivers in a time of drought and climate change. Credit: Dean Krakel
Kestrel Kunz is surfing, Colorado style, in her kayak among the waves at the Gunnison Whitewater Park a few miles west of town. The waves are more than recreational play for Kunz. Flowing water is an important part of the work she does for American Whitewater as the organization’s Southern Rockies associate stewardship director. For Kunz, the Gunnison River is like a watery crystal ball that gives her a glimpse into a future increasingly threatened by drought and climate change.
Kunz is the mastermind behind a prototype web tool developed by American Whitewater and the Upper Gunnison River Conservancy District that may change the future of river management across Colorado and eventually the West. The tool, the Upper Gunnison Basin Boatable Days Web Tool, is based on historical wet and dry year flows and other data and gives river users and water managers the ability to check an entire season’s flow forecast.
The Boatable Days Web Tool, Kunz said, “shows the relationship between river flow and recreational opportunities. With a little research we can use historic flows to project how a dry or wet year, a new diversion project, a climate change scenario, or reservoir operations can positively or negatively impact river recreation opportunities and thus Colorado’s robust outdoor economy.”
Being able to look ahead is an especially important feature for the state’s fishing and rafting outfitters, Kunz said. “The web tool will give an estimation on what flows are going to look like and how that is going to affect the number of commercial operating days in an upcoming season and help them plan in advance.” If outfitters know they’re not going to have sufficient boatable flows in September and October they might bring employees in earlier or may have to shift the way they do business and when they do it.
Kunz sees the tool as an opportunity for water managers both locally and at the state level to use the information to better balance flows for recreation with other needs. “This tool provides an important snapshot into how recreation opportunities are going to be impacted by drought. The web tool in no way is going to solve our drought problem, but it’s a critical piece of the puzzle that’s been missing before now.”
Kestrel Kunz surfs in her kayak at the Gunnison Whitewater Park in Gunnison, Colo. on May 24, 2021. Kunz is American Whitewater’s Southern Rockies associate stewardship director and is the creator of the Boatable Days Web Tool, which helps forecast river flows. Credit: Dean Krakel
Kunz and American Whitewater are currently working to fit other pieces of Colorado’s river puzzle together by finalizing boatable days studies on the Roaring Fork, Crystal, and Poudre rivers and creating similar web tools.
“I think the biggest thing the tool does is give us a perspective on how climate change and drought are impacting our rivers,” said Sonja Chavez, general manager of The Upper Gunnison River Water Conservancy District. Chavez believes the next step will be to gain a better understanding of how changing river flows affect the local economy.
“Gunnison has been discovered,” Chavez said. “We have a lot of people visiting and a lot more people on the river.” As river flows drop, rafters, boaters, and other water users are concentrated into certain segments of the river with more frequency, impacting the fishery and wildlife, boat ramps, wetlands and the boating experience. You can see in water short years how that recreation season is shortened and that’s important for a community like Gunnison that is dependent on recreation.
This web tool is going to be a good model for how communities can come together and identify how their rivers are functioning,” said Trout Unlimited’s Dan Omasta. Omasta was TU’s grassroots coordinator during the development stage of the Boatable Days Water Tool and worked with Kunz and American Whitewater to identify ideal flow ranges for fishing and floating, and the high and low thresholds for navigation.
“When is the river too low to float for a dory or raft with clients?” said Omasta. “The tool will especially help identify sections of river that become unnavigable at certain flows. The Taylor and Gunnison rivers are seeing a lot of pressure. They get busier every year and one of the ways to tackle that challenge is to spread people out and encourage them to be floating and fishing different sections.
“More people are recreating on rivers and that’s awesome to see. We just need to be smarter about how we manage it and hopefully this tool can play a part in that,” Omasta said.
Dean Krakel is a photographer and writer based in Almont, Colo. He can be reached at dkrakel@gmail.com.
Fresh Water News is an independent, nonpartisan news initiative of Water Education Colorado. WEco is funded by multiple donors. Our editorial policy and donor list can be viewed at wateredco.org.
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
Colorado lawmakers approved four new bills this session designed to funnel millions in Covid-related relief funds to help finance the Colorado Water Plan, protect watersheds, mitigate wildfires and recover from drought.
Funding Colorado’s Water Plan
The General Assembly cut $3.5 billion from the state’s budget last year, anticipating major revenue shortfalls caused by Covid-19. But tax receipts bounced back quicker than anticipated, improving revenue forecasts for the state’s Fiscal Year 2022, which begins July 1. This allowed lawmakers to set aside $800 million in a stimulus package for use in the year ahead.
One of the bills benefitting from this jolt is House Bill 1260, which transfers $15 million in state general funds to the Water Plan Implementation Cash Fund to be spent by the Colorado Water Conservation Board on grants to help meet the plan’s goals. The bill was sponsored by House Speaker Alec Garnett, D-Denver, and Rep. Marc Catlin, R-Montrose.
It also moves $5 million into CWCB’s Water Supply Reserve Fund for the state’s basin roundtables. Garnett noted that “this is the biggest investment from the general fund we’ve ever made in Colorado’s Water Plan” and said that it will help move the state toward meeting the annual commitment necessary to avoid future water shortfalls. Catlin echoed that sentiment, emphasizing the bill “will allow the state to speed up so more projects are looked at and more [river basin] roundtables can do the work that they were statutorily given.”
While pleased with the improved fiscal outlook and supportive of funding water projects, Sen. Bob Rankin, R-Carbondale, a member of the Joint Budget Committee, cautioned, “The one thing to keep in mind with HB 1260 and other bills like it is that they are one-time funding. What comes next, what’s our long-term plan? We should have sustainable programs.”
Watershed protection and wildfire mitigation
Senate Bill 240, sponsored by Sen. Jessie Danielson, D-Wheat Ridge, and Sen. Cleave Simpson, R-Alamosa, also takes advantage of stimulus money and transfers $30 million in general fund revenue to the CWCB Construction Fund for grants to restore, mitigate and protect watersheds from wildfire-induced erosion and flooding.
