One hundred-years after the historic Colorado River Compact allocated 15 million acre feet of water between seven states in the arid west, the situation has grown dire. On June 15, US Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Touton issued a call to action for all seven states in the 1922 Compact[Read More…]
Tag: Water
Ditches are a vanishing paradise
Annette Choszczyk lives in rural western Colorado these days, but when she was a kid, the Highline Canal in Denver was her summer paradise. “To us, it was river and a playground, complete with rope swings, swimming holes, crawdads and a trail alongside it that adults and kids could walk[Read More…]
Letter: Time to switch
Dear Editor: Perhaps you remember when there was enough water to launch a boat from the ramps on Lake Powell. Or when CPW didn’t have to close fishing streams because the water temperature was too high. Or when forest fires didn’t explode, launching embers that started spot fires two miles[Read More…]
Tips for a new Code of the West
It’s not always easy living in the rural West, with customs so entrenched that everybody takes them for granted. What makes it hard for the newest newcomers is that they’re caught up in a mysterious culture. Learning the Old West code was easy decades ago. Novelist Zane Gray’s “Code of[Read More…]
Why we must reclaim our river
It’s an annual ritual for the alpine snow to melt as soon as the spring winds blow over the Flat Tops and once the sun again embraces the raw lands of the backcountry. Water, here, is practically woven into nature’s coat out of thin air. It condenses on the rugged[Read More…]
Area aquifers more like ‘geological deposits that happen to hold water’
RBC I “The more I learned about these aquifers, the more I looked at them as not really storage” Said Dr. Mario Sullivan, Instructor of Science/Oceanography at Colorado Northwestern Community College in Rangely. He spoke with members of the White River Alliance last week, detailing known geologic hydrologic information on[Read More…]
Letter: What project helps navigate a healthy water future? RBC deserves best solution for all
Dear Editor: “Can you think of a single dam that was ever taken down?” That was the question posed by one of my fellow members at a Yampa White Green River Basin Roundtable meeting, when someone made the claim that he could not think of a single dam in the[Read More…]
Writers on the Range:
This rancher has radical ideas about water RBC I If Jim Howell, a fourth-generation rancher in Western Colorado, has a guru, he’s Allan Savory, the champion of intensive cattle grazing even on semi-arid land. Howell, 52, says Savory’s methods, which require moving cattle quickly from pasture to pasture, enable him[Read More…]
Wolf Creek project secures River District grant
RBC I The Colorado River Water Conservation District board of directors approved a request to partially fund the permitting costs for a dam and reservoir project in northwest Colorado. The Rio Blanco Water Conservancy District asked the River District for $3 million over three years for federal and state permit[Read More…]
Opinion: It’s time to stop shipping water across the Rockies
RBC I It was 1952 when the cities of Aurora and Colorado Springs first started gobbling up water rights in a remote, high mountain valley on the state’s Western Slope. The valley is called Homestake, and now, those same cities want even more of its pure water. In western Colorado,[Read More…]
State of the River: Part 1
RBC I Seven years since the first major algae bloom affected the White River, much is still unknown about what exactly causes the blooms, and by extension, how they can be remediated/mitigated in the future. The earliest report of significant algae blooms in the river, noted in the HT was[Read More…]
Are you wasting water?
Simple habit changes could save thousands of gallons of water RBC | It’s always a good idea to conserve water when you can, but with ongoing drought conditions in the county water conservation may become more of a requirement than an option. In June, Meeker’s Public Works Superintendent Russell Overton[Read More…]
