by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow
The Daily Sentinel
Range Magazine features a story called “Where the Desert Bloomed” about the Bend, Oregon, region along the Deschutes River. It could just as well be about the Grand Valley. It describes a once-arid desert turned into a lush valley of productive agriculture by irrigation canals, which are now being replaced by closed pipes in the name of water conservation. The authors point to unintended consequences of such conservation, because the area is no longer the desert it once was — it is fertile, green and teeming with wildlife.
Authors Gary Lewis and Rick Olson describe how employees of a local irrigation company spent over a decade (1904-1915) drilling, blasting and digging miles of canals to make the area livable, and bountiful. “It didn’t take long for the desert to bloom as willows grew along the canals and pine trees gained a roothold,” they wrote. “Imagine finding a 110-mile river where no river had been, flowing about six months of the year, water seeping from the canal, while evaporative cooling created riparian habitat for deer, otter, beaver, ground squirrels, rock chucks, muskrats, doves, and all manner of waterfowl and songbirds.” That is precisely what happened in the Grand Valley after its reclamation projects were completed, about the same time as those in Bend, Oregon.
Mesa County’s first settlers found a giant valley almost completely devoid of plants, bare dirt from the Colorado River to the Bookcliffs. An 1870s Hayden Expedition geologist wrote of the valley: “for the most part a desert, covered with a sparse growth of stunted sage brush, which grows in a stiff alkaline soil…” Those first explorers considered the valley unsuited for agriculture, and even the native Utes did not have permanent settlements there. But within a year of its legal opening in 1881, the valley had begun its transformation into an agricultural bonanza.
Irrigation water diverted from the Colorado and Gunnison rivers quickly turned the desert into the prosperous valley we now know. Irrigation systems were improved by the federal Reclamation Service and brought thousands of acres into production, especially for what have become the world’s most highly valued peaches, along with other fruits, vineyards, row crops and livestock.