House Bill 1008, sponsored by former Rep. Jeni Arndt, D-Fort Collins, and Rep. Catlin, also helps fund watershed protection efforts by authorizing local governments to band together and form special improvement districts empowered to levy property taxes for wildfire mitigation and forest health projects. It also makes those districts eligible for $50 million from a Colorado Water Resources and Power Development Authority bond program and expands the program’s life another 10 years through 2033.
Drought resiliency
Senate Bill 234 creates the Agriculture and Drought Resiliency Fund in the Colorado Department of Agriculture to help the state prepare for and respond to drought. Sponsored by Sen. Sonya Jaquez Lewis, D-Lafayette, and Sen. Jerry Sonnenberg, R-Sterling, it transfers $3 million in general fund revenue to the new fund to support agricultural water projects and recovery of grazing lands affected by wildfires.
What’s next?
In addition to looking at more sustainable funding options for Colorado’s Water Plan, the 2021 interim legislative Water Resources Review Committee is likely to study anti-speculation laws and demand management. The committee will receive recommendations from a work group convened by the Department of Natural Resources exploring ways to strengthen anti-speculation laws.
In calling for the DNR study, Sen. Kerry Donovan, D-Vail, chair of the Senate Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee, said, “We want to make sure that water is put to beneficial use and not used by out-of-state entities trying to make a quick buck on our impending drought situation.”
Demand management, which would involve temporary, voluntary and compensated reductions in consumptive use to bank water in Lake Powell as a hedge against future shortfalls on the Colorado River, is being assessed by CWCB as one option to ensure that Colorado and the three other upper basin states comply with Colorado River Compact delivery obligations.
Larry Morandi was formerly director of State Policy Research with the National Conference of State Legislatures in Denver, and is a frequent contributor to Fresh Water News. He can be reached at larrymorandi@comcast.net.
Fresh Water News is an independent, nonpartisan news initiative of Water Education Colorado. WEco is funded by multiple donors. Our editorial policy and donor list can be viewed at wateredco.org.
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
The Ella Ditch, in the Crystal River Valley, placed a call for the first time ever during the drought-stricken summer of 2018. That meant the Town of Carbondale had to borrow water from the East Mesa Ditch under an emergency water supply plan. CREDIT: BRENT GARDNER-SMITH/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Representatives from the Colorado River Water Conservation District say their efforts to develop a solution to a water shortage on the Crystal River will probably include natural fixes before a dam and reservoir and that the plan should not impact a future Wild & Scenic designation.
Staff from the Glenwood Springs-based Colorado River Water Conservation District presented some preliminary findings of a study of a back-up water supply plan, known as an augmentation plan, to Pitkin County commissioners Tuesday. They said their preference is to find and develop natural infrastructure like aquifer recharge or wetlands restoration before proposing a dam and reservoir.
Water could be diverted and stored in an underground aquifer during peak flows and then be allowed to slowly seep back into the river when it’s needed. Restoring wetlands can raise the water table throughout the valley floor, creating a sponge that holds water.
River District staff said they would absolutely not consider storage on the main stem of the Crystal — any potential small reservoir would be on a tributary — and that whatever solutions they come up with shouldn’t affect the long-held goal of some residents to get a federal Wild & Scenic designation to protect the free-flowing nature of the river.
River District Director of Government Relations Zane Kessler said the River District is working with environmental groups like American Rivers to find a solution to the shortage.
“We see a real opportunity to do something cool here and think outside the box,” he said. “I don’t know that natural infrastructure could take care of all of it, but we want to prioritize that first and look at opportunities.”
The Crystal River in August 2018 was running at 8 cfs near the state fish hatchery. Colorado River Water Conservation District staff said a study of a back-up water supply will look at natural infrastructure before dams and reservoirs to address a water shortage. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Water shortage
The River District, along with Rifle-based West Divide Water Conservancy District, undertook the study, paid for by a state grant, to examine a problem that became evident during the summer of 2018: that in dry years there may not be enough water for both irrigators and residential subdivisions.
“2018 was a wake-up call for water users on the Crystal,” Kessler said.
That August, the Ella Ditch, which irrigates land south of Carbondale, placed a call on the river for the first time ever. That meant that junior water rights holders upstream were supposed to stop taking water so that the Ella Ditch, which has water rights dating to 1902, could receive its full amount. Under Colorado’s prior appropriation system, those with the oldest water rights have first use of the river.
The Colorado Division of Water Resources did not enforce the call by turning off water to homes, but instead told water users they must work together to create a basin-wide augmentation plan.
Most junior water rights holders have augmentation plans, which allows them to continue using water during a call by replacing it with water from another source, like releasing it from a reservoir. The problem on the Crystal is that several residential subdivisions don’t have augmentation plans.
Until water users come up with a permanent solution, DWR has said it may not allow outdoor water use when a senior call is on as a temporary fix. Water managers expect once-rare calls by irrigators to become more frequent as rising temperatures result in less water in streams.
Sprinklers irrigate land on the east side of the Crystal River (in foreground) in August 2018, one of its driest years in recent history. A call by a downstream senior water rights holder during the drought of 2018 illustrated a long-simmering problem: several subdivisions in the Crystal River Valley don’t have back-up water plans.C REDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Demand quantification
River District staff presented the first step in the study: a demand quantification or putting numbers on the amount of water needed for different uses throughout the year.
Engineers found 90 structures — many of them wells for in-house water use — that take water from the river system and which would need to be included in the augmentation plan. These 90 structures deliver water to 197 homes, 80 service connections in Marble, nearly 23 irrigated acres, Beaver Lake and Orlosky Reservoir in Marble, 16,925 square-feet of commercial space, plus some water for livestock.
In order for these water users to keep taking water during a downstream call by an irrigator, they would have to replace about 113 acre-feet of water in the Crystal River per year. The amount of extra flow that would need to be added to the river is small — just .58 cubic feet per second during July, the peak replacement month.
Some commissioners asked if simply using less water — instead of creating a new supply of water — especially by irrigators on the lower Crystal, could solve the problem.
