Chapter 1: The Last Frontier
transcript
NARRATION:
This is “The Wild West of Water.” I’m Alejandra Wilcox.
Chapter One: The Last Frontier
On an unmistakably Colorado autumn morning in the high country, just outside Steamboat Springs, aspens wash the sloping hillsides in vibrant, fiery gold — but the color won't last long. It’s already faded since water commissioner Scott Hummer made his rounds three days ago.
HUMMER:
I’m Scott Hummer. I’m one of the two water commissioners — three, actually — that work in water district 58, which are the headwaters of the Yampa River.
NARRATION:
Hummer never really knows, day to day, what his job will bring. Today, he’s driving a rental car with California plates while his Colorado state-issued work truck is in the shop.
HUMMER:
Do you like my rental car?
NEIGHBOR:
Yeah, it’s pretty nice. Looks like you jumped up a couple tax brackets.
HUMMER:
I want my truck back. See ya.
NARRATION:
Hummer is on his way to work, where he’ll check on the irrigation ditches within his territory.
His job varies day to day. He could end up on a heavily wooded, muddy path, snaking his way through state forest. He’ll almost certainly find himself tramping through ranchland marked clearly with “NO TRESPASSING” signs.
He might walk a long wooden plank out across open water, using only a guidewire to keep his balance — or maybe, his bridge will be an old telephone pole, if that’s what it takes.
HUMMER:
There’s not much OSHA compliance to this job.
WILCOX on tape:
Have you ever been injured in the line of duty?
HUMMER:
Oh yeah. I’ve fallen in the river. I’ve had an ATV accident. It’s just inevitable.
NARRATION:
Hummer could even find himself facing down a bear.
HUMMER:
I know that sumbitch is still sitting there. I got the crap scared out of me by a bear. About a week ago in the middle, I was crossing the middle of the crick, and I was looking downstream and not paying too much attention. I looked this way, and all I saw was his head. He was so big, but nobody believes me cause I didn't take a picture
NARRATION:
Hummer is a state employee. His job as a water commissioner in the Yampa River Valley is, simply put, to regulate water use. But the job is far from simple.
HUMMER:
My territory is the southern portion of the district, which includes all the drainages tributary to the river above Stagecoach Reservoir. And I am in charge of the daily hands-on administration of water rights.
NARRATION:
What daily, hands-on administration of water rights can actually entail is pretty wide-ranging. Water users in Yampa are almost exclusively ranchers who depend on water for irrigation and stock. Hummer is responsible for ensuring that water users are getting their water delivered in order of priority. But that’s just the short, easy-to-digest version of a day in his life.
On the last day of September 2019, Hummer invites me to drive with him across his territory on the Bear River, which is a tributary of the Yampa, to show me what it’s really like for a water commissioner in the field.
HUMMER:
Water commissioners are…well, we wear a lot of hats. You know, we're engineers, we're attorneys, we're hydrologists, we're arbitrators, we're counselors. We're all those things rolled into one all in the same day.
NARRATION:
Today, Hummer is manually checking the water flow in an irrigation ditch in the state forest. But this is a light day.
Hummer is on call 24/7, 365 days a year. It’s his job to do everything from respond to water emergencies to ensure
someone’s diverting their fair share of water from the Yampa River.
Hummer is responsible for 300 ditches. If he’s lucky, he’ll get to them all twice within the course of a year.
HUMMER:
I’ve been doing this for 30 years and the physical demands of the administration on the Bear River are intense. In the summer of 2018, I worked 70 out of 73 days. This particular season in 2019 required that I worked 35 days in a row. And it's easier to put it in that kind of time when you're 30 instead of 60.
NARRATION:
One of Hummer’s most important jobs is to manually measure water levels in irrigation ditches, just like he did when he was a young deputy starting out three decades ago.
He can name every ditch he’s responsible for on sight.
