Downriver: Into the Future of Water in the West by Heather Hansman

Downriver: Into the Future of Water in the West by Heather Hansman

Author:Heather Hansman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2019-01-23T00:00:00+00:00


WHAT’S THE POINT OF A WILD RIVER?

The last major undammed tributary of the whole Colorado River system, the Yampa River, flows into the Green in Dinosaur National Monument, just north of Vernal. It drops out of northwestern Colorado, where it picks up water from Pat O’Toole’s ranch, then runs through downtown Steamboat Springs, where tourists tube and fish. It meets up with the Green at Echo Park, Colorado, in the deep, golden canyons of the monument. Jack Schmidt says you can think of the Green as really starting there, at the confluence, because the inflow of the two rivers is almost equal. They become an entirely different river when they come together. The Yampa’s warm, sporadic, sediment-heavy flow drastically changes the composition of the Green when it hits. Downstream of the confluence the river seems more untouched.

Part of the endangered fish recovery program’s mandate is to use the Flaming Gorge Dam to make the Green look as much like the Yampa as possible, even just below the dam, because the fish depend on wild seasonal peaks. That attempt to return to natural flows, to mimic an undammed river, creates some of the drama that comes up in the Flaming Gorge Working Group meeting, because in the balance of uses, the fish carry more weight that agriculture or other industries. Protecting the Yampa has also become a political battlefield in the Upper Basin because it holds some of the last unallocated water, which plenty of people would love to divert. Once a river is dammed up or piped out, it’s nearly impossible to bring back its untouched state, which makes the Yampa invaluable for providing a rare glimpse of an unaltered ecosystem.

The Yampa sparked this whole journey for me. The previous spring, I’d lucked into a last-minute trip through Yampa Canyon from Deerlodge Park, in Colorado, to Split Mountain, Utah, just outside Vernal. It was organized by Friends of the Yampa, a Colorado-based nonprofit that has fought to keep the Yampa free-flowing since the early 1980s, when the river was threatened for the first time by plans for transbasin diversions. Part of Friends of the Yampa’s mission is to bring disparate water users together, and they’ve decided over the years that the best place to do that is on the river itself. At the put-in, water district managers, ranchers, and lawyers awkwardly shook hands and joked about how much beer they’d need to get through the trip. On the river, I listened to Jim Lochhead, who runs Denver Water, break down how he’s trying to plan for the city’s future through both conservation and storage, and Anne Castle, former Deputy Secretary of the Interior, talk about building treaties with Mexico. It was a group of people who were often at odds with one another, but they’d agreed to come along, and to talk, because they think the future of water needs subtle solutions, and that the Yampa is a vulnerable point in that future.

The trip taught me about the tangled legal jumble of water planning, but also reminded me how much I loved being on the river.



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