A lesson on Cow Creek

By Cary Denison

If you walk 400 yards due east from my front door here in western Colorado, you’ll end up on the Billy Creek State Wildlife Area, a 5,393-acre chunk of ground that wraps around my neighborhood. These lands are not what come to mind when you think of public lands in the Rockies: no stunning mountain vistas or picturesque waterfalls to be seen, only hard rough lands dominated by pinon, juniper and sage that provide valuable winter range for wildlife and opens spaces for folks like my family to hike, ride horses, watch wildlife, fish and generally mess around.

And to be honest, I took it all for granted—until recently, that is.

Cow Creek, a small wild stream, cuts through the southern end of the State Wildife Area where my neighbors and I divert water into our ditch for irrigation—and where my son and I like to fish. The creek ran high through spring and early summer, providing adequate water to my pasture, growing more than enough grass to keep my two horses and neighbor’s cows well fed into the winter. When the flows dropped in the creek, so went the ditch until the ditch ran completely dry. A few well-timed rain storms helped, but eventually, dry hot weather threatened to exterminate my lawn and garden and potentially my hopes of marital bliss.

The other day, with shovel, 3 weight and box of dry flies in hand, my son and I headed to the creek, hoping for the best. Earlier in the summer we’d fished the creek below the headgate, fooling a few fish in fast water with big dries.  We hoped this time would be better. My son smartly grabbed the rod out of the truck, leaving me and the shovel in the dust as he scampered down the hill and up the creek to our diversion. I caught up to him as he stood on a cobble bar next to the headgate.

Neither one of us said a word—we knew this was a trip for naught; Cow Creek didn’t hold enough water to divert and there was not enough to fish. I grumbled and shoved the tips of my fingers into the warm water that slithered through the exposed cobbles as my son slung a rock up the creek as if to put an exclamation point on the state of the creek.

We could have stacked rocks in the creek pushing the trickle of water through our headgate, just as we could have drifted a wooly bugger through the deep holes pulling out a stressed fish. Neither would have been right, and I was proud he knew it.

On the slow walk to the truck, my son mumbled, “Maybe it will rain.”  I chuckled at the thought,  realizing there are better solutions.

Solutions such as the work that TU does every day, like helping those upstream ranchers to improve their irrigation systems to reduce system losses and other impacts of inefficient irrigation. And we support best water management practices that leave water in Western streams and improve not only water availability but the natural resources that are the foundation of our public lands.

But the state of Cow Creek did remind me how important healthy water resources are in this country, and how the health of our public lands depends on healthy flows. .

In places like Cow Creek, the goal is to find smart, balanced solutions that keep more water in-stream, for fish and wildlife habitat, while allowing sufficient water for pastures and communities.

And enough water for a father and son hoping to fish together.

Cary Denison is a TU project coordinator in the Gunnison River Basin in Colorado.