“I’d love to see an analysis of the conservation opportunities,” said Commissioner Kelly McNicholas Kury. “What can we do that’s not taking the water out, but preserving it in the stream?”
River District General Manager Andy Mueller acknowledged there may be more “aggressive” irrigators on the Crystal, but that in addition, climate change is decreasing the amount of water available. He said he wants the River District to work more closely with Pitkin County to find conservation opportunities.
“I think those types of opportunities require identifying the potential for them but then developing relationships with the water users,” Mueller said.
Tuesday’s meeting was a chance for board members from both organizations, which have not historically seen eye to eye on water issues, to work together and ask questions. Next steps include public outreach and education, coordinating with water managers and eventually developing a basin-wide augmentation strategy.
“We are going to continue to evaluate alternatives and try to get some additional expertise in the realm of natural infrastructure or aquifer recharge,” Kessler said. “We are going to do our best to make sure that this effort aligns with the Wild & Scenic values that the community supports.”
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) The Hite Marina boat ramp sits idle hundreds of yards from the river’s edge where the Colorado River flows into Lake Powell on Thursday, Feb. 4, 2021. Utah plans to fill the Lake Powell pipeline with water promised to the Ute Indian Tribe. The Utes say it continues decades of racially based maneuvers.
By Emma Penrod
The following story was supported by funding from The Water Desk and was reported by The Utah Investigative Journalism Project in partnership with The Salt Lake Tribune.
Utah politicians and water officials have for years insisted that there is ample water in the Colorado River to fill its planned 140-mile Lake Powell pipeline to St. George in the southwestern corner of the state.
Utah’s consistent argument that it has nearly 400,000 acre-feet (roughly 130 billion gallons) of undeveloped water in the river is disputed by hydrologists who say it’s using all its allotted share under the 1922 Colorado River Compact. Even so, legal experts and engineers point out that there could be room for additional development — if the state is willing to buy or take the water from someone else.
“If there is going to be a new pipeline,” Eric Kuhn, former general manager of the Colorado River District, said in an interview, “let’s not pretend that it’s going to be using new water. If they build a new pipeline, they’re going to get that from irrigation water.”
There’s one problem: The water the state plans to tap for the Lake Powell pipeline was previously promised to the Ute Indian Tribe, which is now suing to get back its water and asserting that the misappropriation is one of a decades-long string of racially motivated schemes to deprive it of its rights and property.
Pulling the plug on the Central Utah Project
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) The Colorado River flows into Lake Powell near Hite Marina on Thursday, Feb. 4, 2021. Utah plans to fill the Lake Powell pipeline with water promised to the Ute Indian Tribe. The Utes say it continues decades of racially based maneuvers.
The dispute dates to the 1950s and the origins of the Central Utah Project (CUP), a series of pipelines and reservoirs that channels Colorado River water over the Wasatch Mountains to Utah’s population centers in Salt Lake and Utah counties.
Utah water managers at the time leveraged Ute tribal water rights to cut a deal for construction of the CUP. In exchange for the destruction of lands and fisheries essential to the Ute way of life, state and federal governments agreed to extend the project to tribal lands.
But once the first phases of the project were complete, Utah and its federal partners abandoned plans to build dams and pipelines for the Utes, citing excessive costs and underwhelming benefits.
“It is unclear why the costs and benefits varied so significantly,” the tribe’s 2020 federal lawsuit said, referring to the completed CUP phases delivering water to the Wasatch Front compared to the originally proposed tribal phases. “However, it is clear that as an exclusively tribal project — that is, as a project for the delivery of the Tribe’s Reserved Water Rights — [the Bureau of Reclamation] found poor economics, but when non-Indians were included as part of the project, the economics drastically improved.”
These decisions significantly curtailed the tribe’s expected economic benefits from the project, guaranteeing it would not grow as quickly as other communities that received CUP water, the complaint said. It cited, for example, a 2018 attempt by the tribe to enter into a contract with an oil and gas development company, which ultimately fell through because the tribe lacked access to sufficient water to make the project happen.
Moreover, in what the tribe sees as an illegal betrayal and violation of its rights, the state has reassigned the promised water to a variety of other projects, including the Lake Powell pipeline.
Starting in 1996, the Utah Board of Water Resources divvied up the unused CUP water, awarding tens of thousands of acre-feet to the Uintah Water Conservancy District, the Duchesne County Water Conservancy District, and other public and private water developers. Two final divisions plan to split the remainder. Roughly 86,000 acre-feet will be assigned to the 140-mile Lake Powell pipeline — a $1 billion-plus project that still awaits federal approval — and the last 72,641 acre-feet of water has been allotted to a conservation and storage project called the Green River Block.
In a statement to The Utah Investigative Journalism Project, the tribe called the approval of the Green River Block a “sham contract” that lacks “any legal authority.”
According to the tribe’s 2020 federal lawsuit, which names the Green River Block specifically but does not include the as-yet unfinalized Lake Powell pipeline transfer, Utah appears to derive its claimed authority to execute these transfers from the Central Utah Project Completion Act of 1992.
The congressionally approved compact, which required ratification of the state and Ute Tribe, has never won approval of the Utes, rendering it null and void in their eyes. The state Legislature only recently endorsed it.
The act, while promising protection for the tribe’s water rights and future financial compensation for economic losses associated with the incomplete portion of the CUP, said the Bureau of Reclamation no longer would fund the construction of pipelines and dams needed to store and access the water — a provision unacceptable to the tribe.
State moves forward despite tribe’s objections
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Luke Duncan, chairman of Ute Tribal Business Committee.
In 1996, even as the Utes were still trying to negotiate a deal to help pay for the needed infrastructure, the bureau determined that the pledged water had not been put to beneficial use and deeded it to the Utah Board of Water Resources. This transfer took place, the tribe told The Utah Investigative Journalism Project, “without any prior notice to, or consultation with, the Tribe.”
Representatives from the Utah Division of Water Resources declined to answer questions about their stance on the Central Utah Project Completion Act and related water transfers, citing the tribe’s lawsuit against the state and a hearing scheduled for later this month.
