Regulations flowing toward Yampa River

State presence increases as cities, endangered fish, growth play bigger roles

By Jerd Smith, Rocky Mountain News

Saturday, November 24, 2007

A water nozzle fountain sits on the desk of commissioner Kathy Bower at the Division of Water Resources office in Craig. Bower and her husband raise horses northwest of the city.

Photos by Darin McGregor © The Rocky

Yampa River

John Fetcher, a Yampa Valley rancher since 1949

Water commissioner Roberta Hume, from left, water commissioner Andrea Schaffner, Division 6 Engineer Erin Light, water commissioner Kathy Bower and hydrographer Jean Ray sit along a bridge over the Yampa River south of Steamboat Springs.

Bower checks a flow meter on a pump along the Yampa River in the Lily Park area west of Craig.

Hydrographer Jean Ray measures the flow of the Yampa near Lake Catamount south of Steamboat Springs. The team working with chief regulator Erin Light is mostly female - an anomaly in the male-dominated Western water culture. Much of the team's early work on the river focused on gathering data on flows and verifying who's taking water from the river and how much and when they're diverting.

Erin Light stands on the banks of the Yampa River knowing that this is one of the last places in the parched American West where you can take as much water as you like.

But not for long. Even as the river flows rich and languid down from the Flat Tops Wilderness, the era of unimaginable plenty in this region is coming to an end.

Light is the top water regulator on the Yampa, the first woman in Colorado history to oversee one of the state's vaunted rivers.

It is a huge task. The Yampa is one of eight major river basins in Colorado that form a massive high-altitude headwaters, helping supply 19 other states, Mexico, and millions of people.

Light's sprawling territory is a remote place where the river has flowed largely unfettered. Butch Cassidy once holed up here, and water users must often think of themselves as outlaws, too, holding out against a new demand by the state to regulate their river.

Pressure from the Front Range, legal obligations to provide water for endangered fish, and even the basin's own growth have induced the state to step firmly in. The river must be harnessed, its diversion structures mapped, its users monitored.

Until now, gentlemen's agreements among the region's ranchers, coal companies and small towns have kept the need to formally regulate the river at bay.

John Fetcher, a 95-year-old rancher who is considered a water powerhouse in the region, would like to keep it that way.

"This is a damn nuisance," said Fetcher. "Once the river is under administration, there will be restrictions on what water you can take. It means you have the state of Colorado looking over your shoulder every time you take water."

Light starts road to regulation

Eighteen months ago, Light began laying the groundwork that will bring the river into the state's regulatory regime.

Most of the work lies on the Yampa's main stem, its mighty trunk.

Light began first with community meetings. Then she sent out letters asking ranchers, coal companies, ski resorts and small towns to install measuring devices on the head gates that usher water from the river into their irrigation ditches and diversion canals.

Months later, fewer than half of those she contacted had responded. So this summer, Light, an engineer with a master's degree in hydrology, sent out official orders to those who had not complied, legal missives that could trigger court action if they're not followed to the letter.

Roughly half of these were ignored as well.

"I think they're testing me," Light said. "I don't know if it's because I'm female or if it's because they think I won't do anything.

"But they sure as heck aren't doing what I ask," she said, referring to perhaps a dozen water users who have yet to contact her office.

Light is undeterred. "I have the list of those who have and haven't complied. If it gets to that point, next spring, they will not be allowed to divert."

It is a prospect no one relishes.

A chance to run a river

Light wanted this job, wanted a chance to operate a river.

At 37, she is rail-thin and deep voiced. A single dark braid sweeps over her shoulder. Small turquoise studded earrings dot a curving line along her ear.

Poised and collected, she will tell you she comes by her ambition honestly. The Colorado River's Lake Mead, the giant reservoir that serves Las Vegas, Phoenix and Los Angeles, was named for her great-great-uncle, Elwood Mead.

Light's staff is largely female, a phenomenon almost unheard-of in the West's insular, male-dominated water culture.

Because it has never been regulated, just 12 people manage the Yampa River. Eight of them are women. Most are ranchers who have worked in the mountains above Steamboat and on the sagebrush plains to the west all their adult lives.

"I would use one word to describe them," Light said. "Tough."

And unflappable. When Light discovered she was pregnant last year, just weeks after accepting the basin's top water job, they said don't worry, we'll help. Birthing is something deeply familiar to them, whether it involves children, calves, or foals.

As Light worked from home this summer, her tiny daughter by her side, water commissioners Kathy Bower, Roberta Hume, Andrea Schaffner and hydrographer Jean Ray set to work, meeting with their reluctant clients.

They spent days alone, with little company other than the white-rumped pronghorn that raced the state-owned trucks across the sagebrush hills of the lower Yampa Basin.

They looked their neighbors in the eye and gave them what was always unwelcome news: The state wants to measure the water you're taking from the river.

"These are, many times, people I grew up with," said Bower. A headband holds back her brown hair. Her daily uniform is a series of layers that can be shed as the weather changes, a bright blue T-shirt, a blue and green plaid flannel shirt, and a green Carhartt vest.

Bower, 55, raises horses with her husband on a 200-acre spread northwest of Craig. Born in Steamboat, she knows the hard luck, the backbreaking labor that it took to settle this valley and she knows how fiercely the people here value the Yampa.

The river, in some ways, has been the one thing these independent, self-reliant Coloradans could count on, even as coal mines opened and closed, and crops flourished and failed.

"A lot of times I'm dealing with people who were my elders," Bower said. "Now I'm telling them I can turn their water off if they don't comply . . . that's tough."

Landing the perfect job

Despite the hard labor, these women revel in their work on the river.

