Yampa River Reality Check

Like many river lovers I was relieved when Shell Oil announced that they were abandoning their plans to secure water rights to divert water from the Yampa River to use for oilshale development.  But it got me thinking about some of the existing diversions from the Yampa.  There are two large coal-fired power plants drawing water from the river to cool the steam that drives their turbines.  There are numerous crop irrigation diversions along the way.  As I was recently driving west along US Highway 40, I thought about how the last undammed river in the Colorado River system was far from being an untouched wilderness river.

It was fitting, as I drove west returning from the east to Utah, to measure my sentimentalized and sometimes romantic associations with the Colorado Plateau against the realities.  Weird how I can be simultaneously immersed in the daily fighting to secure protection for this region and also romantic about it.  I guess we have to invent our own mythology when we love a place - a kind of idealized form that we can run our mental fingers over even when half a continent away to remind ourselves of the true essence of the object of our affections.

Also, I think the coal plants sucking water from our best, last river is also symbolic between regional and global environmental problems.  The coal plants take a little water, sure, but they also are contributing mightily to our climate woes.  Traveling what I thought was a route that would gently bring back to mind a more innocent time in my own past turned out to be a pressing microcosm of the most serious problems that confront us today.  High in the watershed of the Yampa, Hwy. 40 passes through Steamboat Springs, dependent on snow and skiers to deliver livelihoods.  An hour later you pass through Craig, home of the largest coal plant in Colorado, which supports the whole local economy but also undermines their neighbors upstream.  Downstream again to Dinosaur National Monument, where declining, endangered native fish like the humpback chub are clinging to life only because of the free flowing snow melt runoff of the Yampa - imperiled be reduced snows linked to global warming.