Whose Water Is It?
We stopped at a little pullout overlooking this wide meadow at the foot of the Sawatch Range in the distance, because we thought it looked pretty, and I was curious about that little notch in the mountains. A sign at the pullout told me that the Continental Divide follows this ridge, and that there are two "Fourteeners" in this image. Mt. Antero tops out at 14,269 feet above sea level just to the left of the notch, while Mt. Princeton hits 14,197 feet to the right.
A second sign offered some unexpected information. Like much of the rest of the country, Colorado has had a very wet year, and everything was an unnatural sort of green. This makes it easy to forget just how precious a resource water is out here, and how fiercely people have fought over it over the last century and a half. But this meadow illustrates the situation well.
Colorado is subject to typical Western water law, which gives rights to water to the first people who used it. Some of these rights trace back generations to the very first settlement, and people pay huge amounts of money to buy old, established rights. If you're a real estate investor, you have to be really careful about buying cheap land in Colorado, because it might not come with water rights.
This meadow was all part of a ranch that established its rights to 1,900 acre-feet -- about 619 million gallons -- per year way back in 1868. But the ranchers sold their rights in 1986 to a company called Western Water Rights, LLP. And in 2008, Western Water Rights, LLP, sold the rights to the city of Pueblo, 85 miles away. So now the ranches are dry, and Pueblo has enough water for a hundred-thousand or so more people.
This kind of horse trading would be common in Colorado, except available water rights are getting harder and harder to find. Some municipal water manager was happy with himself.
Whose Water Is It?
We stopped at a little pullout overlooking this wide meadow at the foot of the Sawatch Range in the distance, because we thought it looked pretty, and I was curious about that little notch in the mountains. A sign at the pullout told me that the Continental Divide follows this ridge, and that there are two "Fourteeners" in this image. Mt. Antero tops out at 14,269 feet above sea level just to the left of the notch, while Mt. Princeton hits 14,197 feet to the right.
A second sign offered some unexpected information. Like much of the rest of the country, Colorado has had a very wet year, and everything was an unnatural sort of green. This makes it easy to forget just how precious a resource water is out here, and how fiercely people have fought over it over the last century and a half. But this meadow illustrates the situation well.
Colorado is subject to typical Western water law, which gives rights to water to the first people who used it. Some of these rights trace back generations to the very first settlement, and people pay huge amounts of money to buy old, established rights. If you're a real estate investor, you have to be really careful about buying cheap land in Colorado, because it might not come with water rights.
This meadow was all part of a ranch that established its rights to 1,900 acre-feet -- about 619 million gallons -- per year way back in 1868. But the ranchers sold their rights in 1986 to a company called Western Water Rights, LLP. And in 2008, Western Water Rights, LLP, sold the rights to the city of Pueblo, 85 miles away. So now the ranches are dry, and Pueblo has enough water for a hundred-thousand or so more people.
This kind of horse trading would be common in Colorado, except available water rights are getting harder and harder to find. Some municipal water manager was happy with himself.