Nature Conservative Magazine
Frederick Reimers
Photos by Nick Hall
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In the early light of a spring morning 1989, a fellow barged into the Crestone, Colorado, bakery where Christine Canaly worked, hungry for breakfast. The man, it turned out, was vice president of a company that planned to spend $150 million to drill 100 wells and pipe water from the rural San Luis Valley to the Denver suburbs, more than 100 miles away. Those suburbs, he said, would pay top dollar for the water, and the project would be a financial bonanza for everyone in the San Luis Valley.
Canaly was worried by the news. Rumors about such a project had already been swirling through the valley. “People suspected it,” she says. “But no one came out and full-blown said it.”
A few days later, Canaly drove her Volkswagen Rabbit to pick up 400 pounds of flour from miller and rancher Greg Gosar, and she mentioned the conversation to him. In the arid West, water can be an issue as contentious as sports and religion, and Gosar was concerned himself. “Water rights,” he says, “are everyone’s business around here.”
In fact, Gosar had been chewing over a conversation that he’d had a year earlier. The principal owner of the sprawling, 97,000-acre Baca Ranch, a Canadian oilman named Maurice Strong, had been applying for extensive water rights in the valley. Gosar had asked Strong what he planned to do with the water. “Maurice told me, ‘We’re going to put in some potatoes, and we’re gonna plant quinoa,’” he recalls.
But Gosar didn’t quite believe it. And now, talking with Canaly, all the pieces began to fit together. Strong was the head of the same company that Canaly’s hungry visitor worked for. And if the massive water-export plan went through, there was a very good chance that the project would suck the valley’s farms and streams dry. Gosar was angry.
“Let’s go get these guys,” he told Canaly. . . .
http://magazine.nature.org/features/shifting-ground.xml
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