HUMMER:
If you'll notice, there's a ditch coming right down along the side here. It's all full of these trees. It's called the Union Ditch. It used to irrigate ground underneath the reservoir before the water was here …
There’s a ditch right here coming along the upper side of the meadow…it's called the Northside Ditch. No head gate. No measuring device. One of the crankiest old owners in the world.
Now, if you look across the other side, you see the ditch that's coming right along the bottom of the hill there? Okay, well, that's the Southside Ditch. Brilliant, genius names…
NARRATION:
Not only that, Hummer knows what the water level in each ditch should be, or if it’s changed. He can guesstimate cubic feet per second with a glance.
Hummer also knows the people who use the water he patrols — the ranchers.
HUMMER:
I mean, they'll pass me on the road, they'll wave, I'll see them at the gas station. You see them at the cafes, even at the post office. They usually all have a, you know, a question or two or a comment about, you know, the water situation of a particular season.
NARRATION:
Hummer says his job is to stay two steps ahead. He changes the order of his patrol constantly, making sure nobody can predict where or when he’ll show up.
HUMMER:
One of the things that you don't want to do as a water commissioner is become predictable. We try not to set a pattern for our administrative practices just because we don’t want people to maybe take advantage of a timeframe where they think we won’t be there.
The job that I have is not a yes job, it's a no job. I don't get to say yes a lot. And so my interaction with folks in water committee, my colleagues’ interaction with folks when you're, when you're probably initiating a conversation with a negative connotation to start with, that's just the nature of the beast. We're not usually complimenting people for what they do. We're chastising people for what they're not.
WILCOX on tape:
So to work this job, I imagine you have to have a lot of patience and a lot of stamina.
HUMMER:
Patience, stamina, understanding, um, thick skin…all those things. And all those things you become better at over time. I'm a better water commissioner today than I was 30 years ago because I know what I'm doing. I'm not guessing. I'm not learning on the fly.
So, so this is the town of Yampa...and this is the bottom ditch on the Bear River, this is the Nickel Ditch….they’re just running a little bit of water for stock, so I’m not paying a whole lot of attention to it.
So, the 20 ditches that are on the Bear River…I never would have expected that 20 ditches could demand so much of my time. It’s astonishing sometimes, but this is old-fashioned, on-the-ground water administration.
NARRATION:
And in those 20 ditches — which represent only a fraction of the territory he’s responsible for — Hummer is doing more than just gathering data on water use. He’s a defacto sheriff, patrolling and enforcing restrictions on a river that is being dragged, forcibly, into the 21st century.
Hummer says that in some ways, the Yampa River Basin still operates like it did a hundred years ago.
HUMMER:
And we have people that will literally — because it still is 1919 in places — well, not everybody wants to help their neighbor. Water users, some families have long memories, let’s just put it that way. When you talk about this being the last frontier, there’s just some people up here that like to fight.
NARRATION:
Later, in the car, Hummer broke down for me what that really means.
HUMMER:
We have a water user who just will not, she doesn't want her neighbors to get any water. She just doesn't!
And sons fighting their mothers and grandmothers, and you know, it's just, it's craziness. Yeah, there's one guy that suing his mom in court right now over water.
WILCOX on tape:
...Over water?
HUMMER:
Mmmhm. Over the ownership of the water
NARRATION:
The Yampa River was once thought to be the last major “wild,” free-flowing river in Colorado. The water was largely unregulated, just the way it was in 1919.
That’s mostly because water users could make informal arrangements about who would use water — or not use it — amongst themselves. There was always enough water to go around.
That’s not the case for other rivers throughout Colorado, where low water levels and drought have led to strict water regulation for the past hundred years.
And Hummer understands just how different the Yampa River Valley is from the rest of Colorado. He grew up on the Front Range, worked in water districts all over the state before ending up on the Yampa three years back.
Folks here are starting to trust that he knows what he’s talking about.
HUMMER:
Now that I've been here for a few seasons and established myself as, you know, what B.S. I'll put up with and what I won't...yeah, it’s better that way. But there’s two or three that you'll never ever, ever gain any ground with because they're going to be arbitrary just to be arbitrary.
