Chapter 4: Consequences, Part I
transcript
NARRATION:
This is “The Wild West of Water.” I’m Alejandra Wilcox.
Chapter Four: Consequences, Part One
HUMMER:
So today, we’re gonna be driving a car with a California license plate...so it’s gonna be interesting.
NARRATION:
When I got in the car with Scott Hummer in the fall of 2019, it wasn’t his typical work day. First of all, we weren’t in his car.
Second of all, he’s used to doing his job solo. If the Yampa River is the “wild west of water,” water commissioner Hummer is one of its de facto sheriffs.
Hummer mediates age-old conflicts between ranchers who don’t want to share water. He can trespass on private property to make sure people aren’t stealing water, or to check that water measuring devices are in good working order.
HUMMER:
I can get anywhere in Colorado on a road just like this. I don't need pavement, I don't have to see anybody and I can still get to the same place they do probably at about the same time or maybe even sooner. But I don't tell anybody my secrets.
NARRATION
Hummer grew up on the northern Front Range. He’s since spent his entire career working and travelling all over the state.
Over six decades…Hummer has seen for himself exactly how different it is up on the Western Slope.
HUMMER:
I'm going to be 60 in two weeks. The year I was born, the population of my hometown, Fort Collins, was 24,000 — and 3,000 of those were students at CSU. 50 years ago, when I was a 10-year-old boy, the population of Fort Collins was 43,000 people.
When I graduated from high school, the population of Fort Collins was about 60,000. And now that I'm 60, the population of my hometown has more than quadrupled in my lifetime. And the water supply has not.
NARRATION:
Fort Collins now has a population of nearly 168,000 people. As of 2018, over five and a half million people live in Colorado. And that number continues to grow.
Most Coloradoans call the Front Range home, and the water they use each day comes from rivers on the Western Slope.
HUMMER:
What folks — new folks and especially folks along the Front Range — don't understand, especially newcomers, is that that water — you know, Horsetooth, Carter, Boulder Reservoir — where does that water come from, you Boulder County folks? Does it come from Boulder County? I don't think so. It comes from Grand County. It comes through the mountain. We’re filling up our biggest reservoirs on the Front Range with West Slope water!
NARRATION:
Because of the rise of urbanization and development across the Front Range, water supplies have to be strictly controlled.
Even though the same laws have technically always applied to Yampa water users, those laws haven’t had to be enforced. There are fewer people up on the Western Slope. Fewer houses. And, thanks to the snowpack, easy access to water.
In the Yampa River Valley, where the river cuts its 250-mile path through the arid mountains and plateaus of northwestern Colorado, the water levels were always high enough to avoid strict regulations. Water users — mostly ranchers, who irrigate their wide, green fields with Yampa water — took what they needed. Many didn’t measure what they used at all.
It’s part of what made the river so uniquely...wild. But state officials like Hummer say that as the state of Colorado changes, so must the state of water use on the Yampa.
HUMMER:
When that second cousin moved here, because you know, his uncle moved here 20 years ago, when he travels up to the mountains with his uncle now, his uncle is starting to notice that it doesn't look the same in the mountains. The river doesn't look the same. The volumes in the reservoirs don't look the same. Well, there's a consequence for that. It's called population growth.
CASTLE:
We turn on the tap, we expect the water to be there. And it is, and it always has been. I think in general, urban dwellers don’t have much of an appreciation for where their water comes from.
NARRATION:
That’s Anne Castle — a lawyer, and an expert on water rights in Colorado.
CASTLE:
So people haven't needed to know much about the sources of water, how much it costs to get that water to their tap and the implications of climate change impacts on water and how that's going to play out in their lives. I think that we have, all over the state, enjoyed having enough water to go around, and we've built our houses and our ski areas, and we've irrigated our farms and gotten food from the farms and ranches based on the water supply that we had.
But that water supply is changing, and it's shrinking for the most part. And that is going to mean changes in our lifestyles that people haven't really thought too much about because they haven't had to.
NARRATION:
Users on the Yampa haven’t had to worry about much over the years. In Castle’s words, the Yampa has always been more “water-rich” than similar rivers in the
Colorado River Basin, such as the Rio Grande.
But that won’t continue. It’s not just the growing population. It’s the warming climate.
