In the East River watershed, located at the highest reaches of the Colorado River Basin, a group of researchers at Gothic’s Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL) are trying to solve the mystery by focusing on a process called sublimation. Snow in the high country sometimes skips the liquid phase entirely, turning straight from a solid into a vapor. The phenomenon is responsible for anywhere between 10% to 90% of snow loss. This margin of error is a major source of uncertainty for the water managers trying to predict how much water will enter the system once the snow begins to melt. 

Although scientists can measure how much snow falls onto the ground and how quickly it melts, they have no precise way to calculate how much is lost to the atmosphere, said Jessica Lundquist, a researcher focused on spatial patterns of snow and weather in the mountains. With support from the National Science Foundation, Lundquist led the Sublimation of Snow project in Gothic over the 2022-’23 winter season, seeking to understand exactly how much snow goes missing and what environmental conditions drive that disappearance.

“It’s one of those nasty, wicked problems that no one wants to touch,” Lundquist said. “You can’t see it, and very few instruments can measure it. And then people are asking, what’s going to happen with climate change? Are we going to have less water for the rivers? Is more of it going into the atmosphere or not? And we just don’t know.”

“Are we going to have less water for the rivers? Is more of it going into the atmosphere or not? And we just don’t know.”

The snow that melts off Gothic will eventually refill the streams and rivers that flow into the Colorado River. When runoff is lower than expected, it stresses a system already strained because of persistent drought, the changing climate and a growing demand. In 2021, for example, snowpack levels near the region’s headwaters weren’t too far below the historical average— not bad for a winter in the West these days. But the snowmelt that filled the Colorado River’s tributaries was only 30% of average.

“You measure the snowpack and assume that the snow is just going to melt and show up in the stream,” said Julie Vano, a research director at the Aspen Global Change Institute and partner on the project. Her work is aimed at helping water managers decode the science behind these processes. “It just wasn’t there. Where did the water go?” 

As the West continues to dry up, water managers are increasingly pressed to accurately predict how much of the treasured resource will enter the system each spring. One of the greatest challenges federal water managers face — including officials at the Bureau of Reclamation, the gatekeeper of Lake Powell and Lake Mead — is deciding how much water to release from reservoirs to satisfy the needs of downstream users. 

While transpiration and soil moisture levels may be some of the other culprits responsible for water loss, one of the largest unknowns is sublimation, said Ian Billick, the executive director of RMBL.

“We need to close that uncertainty in the water budget,” Billick said. 

 

 

Doing it right 

The East River’s tributaries eventually feed into the Colorado River, which supplies water to nearly 40 million people in seven Western states as well as Mexico. This watershed has become a place where more than a hundred years of biological observations collide, many of these studies focused on understanding the life cycle of the water. 

Lundquist’s project is one of the latest. Due to the complexity of the intersecting processes that drive sublimation, the team set up more than 100 instruments in an alpine meadow just south of Gothic known as Kettle Ponds. 

“No one’s ever done it right before,” Lundquist said. “And so we are trying our very best to measure absolutely everything.”  

Throughout the winter, the menagerie of equipment quietly recorded data every second of the day — measurements that would give the team a snapshot of the snow’s history. A device called a sonic anemometer measured wind speed, while others recorded the temperature and humidity at various altitudes. Instruments known as snow pillows measured moisture content, and a laser imaging system called “Lidar” created a detailed map of the snow’s surface.  

“We are trying our very best to measure absolutely everything.” 

From January to March, the three coldest months of the year, Daniel Hogan and Eli Schwat, Ph.D. students who work under Lundquist at the University of Washington, skied from their snow-covered cabin in Gothic to Kettle Ponds to monitor the ever-changing snowpack. 

Their skis were fitted with skins, a special fabric that sticks to skis so they can better grip the snow. The two men crunched against the ground as they made their near-daily trek out to the site, sleds full of gear in tow. It was a chilly day in March, but the searing reflection of the snow made it feel warmer than it was. When Hogan and Schwat arrived, they dug a pit into the snow’s surface, right outside the canopy of humming instrumentation.

 

  

The pair carefully recorded the temperature and density of the snow inside. A special magnifying glass revealed the structure of individual snowflakes, some of them from recent storms and others, found deeper in the pit, from weeks or even months before. All of these factors can contribute to how vulnerable the snowpack is to sublimation. 