When Utah lawmakers in 2018 finally decided to officially ratify and put into statute the congressional compact, state leaders were aware that the tribe objected to it but chose to move forward with SB98 regardless, records show. A month before the final legislative passage, the tribe sent a letter to then-Sen. Kevin Van Tassell, the bill’s sponsor, to express its view that the terms of the compact were “unacceptable to the Ute Indian Tribe in that it was substantially amended without any input from the Tribe.” The only saving grace of the congressional action that created it, the letter said, was that Congress “made the compact contingent upon ratification by the Ute Tribal members before it became a valid document.”
“We therefore request that your bill be withdrawn until such time as the Ute Tribe and the state of Utah have come to a compromise on the water compact that can be approved by both the state of Utah and the Ute Tribe and its members,” Ute Tribal Business Committee Chairman Luke Duncan wrote to Van Tassell.
Van Tassell responded in a letter dated Feb. 27, 2018, saying he had asked the tribe for proposed amendments to the compact that would address its concerns and expressed disappointment that it had not done so. He said he intended to move ahead with his bill.
“Please know I’m happy to continue to work with you and the rest of the Ute Tribal Business Committee throughout this year to improve the statute and address your concerns,” he wrote the same day the bill cleared its first Senate vote.
The bill passed the Legislature without a dissenting vote — and with no testimony from any member of the tribe.
‘Beneficial use’ water doctrine has religious underpinnings
(Leah Hogsten | The Salt Lake Tribune) Members of the Ute tribe dance during halftime of a University of Utah basketball game in 2014. Utah plans to fill the Lake Powell pipeline with water promised to the Ute Indian Tribe. The Utes say it continues decades of racially based maneuvers.
The notion that water should be assigned not according to wealth or power but according to a community’s ability to put water to socially beneficial use dates back to Brigham Young and his oversight of Mormon settlement in Utah in the 1800s.
This principle ostensibly prevented any one party from exercising monopoly control over natural resources. But Young’s assertions also provided a convenient way for white settlers to ignore Native American claims to land and water, according to W. Paul Reeve, the head of Mormon studies at the University of Utah.
“It’s not just a conflict over resources; it’s values,” Reeve said. “Young said he didn’t believe the land belonged to anyone, it belonged to the Lord, and therefore it was there for anyone to use. It was a theological way of sidestepping Native Americans’ claims to the land and Native American cosmologies in which their creation stories suggest that their gods gave them the land.”
White settlers went on to use this theology to settle the best-watered valleys and to assign themselves ever-larger portions of the state’s water and farmland, even though Utah’s native populations also practiced agriculture and irrigation long before white settlement. State leaders did not believe native communities were as efficient or productive in their use of natural resources, according to Reeve, because their systems were not based in the Americanized ideal of homestead-based agriculture that Thomas Jefferson envisioned as key to self-sufficiency and true individual freedom.
This practice of assigning natural resources to the user who achieved the greatest “benefit” gradually eroded native control of the state’s natural resources. In a matter of years, Native Americans went from controlling 100% of the lands now considered Utah, to controlling just 4%, said Reeve, author of the book “Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness.”
“The narrative Latter-day Saints would tell is we came West and we conquered an inhospitable environment. We took land that was inhospitable and made it blossom,” Reeve said. “So when you see all the green lawns in this semiarid environment, it’s 21st-century Latter-day Saint attitudes of continuing that conquest of a desert environment.”
The fact that southern Utah, the most inhospitable of all Utah environments, is now experiencing a housing boom that prompts the construction of a Lake Powell pipeline is a remarkable testament to that pioneer legacy, Reeve said. But framing that legacy as solely a conquest of a landscape “completely ignores the fact that the development and the settlement came at the expense of native peoples.”
“All those things factor into how this unfolds,” Reeve said. “It’s part of how we’re going to solidify the conquest of our ancestors, by building this pipeline.”
Utes seek a seat at the table
After the Ute Tribe watched the Utah Legislature act unilaterally to try to solidify and codify the never-ratified compact of 1992, it decided to pursue another avenue for defending its rights on the Colorado River. A few months after SB98 passed and was signed by then-Gov. Gary Herbert, Chairman Duncan sent a letter to the Upper Colorado River Basin Commission seeking appointment of a tribal representative to the body.
“We have studied the law of the Colorado River and its management, and we conclude that there will never be effective management of the river unless the Commission establishes a relationship with the Ute Tribe,” Duncan wrote in the July 24, 2018, missive. “This relationship must recognize that the Tribe has a sovereign, governmental interest in its apportionment of water in the Colorado River Basin with senior, reserved water rights that are held in trust by the United States for the Tribe, as the beneficial owner of these water rights.”
The letter requested a meeting at Ute Indian tribal headquarters in Fort Duchesne. Amy Haas, executive director of the commission, subsequently forwarded the letter to other members, saying she was suggesting some alternative locales. She signed off with a sarcastic quip: “Good thing we have nothing else going on!”
“The Upper Basin states — Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah — believe that any tribe within any of the states’ boundaries are already and best served by their state representative on the Colorado River,” Millis wrote to his colleagues. “For the Ute Tribe, that is Eric Millis, Utah’s Upper Colorado River Commissioner. This has been expressed to the Tribe.”
(Gene Shawcroft, who was appointed in January by Gov. Spencer Cox to replace Millis as Utah’s Upper Colorado River commissioner, did not respond to questions regarding his position on the tribe’s request.)
Not surprisingly, the tribe had a different view:
“State representatives are not in a position to represent tribal interests, which is largely why we continue to face issues related to Indian water rights recognition, development, and water management today. … Time and time again, we are made aware of situations and decisions where the Tribe is not involved in discussions which have direct implications for our most valuable tribal trust resource — water.”
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
A kayaker surfs the Hawaii Five-0 wave on the Roaring Fork River. The wave is an example of the type of naturally occurring river feature that conservation groups want included in the state statute that allows water rights for recreation. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Three conservation groups aiming to keep more water in rivers for recreation are working on a revision to a state law.
