Drought turns water to 'liquid gold' By Greg Avery
Camera Staff Writer
Michael Munson waits for it like a bus, checking his watch and anxiously taking on other chores that need completing.
Standing in the early-morning sun in one of his farm fields just east Boulder, Munson fields phone calls, awaiting word that water, an increasingly scant resource, will arrive to soak his thirsty crops.
For the first time this season, the news is good — at least in the short term.
The previously barren Enterprise irrigation ditch that runs through one plot of peas, sweet corn, spinach and lettuce on the farm east of 75th Street ran wet for the first time all season Wednesday afternoon.
"It's about a month late," Munson said around 7 a.m., getting off his mobile phone from the ditch rider giving him an update on the water's progress.
The unexpected burst of water from Baseline Reservoir came available for one field that Munson, a Boulder County Farmers' Market regular, has barely been able to irrigate so far this spring.
In most years, between 24 to 30 agricultural users lease city water for their farms. This year, supplies are so scant that the city is leasing to no one, and that's leaving many farmers near the city scrambling daily to find any water that is available.
Boulder has been trading water in its low-lying Baseline and Boulder reservoirs to users downstream far east of the city with the highest-priority water rights. In exchange, the city has been able to store a similar amount of water higher in the Boulder Creek watershed.
Boulder's mountain reservoirs, Barker and Silver Lake, hold less than a third of the water they normally do this time of year.
Water levels are so low that none of the city's normal water rights can be used to store water, and the city has had to use some of its reservoir supply to meet daily demand — something it normally doesn't need to do until August or September.
"When we have it, we make it available to agriculture," said Carol Ellinghouse, Boulder's water coordinator. "This year we don't have it available."
Watching daily snowpack readings in April, it became apparent that much of the snowpack was evaporating into thin mountain air, leaving little runoff for streams, Ellinghouse said.
"It was like I was watching an accident in slow motion," she said.
The drought is now ranking as the worst one in more than 100 years on Boulder Creek, a severity she called mind-boggling.
None of that is a surprise to farmers like Munson, who go to work daily in view of the increasingly bare mountaintops.
Munson's early-season crops are a month behind their normal growth, and crops that normally thrive later in the season could have no water at all.
Like others small farmers immediately east of the city that lease Boulder water, Munson is finding there is none to spare.
"All of a sudden water is liquid gold," the 36-year-old Munson said.
Contact Greg Avery at (303) 473-1307 or averyg@thedailycamera.com.
May 23, 2002
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