This would be just one of many pits dug as snow continued to blanket the valley. If all of the measurements the team takes over a winter are like a book, a snow pit is just a single page, Hogan said.

“Together, that gives you the whole winter story,” he said, standing inside one of the pits he was studying. Just the top of his head stuck out of the snowpit as he examined its layers. 

Lundquist’s team began analyzing the data they collected long before the snow began to melt. 

They hope it will one day give water managers a better understanding of how much sublimation eats into the region’s water budget — helping them make more accurate predictions for what is likely to be an even hotter, and drier, future.

Bella Biondini is the editor of the Gunnison Country Times and frequently covers water and public lands issues in western Colorado. We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

Keane had lived on the plains 16 miles north of Loma, Montana, for 14 years. He married into the farm and he and his wife grew wheat, canola, flax and hemp. They kept chickens, but not cows. To the best of Keane’s knowledge, the closest grizzlies lived some 150 miles west in Glacier National Park — certainly not in the wide-open ranchland of north-central Montana. He reasoned that the bear followed the Marias River, which flows east from Glacier County, near the Blackfeet Reservation, and runs along the edge of the Keane farm. “I guess he happened to smell the chickens and came up out of the river bottom,” Keane said.

At the time, Keane’s grizzly sighting was the easternmost in the United States in more than a century. He had heard murmurings around town that the bears were moving closer, “but you just don’t expect one to be in your backyard,” he told me. As the grizzly pulverized his poultry, Keane dialed up the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks to report the animal. But before the officer could make it out to his farm to apprehend the grizzly, a neighbor drove by in a loud pickup. The bear took off, and Keane was left to assess the carnage.

When the state’s grizzly bear management specialist for the region investigated the scene, he surmised that the bear was a 3-year-old male that had been moving toward the area, traveling about 10 miles every day. The official set a trap next to Keane’s coop, but the bear was never caught.

After the encounter, the state official installed an electric fence around his coop to protect the ruffled survivors. Keane started carrying a pistol with him on his tractor. “I catch myself looking over my shoulder now,” he said. “It makes you think twice about what else is out there.” After the incident made the local news, Keane was criticized by others around town. “One guy said we should have known better to keep chickens, being in bear country and all. Well, we aren’t in bear country. But maybe we’re starting to be now.”

“I catch myself looking over my shoulder now. It makes you think twice about what else is out there.”

TODAY, KEANE’S RUN-IN would not be newsworthy. Just a year after his sighting, another grizzly was photographed in the Big Snowy Mountains, about 100 miles southeast of the Keane farm. In the Yellowstone and Northern Continental Divide ecosystems, bears that have been isolated from one another for more than 100 years are venturing out of their respective regions, slowly reclaiming old territory.

The grizzly bear, despite what most people think, isn’t a species unto itself. Rather, it’s one of two living subspecies of brown bear found in North America, the other being the Kodiak bear (Ursus arctos middendorffi) in Alaska. Grizzlies (Ursus arctos horribilis) once ranged as far south as central Mexico, where they were known as oso plateado, silvery bears, for their grayish fur. An estimated 50,000 grizzly bears lived in the contiguous United States when the Lewis and Clark Expedition passed through in the early 1800s. But European settlers trapped and shot these bears until fewer than 1,000 remained. The southern edge of the grizzly’s range eventually contracted from Mexico to the southern border of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.

Grizzlies also disappeared from the Pacific Coast. In California in the mid-1800s, the bears were still so common that a $10 bounty was placed on their heads. Restaurants fried up greasy grizzly steaks and served them for less than a dollar. But by 1922, there were only 37 grizzly populations left in the contiguous U.S., and 31 would vanish within just 50 years. Survivors sought refuge in the remote forests of Montana, Wyoming, Idaho and Washington.

The grizzly’s gains in recent decades are the result of swift human intervention followed by natural expansion. In 1975, all grizzlies living in the Lower 48 of the United States were protected under the Endangered Species Act. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service later designated six ecosystems as the focus of recovery efforts: Greater Yellowstone, Northern Continental Divide, Cabinet-Yaak, Bitterroot, Selkirk and the North Cascades.

Through taxes and donations, Americans spent millions of dollars to restore grizzlies — financing recovery planning, private land easements, and educational programs designed to teach people how to live with an animal capable of eating them. Critically, they also funded the relocation of bears. In the 1990s, scientists augmented the Cabinet-Yaak grizzly population in northwestern Montana by transplanting a handful of Canadian bears into the ecosystem. The descendants of those bears are now wandering into the Bitterroot Range, near the Montana-Idaho border, which has been devoid of grizzlies for decades. Biologists had initially planned to move some Canadian bears into the Bitteroots, too. Now they think the grizzlies may repopulate the ecosystem without their help.