American Whitewater, Conservation Colorado and Western Resource Advocates are proposing an amendment to legislation that would allow natural river features such as waves and rapids to get a water right. Under the state’s current statute, in order to get what is known as a recreational in-channel diversion water right, it must be tied to a man-made structure in the river, such as a design feature that creates the waves in many kayak parks.
Pitkin County Healthy Rivers is supportive of amending the existing statute to include natural river features and said so in an April letter to legislators.
“I think it’s kind of ironic that you have to make a man-made engineered structure in a river to make it somehow be of value to have a water right,” said Healthy Rivers board member and boater Andre Wille. “It would be nice to not have to put a structure in the river.”
According to numbers provided by the Department of Water Resources, there are currently 21 recreational in-channel diversion, or RICD, water rights in the state, all of them tied to an artificial structure. In the Colorado River basin, that includes features in Vail, Silverthorne, Aspen and Avon. Glenwood Springs has an approved RICD for a series of waves. Durango, Steamboat Springs, Salida, Buena Vista and Golden also have whitewater features with RICDs.
This type of water right ties an amount of water necessary for a reasonable recreational experience to the man-made river features.
Hattie Johnson, southern Rockies stewardship director of American Whitewater, likens making the acquisition of water rights dependent on the creation of an artificial feature to protecting backcountry skiing by building a ski jump.
“Right now, we can only protect water in the river for recreation if we build a ski jump,” she said. “So, we are looking for a change that protects the resource to provide all the wide-ranging recreational activities that happen on the river.”
This wave, known as Hawaii Five-0, on the Slaughterhouse section of the Roaring Fork River is popular with kayakers. Conservation groups want to amend a state statute to allow naturally occurring river features to get a water right for recreation. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Hawaii Five-0 wave
Proponents aim to tie a water right to a specific naturally occurring river feature, instead of a stretch of river — for example, the wave known as Hawaii Five-0 in the lower reaches of the run that begins with Slaughterhouse Falls on the Roaring Fork, instead of the entire 4.5-mile section of rapids. Slaughterhouse is a whitewater reach that begins at Henry Stein Park in Aspen and ends at Wilton Jaffee Park downstream in Woody Creek. It is a popular after-work run with kayakers and commercial rafting companies. Its many fishing holes also attract anglers.
A water right at Hawaii Five-0 could help keep water in the river for most of this section, since it’s located about a half-mile upstream of the take-out at Jaffee Park.
Scotty Gibsone has been running this section of river for 26 years and is on it nearly every day in the summer. His rafting company, Kiwi Adventure Ko, takes paddlers down the Class IV rapids of Slaughterhouse and the Class III Toothache section on the Roaring Fork in Snowmass Canyon. He said the Slaughterhouse season is short; it’s not usually runnable in boats after July 4. He can sometimes eke out a few more weeks using tubes in low water, but he would like to see higher flows overall.
“More water is always going to help, especially for us in the tourism sector,” he said.
A kayaker runs the 6-foot drop of Slaughterhouse Falls on the Roaring Fork River. In recognition of the contribution river recreation makes to Colorado’s economy, conservation groups want to amend a state statute to allow naturally occurring river features to get a water right for recreation. Proponents have discussed the Hawaii Five-0 wave, a few miles downstream from here, as an ideal place for a recreational in-channel diversion, or RICD, water right. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Early opposition
Most RICD water rights are held by municipalities — cities, towns and counties — and many have encountered opposition in water court. When Pitkin County began the process of securing an RICD for the two waves in the Basalt park on the Roaring Fork, Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District and Twin Lakes Reservoir and Canal Company, two entities that take water from the basin’s headwaters over to the Front Range, opposed the water right.
There will probably be opposition from Front Range water providers to any amended state legislation. That is because an RICD could limit their ability to develop more water from the Western Slope in the future.
American Whitewater has met with representatives from Denver Water, Northern Water and Aurora Water to discuss the legislation.
“We did inform them that we believe there will be significant opposition to the proposal, but Aurora Water would need a draft and go through our process to determine our position,” Greg Baker, manager of public relations for the city of Aurora, said in an email. “There is great potential for unintended consequences from even a modest proposal.”
To appease its opposers, Pitkin County agreed to a “carve out” provision that allowed up to 3,000 acre-feet of new water rights to be developed upstream of the kayak park, without being subject to the county’s new water right. (An acre-foot equals about 326,000 gallons, or enough water to cover an acre 1 foot deep.)
A kayaker runs the 6-foot drop of Slaughterhouse Falls on the Roaring Fork River. Conservation groups want to amend a state statute to allow naturally occurring river features to get a water right for recreation. Proponents have discussed the Hawaii Five-0 wave, located a few miles downstream from here, as an ideal place for recreational in-channel diversion, or RICD, water right. CREDIT: BRENT GARDNER-SMITH/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Growing recreation sector
A growing recognition of the importance of the outdoor recreation economy to the Western Slope is driving proponents’ push for updating the RICD legislation. And as climate change continues to rob western Colorado of streamflows, there is an increasing sense of urgency to protect and maintain water for recreation into the future.
“What we are trying to do is say that recreation is part of this complex system and we need to take that type of use into consideration,” said Josh Kuhn, water advocate for Conservation Colorado. “When we think about the transitioning economy, especially on the Western Slope, we need to have the security that this economic driver is going to be there in the future.”
Proponents say an amended law would also open up the possibility of RICD water rights to river runners in less-wealthy areas. Rearranging a streambed to create an artificial wave can be problematic: It is expensive, it requires disturbing the river ecosystem with heavy equipment, and engineers don’t always get it right the first time. For example, Pitkin County has spent nearly $3.5 million on the Basalt waves. The county had to reengineer the structures twice after complaints from the public that the waves were dangerous and flipped boats.
Supporters plan to meet with stakeholders throughout the summer and fall to further refine their proposed modifications to the legislation. They hope lawmakers will introduce a bill during the 2022 legislative session.
Water rights for natural river features would represent a shift in a state where putting water to “beneficial use” has traditionally meant taking water out of the river for use in agriculture or cities. It could mean that the often-overlooked river-recreation economy gets a bigger seat at the water-policy table.
