It was 1952 when the cities of Aurora and Colorado Springs first started gobbling up water rights in a remote, high mountain valley on Colorado\u2019s Western Slope. The valley is called Homestake, and now those same cities want even more of its pure water.<\/p>\n
In Western Colorado, where only about 20% of Colorado\u2019s population lives, all water tries to flow toward the Pacific Ocean. On the east side, where most people live, water flows to the Atlantic. To bring the water from the west side to the east side of the Rockies requires lots of money and lots of pipelines.<\/p>\n
But money isn\u2019t much of a barrier when your population is exploding: Colorado Springs, with 478,961 residents, and Aurora, with 386,261, need more water. And they aim to get it even if it must cross under the Continental Divide and damage a fragile and ancient wetland called a \u201cfen\u201d in the process.<\/p>\n
The new reservoir the two cities plan to build would be five miles downstream from their existing Homestake Reservoir, and called Whitney Reservoir after a creek that flows into Homestake Creek. There\u2019s also a Whitney Park within the nearby Holy Cross Wilderness Area, which could lose about 500 acres if the new reservoir goes through.<\/p>\n
But protesters are already active, and conservation groups are threatening lawsuits. Meanwhile, the cities have already quietly begun test drilling at four possible dam sites on U.S. Forest Service land along Homestake Creek.<\/p>\n
Obstacles, however, are popping up. The Forest Service says it won\u2019t even consider a reservoir proposal that shrinks a wilderness area, and the cities would have to get that approval from both Congress and the White House.<\/p>\n
The U.S. congressman for the district, rising Democratic star Joe Neguse, has also made it clear he doesn\u2019t support shrinking a designated wilderness or damaging wetlands. Local leaders are also chiming in: \u201cA Whitney Reservoir would irreparably change and harm our community,\u201d said Minturn Mayor John Widerman and Red Cliff Mayor Duke Gerber, who co-wrote a letter to the Forest Service. Both represent small towns dependent on tourism and outdoor recreation.<\/p>\n
State Sen. Kerry Donovan, a Democrat who grew up in the nearby ski town of Vail, also wrote the Forest Service to oppose the dam: \u201cI cannot express how sternly the citizens of my district … oppose water diversion projects to Front Range communities.\u201d<\/p>\n
Another issue, and for some it\u2019s the most critical, is the fate of valuable \u201cfen\u201d wetlands that would be destroyed by a dam and reservoir. \u201cThis is one of the finest wetlands we can find on our forest \u2013 it\u2019s unbelievable,\u201d White River National Forest Supervisor Scott Fitzwilliams told Aspen Journalism in 2019. \u201cYou can mitigate, but you can\u2019t replace 10,000 years of work.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nor can you turn the clock back to 1952, when Colorado\u2019s population was 1.36 million, compared with 5.7 million today, and the global land and ocean temperature was 1.52 degrees Fahrenheit cooler. Climate change, scientists say, will cause the Colorado River to lose up to 31% of its historical flow by 2052. That prediction was a factor in a recent, first-ever federal water shortage declaration.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen Colorado Springs and Aurora got their water right, the (Holy Cross) wilderness wasn\u2019t there and wetlands at that time were something we were just filling in,\u201d said Jerry Mallett, president of the local conservation group Colorado Headwaters. \u201cSince then, (wetlands) have become an extremely valuable resource because of what they can do for groundwater recharge, addressing climate change \u2013 all kinds of things.\u201d<\/p>\n
Then there\u2019s the issue of Kentucky bluegrass, Colorado\u2019s landscaping groundcover of choice. Kentucky gets more than 50 inches of rain a year compared to the Front Range average of 17, so why pump Western Colorado\u2019s high-elevation water through the Rockies for lawns?<\/p>\n
Colorado photographer and conservationist John Fielder, who says he\u2019s been just about everywhere within the nearly 123,000-acre Holy Cross Wilderness Area, wants people to just look at his images of the fen wetlands along Homestake Creek, and then ask themselves these questions:<\/p>\n
\u201cIs anything more sublime and fertile and life-giving than a 10,000-or-more-year-old fen wetland? You can\u2019t \u2018mitigate\u2019 the loss of ancient wetlands by creating a manmade wet place somewhere else. No more water to the Front Range.\u201d<\/p>\n
David O. Williams is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, a nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is a freelance writer and journalist who lives near Vail.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" was 1952 when the cities of Aurora and Colorado Springs first started gobbling up water rights in a remote, high mountain valley on Colorado\u2019s Western Slope. The valley is called Homestake, and now those same cities want even more of its pure water. In Western Colorado, where only about 20% of Colorado\u2019s population lives, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[125],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-44636","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-newsletter-opinion"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44636","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44636"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44636\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44636"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44636"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44636"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=44636"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}