Today, grizzlies number just below 2,000 in the Lower 48. Their population has more than doubled in half a century, and, as evidenced by Keane’s encounter, the bears are no longer content to roam within the boundaries we’ve contrived for them. Yellowstone’s grizzlies have tripled their range in recent decades and are now moving north out of the national park. Meanwhile, grizzlies in the Northern Continental Divide recovery zone are heading south. The populations are now only about 50 miles apart, the closest they’ve been in more than a century. Scientists expect that the bears will join up in less than a decade — two islands becoming a continent.

The return of the grizzly bear from near-extinction is one of America’s unlikeliest comeback stories. The bears are among the slowest-reproducing mammals in North America; they require vast tracts of habitat (an adult male grizzly can have a home range of 600 square miles); and they kill people. Bringing back the grizzly required humans to overcome their fear of predators and champion the return of a known man-eater.

And the grizzly remains a fearsome animal. The bear is 800 pounds of muscle and fat, with sharp canines and 4-inch-long claws. It’s extremely defensive, always ready to neutralize a perceived threat. A human being is little more than a rag doll in its immense jaws. Though humans have protected the grizzly from extinction, public sentiment toward the subspecies remains divided: Only the wolf inspires more hatred and mistrust. And as grizzlies expand into places they haven’t inhabited in more than a century, they are crossing not only geographical and political boundaries but thresholds of tolerance.

By 1922, there were only 37 grizzly populations left in the contiguous U.S., and 31 would vanish within just 50 years.

I ENCOUNTERED MY FIRST Yellowstone grizzly outside a resort hotel near Jackson, Wyoming, in 2015. Next to the stone facade, a portly man wearing a furry brown onesie was waving at passing cars. The bear costume’s head was perched above his own, and two fangs protruded over his mustachioed face, almost as if the man had been partially consumed by the bear and was now helplessly peering out of its open mouth. In front of his chest, clasped between wooden claws, he held a placard that read: “I’m Worth More Alive Than Dead.”

I approached the bear, notebook in hand.

“I got this costume just for this event,” the man beamed, performing a small twirl. “Grizzlies are my absolute favorite species! I always feel more alive when I’m in grizzly habitat.”

Extending a paw, he introduced himself as Jim Laybourn, and said he had shown up on behalf of Wyoming Wildlife Advocates, a nonprofit dedicated to conservation in the state. Inside the hotel, dozens of federal, state and tribal representatives were gathering to discuss the possible removal of federal protections from the Yellowstone grizzly population. If the states — Wyoming, Montana and Idaho — regained management authority, they were likely to legalize a trophy hunt.

The debate over Endangered Species Act protections for Yellowstone’s grizzly bears has dragged on for more than a decade. In 2007, when the population numbered more than five hundred, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared it recovered and removed protections. But environmental groups disputed the government’s assessment and took the agency to court, where a judge ruled that Fish and Wildlife had failed to adequately analyze the impact of climate change on whitebark pine, a key food source for Yellowstone’s grizzlies. Average temperatures in the region had increased by more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the 1950s, and the greatest warming was occurring at elevations above 5,000 feet, where whitebark pine grows. (In 2022, the tree was listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.)

Federal scientists launched their own investigation into the grizzly’s food sources. They agreed that whitebark’s precipitous decline had caused bears to forage at lower elevations, making run-ins with humans more likely. And reduced cub survival rates, which had begun to slow grizzly population growth in 2002, coincided with the whitebark decline. However, the scientists also found that Yellowstone grizzlies relied more on meat than other populations, and that many bears already lived in areas without much whitebark pine. They proposed that cubs and yearlings were dying not from a lack of whitebark pine but because too many grizzlies were crowded into too limited an area.

Federal officials had again recommended the removal of Endangered Species Act protections for the Yellowstone grizzly population. Laybourn, a lifelong Wyoming resident, declared that despite his costume, he was not a “bear-hugger.” He was most concerned about the economic ramifications of a trophy hunt. “Our tourism economy here is based on bears. I work as a guide myself, and I’ve taken hundreds of people to see grizzly bears,” he said. Scientists funneled past us into the building, carrying hefty manila folders. Laybourn held the door open with his toothpick claws, an inadvertent ursine bellhop. “I want to make sure we have a robust population,” he continued. “Whenever we take people out to see the wildlife and geysers, every single person asks me, ‘Are we going to see a bear today?’”