“Recreation is a huge part of Colorado’s economy, it’s a huge part of our future, and yet it’s barely recognized in Colorado water law — and to the extent it is, it’s limited to a real-small class of recreation that only some towns and places can afford,” said John Cyran, senior staff attorney with Western Resource Advocates. “I think it’s time for Colorado water law to catch up with what’s actually happening on the rivers.”
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
The Lefevre family prepares to put their rafts in at Pebble Beach for a float down the Yampa River to Loudy Simpson Park on Wednesday. From left, Marcie Lefevre, Nathan Lefevre, Travis Lefevre and Sue Eschen. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
CRAIG — With the impending closure of coal mines and power plants in northwest Colorado, Craig officials and river enthusiasts are hoping a long-overlooked natural resource just south of town can help create economic resilience.
The city has applied for a $1.8 million grant from the federal Economic Development Agency for the Yampa River Corridor Project, which will refurbish boat ramps, add parking areas and a whitewater park, in an effort to develop the Yampa River as a source of outdoor recreation and local pride. The project is part of a multi-pronged approach to help rural Moffat County transition from an extraction-based economy to one that includes outdoor and river recreation as one of its main pillars.
“(River use) has definitely grown in the last couple of years,” said Jennifer Holloway, executive director of the Craig Chamber of Commerce. “Awareness that the river could be part of our future has grown. It had just not been on our radar as a town. We had the coal mines, we had the power plants. People tubed the river and fished in it sometimes, but it was not looked at as an economic asset until the last few years.”
An August 2020 preliminary engineering report by Glenwood Springs-based consultant SGM laid out the project components. The first phase of the proposed project would include improvements to Loudy Simpson Park on the west end of town, including a boat ramp, parking, a picnic area and vault toilet. The park is often a take-out point for tubers and boaters who float from Pebble Beach, just a few miles upstream. The project would also create better waves, pool drops with a fish passage, two access points and a portage trail at what’s known as the Diversion Park, as well as improve the city’s diversion structure.
The total project cost is roughly $2.7 million. A second project phase, which is still conceptual, would include bank stabilization and a trail connecting the river to downtown Craig.
Project proponents see the river as one of the town’s most under-utilized amenities and say it can add to the quality of life in the town of about 9,000.
Josh Veenstra is the owner of Good Vibes River Gear in Craig. The company rents paddle boards, rafts and tubes, runs shuttles on the Little Yampa Canyon and sells hand-sewn, mesh bags and drying racks, which are popular among the boating community. This is the fourth season for his company and Veenstra said the momentum is unbelievable.
“What it’s going to do is give Craig a sense of identity,” he said.
This boat ramp at Loudy Simpson Park will be replaced by a new one about a quarter-mile downstream as part of the Yampa River Corridor Project. The park is a popular place to take out after a day float from Pebble Beach. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Transitioning from coal
Two of the region’s biggest employers and energy providers, Tri State Generation and Transmission and Xcel Energy, announced in 2020 that they would be closing their coal-fired plants and mines. Tri-State, whose plant is supplied by two local mines, Trapper and Colowyo, plans to close all three of Craig’s units by 2030. Xcel, whose plant is located in nearby Hayden, plans to close both its units by the end of 2028.
According to Holloway, the closures represent about 800 lost jobs.
“All of our restaurants survive off the power plant workers, all of our retail, all the rest of our businesses,” she said. “Most of our small businesses downtown are run by women whose husbands work in the mine. So I think we are going to see a mass changeover of people leaving.”
Holloway is focusing on ag-tourism, the arts and outdoor recreation as industries that can help replace lost jobs. Although she recognizes that tourism jobs generally don’t pay the high wages of extraction industries, outdoor recreation has been identified as an industry with a large potential for growth and is identified as a priority in Moffat County’s Vision 2025 Transition Plan.
In addition, the pandemic has shown that many white-collar workers can work remotely from anywhere that has internet. It has also increased interest in outdoor recreation. Project supporters say improving the river corridor could help attract a new demographic interested in the outdoors but who don’t want to pay the premiums of a resort community, like nearby Steamboat Springs.
“Entrepreneurs in the rec industry would be a great fit,” Holloway said. “A warehouse here would be so much cheaper than Steamboat. If we could get some of those entrepreneurs, that would attract those that have a remote job or business elsewhere but that want the rural outdoor lifestyle.”
This small section of rapids known as the diversion wave will get upgraded into a whitewater park as part of the Yampa River Corridor Project. The city of Craig is betting on river recreation to help fill the economic void as local coal-fired power plants shut down in the coming years. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Recreation water right
Although city officials are moving forward with plans to build the whitewater park, they are — for now at least — forgoing a step that could help protect their newly built asset and keep water in the river.
Many communities in Colorado with whitewater parks, including Glenwood Springs, Basalt, Durango, Silverthorne and Vail, have a water right associated with the man-made waves, known as a recreational in-channel diversion or RICD. This type of water right ties an amount of water necessary for a reasonable recreational experience to the river features.
A RICD can help make sure there is enough water in the river for boating, but it also has the potential to limit future upstream water development. Under Colorado water law, known as the prior appropriation system, older water rights have first use of the river and therefore, a RICD does not affect existing senior water rights.
“It’s something that we have had some discussion about and we are looking closely at; it can be kind of political,” said Craig City Manager Peter Brixius. “I have not personally heard from folks, but I know people are opposed to it.”
Brixius said the conversation about a RICD is on hiatus at least until the fall.
Without a water right, which would secure the whitewater park’s place in line, future upstream water development could jeopardize having enough water for the park.
Peter Fleming, general counsel for the Colorado River Water Conservation District, said that while he can’t speak specifically for Craig, it makes sense for a municipality to protect its place in the prior appropriation system with a water right.
“If there may be some risk in the future that somebody is going to develop some water upstream that would either reduce or eliminate entirely the benefit of this expenditure, then yeah, you go to water court and try to protect this investment you have made,” he said. “Even if you don’t see anything on the horizon that is going to impact you, who knows what’s going to happen in 20 years.”