HUMMER:
Climate change is real. It’s happening. And, unless water users in the Yampa River Valley begin to understand the validity of the need for change, there's a chance that future generations will not be able to utilize the water the same way that their great-great-great-grandfather did.
NARRATION:
Many water users in Yampa live on land their families have owned for generations. In fact, Marsha Daughenbaugh still lives in the house she was born in.
WILCOX on tape:
Hi, Marsha?
DAUGHENBAUGH:
Yes I am! Alexandra?
WILCOX on tape:
Alejandra, yes. Hi!
DAUGHENBAUGH:
Alejandra? Come on in!
NARRATION:
Daughenbaugh’s father first purchased the Rocking Bar C Ranch in 1946. Daughenbaugh and her husband took over, and now their daughter and son-in-law run things.
And Daughenbaugh understands the way ranchers think. She spent 25 years with the USDA and then 15 years with the Community Agriculture Alliance. As a rancher herself, and as someone who has devoted herself to agriculture advocacy, Daughenbaugh views the issue of water through many different lenses. She understands why ranchers are reluctant to see the river change.
DAUGHENBAUGH:
I think a lot of it is simply we never had to do it before…that independence of the West, perhaps, that we don't like anybody telling us what to do. And a lot of those days are gone. We can't run cattle all across everything like was done in the early 1900s.
I think some of the resistance with the water issues is that fear that we're just giving up one more thing, that our independence is just becoming smaller and smaller as the systems dictate a different use or as we're being encroached by more and more people.
[office noises - transition]
WILCOX on tape:
Can you first of all just introduce yourself, tell me what your title is, and then tell me a little more about your role?
LIGHT:
I’m Erin Light, I’m the Division Engineer for Division 6. think as we get into an era of not just the Yampa going under administration, but it becoming so critical to understand what our water uses as a state…we can't rely on how great-granddad used to do it anymore. We need to have means of controlling diversions via the headgate and knowing what they've diverted using the measuring device.
NARRATION:
There already isn’t much water in Colorado. To make sure water users don’t take more than their fair share, many rivers throughout the state go under “administration.” or a call. As a refresher, an administration means that officials ensure water rights are being met.
LIGHT:
A headgate is something on the ditch itself that you can adjust — so it's a gate, something that you can literally move up and down, and adjust how much water is going down your ditch.
NARRATION:
Headgates became especially important in September of 2018. Nearly two decades of drought and an especially hot, dry summer left the Yampa at historically low levels.
As the division engineer, Light was responsible for putting the river under administration for the first time ever — or, as it’s colloquially known, “on call.” Water commissioners like Hummer began shutting off junior water users’ ditches.
HUMMER:
When you talk about this being the last frontier, there's just some people up here that like to fight. They like the challenge of pushing the envelope.
“Will the division engineer really put the river on call? Will the water commissioner really show up on a Sunday afternoon at 5:30 to see what I'm doing?” And the answer to those two questions may not have been yes in the past, but it sure as heck is now.
LIGHT:
There were areas that...I don’t wanna say people were caught by surprise; it’s just that they live their lives every day thinking we would never go on a call. They had been told time and time and time again, “You have to install a measuring device, you have to install a measuring device.” And the water commissioner kept getting a cold shoulder. Like, “We're never going to be administered! Gimme a break. We're not going to spend that money and go do this.”
And so I think they were very unhappy when the system did go on call and they were shut off. And they were shut off because they had no measuring device.
NARRATION:
Daughenbaugh says that by the time the Yampa went on call, the ranching community wasn’t exactly shocked. Everyone could see how low the river was becoming. And everyone was acutely aware of not only population and development growth, but the reality of the drought.
DAUGHENBAUGH:
I think that maybe at that point, it was one of the first times it hit home that this could be the first of many times, and we need to be better prepared. A lot of people were saying at that time, “This is the face of things to come.”
NARRATION:
Next time: more consequences, and the face of things to come.
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. Music research for this episode provided by local river whisperer and music expert, Rebecca Rupnow.
The music featured in this episode is “Casper, Pt. I” by Derek Blake, who grew up in the Yampa River Valley. To listen to the full song and hear more of Derek’s work, please visit derekblake.bandcamp.com.
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.