Hume joined Light's team last summer. But she, too, has a long history on the Yampa. Her great-grandfather homesteaded here. Now she ranches with her husband and brothers.

Hume, 54, arrives at work in Craig on a cold fall morning in a pink hooded sweat shirt, jeans, and work boots.

Small and slight, she has reared seven children, working in classrooms off and on to help support her family.

But she thrives on the outdoor life. When a friend told her of the opening for a water commissioner, she was quietly thrilled. Eight months into the job, she's still counting her blessings. "One day I drove 207 miles and didn't see one person," she said.

High season in water work begins in the spring, when the river swells with mountain snowmelt and ranchers begin irrigating their fields. By midsummer, the work is in full swing. The weather is hot. Endless, heavy ranch gates must be opened and closed. Diversion structures must be located, examined and mapped.

Hume knew she had her dream job last summer. On a 102-degree day, she found herself in an unfamiliar field, looking for an out-of-of-the-way diversion structure. She finally saw it, across the river from her truck and the road she had driven in on. There was no dry way to get there. But there was no one about, either. So she stripped off her jeans, and waded the river.

"I love going out on these back roads and measuring water," she says, smiling. "It's the perfect job."

Providing for endangered fish

Behind this first phase of work Light and her colleagues have undertaken - to measure diversions - is a need to deliver water for endangered fish from Elkhead Reservoir 127 miles downstream to a spot near Dinosaur National Monument.

Light and her team must protect the water as it travels, which means the women must know how much other water is in the river at any given time, who is taking water, who is not. They must know how long it takes water to travel from Elkhead Reservoir to Craig, and from Craig to Maybell and beyond, and how much water is lost to evaporation.

These were the kinds of questions answered years ago on Colorado's other rivers. But they remain mysteries on the Yampa.

Ray Tenney, 52, is a senior water resources engineer for the Colorado River Water Conservation District in Glenwood Springs.

The river district, a consortium of water users and state and federal agencies spent $30.5 million enlarging Elkhead Reservoir, just outside Craig, to store more water to meet their obligations to the fish, as the Endangered Species Act requires.

Now they want their money's worth.

Weeks of work this summer by Light and her team uncovered lots of information, but much remains unknown.

After seven weeks of trial water deliveries, Tenney estimates that just half the required water reached the fish.

And that's not good enough.

Bower and her colleagues then worked day in and day out during August and September, measuring flows, water speeds, and scrambling between diversion structures to see where the water was being lost. They describe Tenney, congenially, as the man who "cracked the whip."

It's a label he can live with.

"That's my job," said Tenney. "The whole notion of the fish program is to keep federal regulators off everyone's back. But the people up there think, somehow, that they're over the horizon, beyond the view of the empire. They don't want to be like the rest of the West, of having water engineers and water lawyers watching over them. I used to have nightmares of being burned in effigy for bringing administration to the Yampa River Basin."

Front Range cities eyeing river

It isn't, however, just Tenney and the Endangered Species Act that are dogging the Yampa. The Front Range, short of water and growing fast, is also eyeing the river.

"The Yampa is on the cusp of major change," said Ken Knox, deputy director of the Colorado Division of Water Resources. "Because of increasing demands, all river basins in Colorado are going to change, but change in the Yampa is growing at an accelerated pace."

Though other Colorado river basins have long battled the effects of drought and population growth, the Yampa has largely avoided this painful reality because its water supplies are abundant, its population is small and it is remote.

It generates roughly 1.5 million acre- feet of water each year, according to annual flow records compiled by the Division of Water Resources. That's enough for more than 3 million households in a region where barely 36,000 people live.

Contrast that with the South Platte River Basin on the Front Range, a river that generates about 1.4 million acre- feet, but which supports a population of more than 3 million.

Because of this, the Front Range is eyeing the river as a possible source of new supply, one that, with a giant, 227-mile pipeline, could quench the urban corridor's thirst for another 100 years.

The idea for the pipeline, floated by the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District this summer, is far from a done deal, and would likely face strict scrutiny from environmentalists and federal regulators.

Still, Light and her team are preparing the Yampa for this new world, where its water will be coveted more and more. Their goal is to protect those who have rights to the river already and to shepherd the resource for those who will surely come in the future.

But many longtime residents would prefer that people like Tenney, federal wildlife officials and Front Range water planners would simply go away.

Asked to give a rough count of those who would oppose a diversion of the Yampa's water to the Front Range, commissioner Schaffner, 53, paused, then said dryly, "That would be everyone."

Light believes, though, it's inevitable. "The waters of the state of Colorado belong to the citizens of Colorado," she says, the language of the state Constitution flowing smoothly from her lips.

"We know that the Front Range is a big enough entity that if they want the water, they're going to get it. I would say 90 percent of the people up here believe we're better off sitting at the table and talking about it than digging in our heels. But the idea doesn't excite me," she said.

With fall, the big outdoor work on the river is done. Now Light and her team are settling down at their desks, tabulating the field data.

They're also planning their work for next spring, when the Yampa bucks and stampedes its way down from its mountain snowfields, out to Steamboat and the hay meadows beyond.

Light hopes she doesn't have to take any reluctant water users to court and that her team can craft a good working relationship with Tenney and his fish.

"We have a lot of work in front of us," Light said. "There's a lot going on up here."

• November 27, 2007

  11:46 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  Jackal writes:

  Regarding the Front range taking water from the Yampa, Knowing a good deal of the 36,000 people in the area, it may look somewhat like 300 spartans vs the persians!
  This is a group of tough, independent people that have had a way of life for generations. They don't take change well, and they have certainly never liked interference from city folk! They have to this point tolerated Mr. Tenney's sucker fish, but try and take their water, change their way of life, so you can build a bigger metropolis somewhere and it'll end up being a mess.