The city has applied for a $1.8 million grant from the federal Economic Development Agency for the Yampa River Corridor Project, which will refurbish boat ramps, add parking areas and a whitewater park, in an effort to develop the Yampa River as a source of outdoor recreation and local pride.
Looking to the future
The city expects to find out if it got the EDA grant in early fall. The project has also received funding from Moffat County, Friends of the Yampa, Trapper Mine, Northwest Colorado Parrotheads, the Yampa/White/Green Basin Roundtable, Resources Legacy Fund and the Yampa River Fund.
City officials are hoping the Yampa River Corridor Project will attract visitors, contribute to marketing efforts to rebrand northwest Colorado and build morale around the area’s economic future. For river gear shop owner Veenstra, that future can’t come fast enough. He hopes to hold swift water rescue courses and do environmental education using the new river corridor area.
“Craig is one of the coolest little towns,” he said. “The closure of the power plant, everybody says it’s going to be the downfall of Craig. It’s the best thing that could ever happen to us because it made people snap out of it and go, ‘oh, we need to do something different.’ That’s why the whitewater park is getting built. It was a blessing in disguise.”
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
The sun sets on the Grand Canyon, sending the inner gorge into shadow as the buttes catch the red light. Tourists on Mather Point watch the spectacle, content with absorbing nature’s most awesome show. Deep in the canyon, the Colorado River roars, fed by mountain snowmelt. In the side canyons the springs, seeps, and streams nurture birds and trees and wildlife in this arid landscape. A mile up, elk shedding their winter coats graze the dry Ponderosa pine forest for green shoots.
But after sunset the visitors disperse for the night, headed off for their campgrounds, dinner, and lodging. While some stay within the park, many head just outside of the South Rim gate to the town of Tusayan, Arizona, with its rows of restaurants, hotels, shops, theatres, and museum.
But Tusayan’s character could potentially boom, with thousands of new homes, employee housing, and millions of square feet of commercial space if Italian developer Stilo gets approvals. Rezoned in 2011 from open space to commercial, their two large inholdings (195 and 160 acres) within the Kaibab National Forest are accessed by two unimproved forest roads, and for Stilo to build they need an easement from the U.S. Forest Service to use these gravel roads for power, sewer lines, natural gas, and communication infrastructure. For some it’s an opportunity, and for others it could change the town forever.
Opponents say the project would threaten roads, wildlife, and even the night sky itself, not to mention the lifeblood of the South Rim: water. Proponents point to economic development to serve an ever-increasing number of visitors.
Development Seems Inevitable
There’s no doubt that visitation to the Grand Canyon is booming, with nearly 6 million visitors in 2019. Despite a partial park closure in 2020 due to Covid-19, nearly half that many came to see this wonder of the world. As things return to a near normal in 2021, numbers are once again expected to peak, stressing what are already limited services in Grand Canyon National Park and nearby Tusayan.
Tusayan was homesteaded in 1918 (the year before Grand Canyon became a national park) and there was very little development until the late 1940s; in fact, Tusayan was only incorporated as a town within the last decade. Today there are about 600 year-round residents, working primarily in the service industry at the lodges, hotels, restaurants, and shops.
In the summer, the airport’s a busy spot too. A half-dozen, orange jet helicopters buzz back and forth, and come and go, like a nest of hornets. A $37 million airport expansion will bring in even more visitors by plane as well. Today, summer traffic backs up for miles at the park gates, parking lots are full, shuttle buses are packed.
Locator map of the proposed Stilo development near Grand Canyon National Park/Grand Canyon Trust
Stilo’s initial request for a permit from the Kaibab National Forest for a road easement was refused in 2016, even before any environmental review, because “it fails to meet minimum requirements for not interfering with the use of adjacent federal lands.” The Forest Service reviewers were concerned of the impact not only to Grand Canyon National Park, but to tribal lands as well. The developer’s second proposal, filed last year, however, is not well-defined and will likely undergo a complete Environmental Impact Statement.
Clarinda Vail is the mayor of Tusayan, and a third-generation owner of the Red Feather Lodge, and she too has questions. She’s been involved with the town forever, and exudes energy as she gives us a tour of the area.
Tusayan Mayor Clarinda Vail is anxious about how the project could impact her town/Patrick Cone
“Depending upon the entity that you talk to in the proposal, it’s anywhere from about 3 million square foot of retail,” she said, “and anywhere from one to 5,000 hotel rooms. And I just say that because they’ve talked about phasing. And so, it really is unknown as to what could be built up to. Those are kind of the maximums that it could be built up to … There have not really been specifics proposed.”
But on everyone’s mind is water. Where will it come from? Tusayan itself has an extensive reclaimed water system, and in this desert every drop counts.
Tusayan Mayor Clarinda Vail is anxious about how the project could impact her town/Patrick Cone
Groundwater wells are thousands of feet down, and even the national park relies on an antiquated, failing pipeline that brings water from a thundering spring pouring out of the North Rim to the South Rim to slake the tourists, employees, and year-round residents. Replacing that line, according to Grand Canyon Superintendent Ed Keable, will cost “around $100 million.”
Stilo has offered some preliminary thoughts on their water sources, including trucking in water for the commercial spaces and drilling new wells for the residential areas. But no specific sources have been proposed.
“I think water is always the biggest topic of any discussion in our region,” said Mayor Vail. “How do we all know we’re going to provide our communities water for hundreds of years to come? Not for 10 years down the road, but for long term. And where we are here, we have to be really environmentally sensitive, with regards to our water, because of what it does to the seeps and springs, and for the Havasupai people, and for our neighbor (the park). It’s an incredibly important topic to be discussing. And we’re in a 1,200-year drought. You know, water has always been the gold of the West. And it’s only going to get more so as we go on here with more population.”
Roger Clark is the past director of the Grand Canyon program for the Grand Canyon Trust, and has similar questions: “Where are they going to get the water, which has direct implications to springs in the Grand Canyon? There is water down 3,000 feet, and hydrologists in the park have information that the water Tusayan is using is directly affecting the springs in the canyon. For the Havasupai Tribe, their sole source of water might be threatened by the existing wells. If they (Stilo) put up thousands of new residences, and those residences are dependent on groundwater, it really could be a death sentence for Grand Canyon springs.”
