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Spring-Summer 2008: The Roar of the Yampa: A proposed diversion that could tame the beast by Kent Vertrees In Steamboat Springs, from mid-April through July, step outside at night, when all is still, and you’ll hear it. The first time I heard the roaring of the Yampa River, I was in awe. I was a mile and a half from the river, sipping beers on my friend’s deck. It was late May and the sun was just about to set. “Is that the Yampa?” I asked my buddy. “Yeah, can you believe it?” he said. “It’s amazing that we can hear it all the way up here.” He kept talking but I wasn’t listening as I was fixed on the roar. Unlike the controlled, tamed rivers of my Midwestern youth, the Yampa River is an exact opposite, a wild unrestricted drainage. The second time the roar caught my ear I was standing beside Mammoth Falls, the infamous first rapid also known as Osterizer in Cross Mountain Canyon.  | | Yampa River spring flows distribute sediment evenly, something that could be affected by a diversion. By Larry Pierce |
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Cross Mountain is the Yampa’s most continuous stretch of whitewater. With towering cliffs and bus-sized boulders constricting its flow, the river’s water was re-circulating in and around itself, forming an immense hydraulic that looked as if it would eat a raft. As an experienced rafting guide, I had seen big water, but nothing like this. At Mammoth Falls, you can stand, perched just feet above the source of the roar, where mist from the spewing water mixes with the cold sweat from your pounding heart. in full flood, the Yampa becomes a freight train of water and earth. And it all flows freely. Though there are a few small reservoirs along the Yampa’s path, the dams of Stagecoach and Catamount do little to stop the springtime snowmelt as the water spills over the cement in natural flow patterns. “The Yampa River is widely regarded to be the largest tributary in the entire seven-state Colorado River system that still retains all the characteristics of a free-flowing river,” says Geoff Blakeslee, the Yampa River project director for the Nature Conservancy. But it all could change. In the next 25 years, Colorado’s population is forecasted to increase by 2.8 million people, the majority of whom will be moving to Front Range cities where water resources are historically thin. Initiative, an expansive review of Colorado’s water resources, is quick to identify that “it’s time for us, the residents of Colorado, to locate our future water supply. With current projections, we have identified a 20 percent gap in the water we will need to provide for our growing municipalities by 2030. If we’re unable to store and use new water supplies, we’ll likely see increased pressure to transfer water from irrigated agriculture on both the east and west slopes.” As this process unfolds, the Yampa’s abundance of water makes it a prime candidate as Colorado’s future water supply. “The Yampa River carries an abundance of clean and available water that we could use to satisfy our needs,” says Carl Brouwer, a project manager for the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District. “In the Multi-Basin Water Supply Investigation, we have summarized a project that would pump water from the lower reaches of the Yampa River, east to the communities along the East Slope that are in need of obtaining future water supplies.” The investigation, also known as the Yampa Diversion Project, outlines a colossal project, the likes of which Colorado has never seen before. At an estimated cost of $3-4 billion and a 25-year build out, the project entails diverting approximately 20 percent of the Yampa River’s flow near the tiny community of Maybell. By diverting water to an off channel reservoir during only the higher spring runoff months, Carl
suggests that this project would still allow the Yampa to function as it does today. “We have initially planned to shut off the pumps when the river gets below 1,000 cubic feet per second, allowing for the environmental and recreational qualities of the Yampa to sustain themselves.” More importantly, flushing flows would be allowed to pass by the diversion during a certain time frame at peak flow, providing the same pulse of water that has existed for millions of years. Northern, which has yet to find a project sponsor, suggests that pump stations would then deliver this water via hundreds of miles of pipeline back up river, under the Continental Divide to its final destination: a reservoir along the Front Range. The exact location of the pipeline and tunnel has yet to be configured, but additional elements could be added into this system.
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