West of the Mississippi, the right to use water in a stream or river is real property that is bought and sold like a house or a car. If you own property with a ditch or a stream running through it, you can’t touch a drop unless you buy water rights. This area has 19 inches of rain a year, so your water rights determine whether your land is lush pasture or near desert.
Water rights have three parameters. There is the location the water is extracted from the waterways; there is the amount of water you can use; and there is the original date that the right was first filed for in water court. Bob and I own shares in a ditch company with rights from 1881, and since the oldest water rights get their allotment first when the river runs low, we’re set for most any situation.
In La Plata County, well over 90% of the water rights are owned by ditch companies and old ranching families. Agricultural diversions account for most of the water extracted from the river.
From a management point of view, you’d think since these ditches take so much of the river’s flow that it’d be measured. No, no, nooo. You just get in some heavy equipment and split the flow.
Just move the boulders swept downstream in the run-off to partition off part of the river for the ditch company. Casual over-appropriation is part of the reality of western water management.
On some of the smaller rivers and streams, more water rights are owned than are actually flowing in the river, so the streams are drained completely. A friend with land on the La Plata River used to watch as a backhoe placed stones to divert the entire flow of the river into an irrigation ditch. After midnight, she’d tiptoe out in her nightie and move rocks to let some of the flow into the streambed. She’d telephone a friend downstream at 1am to say, Water’s coming in 20 minutes.
Women in nighties subverting the flow is also part of western water management.
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