More “straws” into the groundwater aquifers of the South Rim could adversely impact seeps, springs, and hanging gardens in Grand Canyon National Park/Patrick Cone
The Havasupai Tribal Council went on record in 2019 opposing the project, writing Forest Service officials that it is a threat to “the Tribe’s primary and near-exclusive water source — the Redwall-Muav Aquifer — and the Tribe’s sacred places on the Coconino Plateau.”
“The Town of Tusayan currently draws on the Redwall-Muav Aquifer for its water supply, and its existing demands for water are already jeopardizing flows into Havasu Creek and, by extension, the Tribe’s livelihood,” the letter went on. “The Stilo proposal threatens to further strain the limited supply of groundwater from the Redwall-Muav Aquifer that the Tribe depends upon for its cultural identity and continued existence.”
Groundwater Nourishes Grand Canyon
While not visible from the rim, there are plenty of springs, streams, and creeks within the canyon, and wildlife and vegetation rely on these water sources for survival. Some of the springs gush like a firehose from the cliff, such as Vasey’s Paradise in Marble Canyon and Thunder River, while hanging gardens and small creeks abound. They all water the ferns, columbines, and monkeyflowers, as well as the deer, big horn sheep and birdlife.
David Kreamer has spent three decades studying these water sources in the canyon. He’s a professor of hydrology at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, and he’s concerned about development, and water, on the South Rim.
“When I started back 30 years ago there was only one deep well….and now there are several in Tusayan that draw water,” said Kreamer. “There are more and more wells going in. In my opinion, it’s not a question of if spring flow is going to be diminished. It’s a question of when. And so, I think that there’s evidence that there is a connection between where people would develop and impacts on the Grand Canyon springs.”
Grand Canyon Superintendent Ed Keable wants to know how the project would impact groundwater flowing into the national park/Patrick Cone
Superintendent Keable is watching the process carefully.
“That development project has been in some fashion in the works since 1992,” he said. “The Forest Service is doing what it needs to do. It’s reviewing that proposal under the (National Environmental Policy Act) process, and the Forest Service has reached out to the park. We are working with the Forest Service to provide what input we will provide. It’s still early in the process. Frankly, we need more information. And one of the pieces of information that I’m going to be interested in is what are the impacts on water to the area? So that’s going to be a key source of information for me as I work with my science staff to determine the impacts of that proposal on the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River Basin.
Andy Jacobs, of the Policy Development Group, is a spokesman for Stilo. He said the company has downsized the development in the latest proposal by 33 percent and pledged not to use groundwater for its commercial components. They’ve also donated 20 acres within the project to construct affordable long-term housing. Currently, people working in or near the park face few options for housing, and much of it is either employer-owned trailers or modular homes. But there’s no assurance about how affordable the new housing will actually be.
“The town council and planning and zoning board have both approved the broadly planned community district zoning several years back,” Jacobs said. “Stilo technically has the zoning approval, but the inholdings are within the forest. There are a lot of uncertainties for a path forward. It’s been a holding pattern lately, though they’ve owned these (parcels) for almost 30 years now. We’re interested in working with people.”
How Much Development Is Needed?
There’s no doubt that with six million visitors annually, and growing, that the area is ripe for some sort of new development. And, according to Stilo, people are looking for things to do on and next to the South Rim when they’re there.
The scale of the proposed development is still overwhelming to some, even with the proposed reduction in their new application. Alicyn Gitlin, the program manager for the Sierra Club, Grand Canyon Chapter, is frank in saying the project is just too big.
“It’s a massive development,” she said.
Problematic, Gitlin went on, is that while Stilo claims its latest proposal reflects a 33 percent reduction in development, “they never really told us what they were planning.”
Grand Canyon Superintendent Ed Keable wants to know how the project would impact groundwater flowing into the national park/Patrick Cone
“So, you know, a 33 percent reduction of ginormous is still ginormous. So we’re pretty much concerned with everything. We’re concerned with the light, the noise, the litter, the wildlife impacts, the traffic, bringing more multi-day visitors to Grand Canyon where they’re going to be putting stress on already aging infrastructure,” she said.
“We’re worried about the cultural impacts of more people being in the forest there. We’re worried about the loss of campsites that people are using (in the Kaibab Forest) when they’re visiting the park. You have to remember that this community relies on others for all of its resources. It doesn’t have a clinic, it doesn’t have a cemetery, it doesn’t have a trash dump. It doesn’t have its own law enforcement,” Gitlin pointed out. “We recognize that there is a need for housing that is not employer-owned in Tusayan, and that’s not what we’re trying to stop. The scale of this development is completely out of step with what is needed. It’s going to create a bigger workforce housing issue because they’re going to need to have workforce to run all these things. And where are those people gonna live?”
As the summer season begins, and the crowds descend on the town and park, the project has divided the town.
“Yes, absolutely. It’s been very controversial,” Mayor Vail said while looking over the TenX Ranch acreage. “I’m always proud of our community, like our school project, our sports complex. And so, I do love that we can disagree on certain subjects. We all come together on the things that are important and move together wonderfully. So yes, it has divided. But we still know when to come together on things. It’s just the right thing to do.”
Yet, Tusayan depends on tourism for its existence, and there are opportunities for economic development and there will be growth. The Grand Canyon is a special place, whether seen by a rowboat on the Colorado River, hiking down the trails, on aerial tours or just watching the light change on this magnificent landscape.
Mayor Vail understands that change is coming.
“Every community wants economic development,” she noted. “And you get to the point where you have to ask yourself, is this type of economic development worth the character and the soul of our community?”
This coverage was made possible through grants from the Society of Environmental Journalists – Fund For Environmental Journalism and the Water Desk at the University of Colorado.
Along much of its lower section, the once sinuous riverbed of the San Joaquin has been hemmed into linear concrete canals. Jeremy Miller
