Beside the Stream

In the arid states west of the Mississippi, water is owned like a house or a car.  It’s real property that is bought and sold separately from the land it flows over.  If you have a stream or a ditch running through your property, you can’t use the water unless you own water rights. 

 Each water right has three parameters: the location that the water is taken from the river, the amount of water, and the date that the right was first granted.  The date matters, because it’s a first in time/first in right system.  In dry years, the people with the oldest rights get water, and the people with newer rights don’t.  Western cities filed for water rights decades after the ranchers and ditch companies did–their population growth is more recent– so city water rights are more recent too. 

From the earliest days of statehood, ditch companies filed for huge water rights and dug channels to deliver water to farmers far from the river.  In La Plata County, 96% of the water is owned by ditch companies and ranchers.  In some of the dry western states, as much as 90% of all the water in the state is owned by early agricultural claims–no wonder the cities run dry!  This is our ditch.  Isn’t it lovely? 

Our ditch has rights that date from 1880 (according to the neighbors,  it was dug by Navaho Indians the winter of 1879).  The ditch company’s water rights are earlier and larger than Durango’s, so in a dry year our ditch shares provide us with irrigation water before the city has drinking water.   Most ditches are empty during the winter, but this ditch is always full.  And some of that water flowing in it is always mine.  Love that ditch.

The water level is wholly controlled by humans, and ditch management has been wonky this winter.  In the picture above, water is almost up to the footbridge.   Two days later, the water is a foot lower and the snow is two feet higher.  It looks like some kind of hydrological balance, but it’s not.