If you want me to be able to protect your water right, have a record on the books that will establish use that could be looked at in 20 years when maybe your grandson doesn't want to own the ranch, you'll be able to come up with a figure — a dollar figure, a value for the water itself — which they don't have now without being able to measure it. You know, change is inevitable. There will be a time when there isn't as much ranching in this valley as there is now.
NARRATION:
While technically, Colorado law says water users should measure what they take or consume, the state has never needed to enforce that law in Yampa. Again, historically, water users have worked water disputes out amongst themselves.
But in September of 2018, due to extremely low water levels near Dinosaur National Monument, the Yampa River went on call. 65 percent of water users had to drastically cut water use — or stop it entirely.
A call, or administration, is issued when a senior water right holder is not receiving all the water they’re legally entitled to. Junior water right holders — those who have owned water rights for less time — are forced to decrease the amount of water they use and -- divert water to seniors — those who have owned water rights for longer.
Water commissioners like Hummer are responsible for enforcing those diversions — in some cases, actually turning the water supply in irrigation ditches off.
And in 2019, a year after that call, the way water use has been enforced in Yampa is about to change.
HUMMER:
What we're asking you to do is to comply with the statutory requirement that's been on the books for over well over a hundred years. And your brethren, ranchers and farmers in other parts of the state, have already stepped up to the plate to do that. There's no excuse for you not to do the same thing unless your water isn't as valuable to you as theirs is.
WILCOX on tape:
This is personal to you in some ways.
HUMMER:
Yeah, very, very personal, sure. Every citizen of the state of Colorado is dependent upon our most precious natural resource, and that’s our water. Water is our lifeblood in the West. It’s simply a fact.
NARRATION:
Water is also personal for Hummer’s boss, division engineer Erin Light — she heads up all of water Division 6, including Hummer’s district.
LIGHT:
I'm Erin Light, and I'm the division engineer for water Division Six. The state of Colorado...
NARRATION:
And while many were not exactly surprised by the call on the Yampa, including Light, it still caught her off guard.
LIGHT:
Winter of 2018, in February or March, The State of the River. I told a group of 300 people or whatever, I said, “Eh, there's never gonna be a call on the Yampa — probably not during my lifetime and certainly not during my tenure.” And sure enough, we administered the Yampa in 2018.
HUMMER:
There's an unrealistic expectation that we can continue to do things the way that great-grandpa did. And we are probably already two generations past that. One of the challenges of trying to administer water in this space is that folks have developed an attitude over time that they're somewhat unique because of the abundance of water in the Yampa River basin, because they have been able to go have a conversation with their neighbor and work things out. And that's all well and good — but there's nothing unique about the Yampa River basin.
Where's the book? Yeah, here's our Bible.
NARRATION:
Hummer grabs Light’s copy of the Colorado Revised Statutes, the bright red book employees always keep close at hand.
HUMMER:
There's nothing in this book that says the Yampa River is unique. The Yampa River has to follow all the rules and regulations like everybody else at every division does. And what has made this basin “unique” is that it's somewhat been ignored because it's up here in Northwestern Colorado. It's been one pass too far to make it economically viable to move water from this basin into another. But I wouldn’t bank on that forever.
This is Colorado — and water flows to money.
NARRATION:
Next time: we follow that water — and the money.
You’ve been listening to “The Wild West of Water.” The production of “The Wild West of Water” was supported in part by Connecting the Drops.
This episode was reported and produced by me, Alejandra Wilcox. Editorial and production support from Emilie Johnson, Jared Browsh, Patrick Clark and Maeve Conran.
The music featured in this episode is “Don’t Fence Me In” by Bing Crosby. Liz Greeen created stunning artwork for each episode of “The Wild West of Water.” To view her art, map out the Yampa River, listen to the full podcast and learn more about this project, please visit thewildwestofwater.com.