FROM THE THREE BEAR LODGE to the Beartooth Barbeque to the Running Bear Pancake House, businesses near Yellowstone rely heavily on the ursine theme. “Grizzly X-ing” mugs are well stocked at every souvenir stand. And bear claws — a sweet Danish pastry — are sold in almost every bakery within a 100-mile radius of the national park. But there are still those who long for an actual bear claw.

At his office in eastern Oregon, I met Steve West, the host of the TV show Steve’s Outdoor Adventures. West was huge in both height and girth — the kind of man who might stand a tiny chance against a grizzly in a fight. A trimmed sandy beard created the mirage of a jawline on his round face. On the day I met him, he wore a plaid shirt that pulled tightly across his chest and a camouflaged ball cap with his TV show’s logo on it. West explained that he had started out hunting for meat — deer and elk, mainly — and made his first foray into trophy hunting in the 1990s with black bears and grizzlies in Alaska. Part of what had made bears so attractive was the risk. “Grizzlies are hunted because they’re a challenge,” he said.

West was a connoisseur of charismatic megafauna, and had bumped off beasts around the world. Oryx in Namibia. Water buffalo in Australia. Musk ox in Canada. Exotic glass-eyed trophies decorated the wood-paneled walls of his office.

“Stalking a grizzly bear is completely different than going after anything else,” West observed as we moved through the halls. “There’s the man-versus-bear thing that comes into play. Yeah, I’ve got a rifle or a bow, I’m holding an advantage of weaponry, but there’s still an element of danger.”

West told me he supported a mix of management approaches to brown bears. He thought there should be places off-limits to hunters, like Brooks Falls in Alaska, where thousands of tourists can watch brown bears fish for salmon from wooden viewing platforms. At the same time, bear hunting is permitted in other parts of the state. “Alaska is the perfect compromise,” he said. I asked West whether he would hunt in the Yellowstone ecosystem given the chance. Without a pause, he replied:

“I’ll buy the first tag.” 

“Grizzlies are hunted because they’re a challenge.”

IN 2017, following years of highly contentious meetings, the Yellowstone grizzly population lost federal protections for a second time. Then-Department of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke called the delisting “one of America’s great conservation successes, the culmination of decades of hard work.” Less than a year later, Wyoming and Idaho announced trophy hunts. The two states held lotteries for a total of 23 tags, each of which would enable the winner to bag a bear. 

More than 8,000 people entered the lotteries, each paying a fee of less than $20. A few hunters gleefully anticipated killing the region’s best-known bear, Grizzly 399, who was often photographed ambling along park roads with two or three cubs in tow. World-renowned wildlife photographer Thomas Mangelsen entered the lottery, hoping to spare a bear’s life by winning a tag and then shooting with his camera instead of a gun. Miraculously, Mangelsen won a tag; Steve West did not.

Following the announcement of the grizzly’s second delisting, environmental groups and the Northern Cheyenne tribe sued the government, challenging the decision to remove protections from the isolated Yellowstone grizzly population rather than prioritize reconnecting populations across the West. Another lawsuit, filed by the Crow, Crow Creek Sioux and Standing Rock Sioux tribes and the Piikani Nation alongside other tribal leaders and societies, alleged that the federal government ignored legal requirements to consult with tribes about the decision. Since 2016, more than 100 Indigenous nations have signed the Grizzly Treaty, committing them to the restoration and revitalization of grizzly bear populations throughout North America.

“Our people have been separated from the grizzly since we were forced onto reservations, but we have not forgotten,” then-Crow Creek Sioux Tribe Chairman Brandon Sazue wrote to me. “In our genesis, it was the great grizzly that taught the people the ability for healing and curing practices, so the grizzly is perceived as the first ‘medicine person.’ … It is no coincidence that the spiritual reawakening of Native people on this continent has coincided with the modest recovery of the grizzly since the 1970s — a recovery that will end with delisting and trophy hunting in a return to the frontier mentality of the 1870s.”

Just before the trophy hunt was scheduled to begin, the judge presiding over the environmental groups’ lawsuit brought down the gavel. He ruled that the federal agency had exceeded its legal authority when it removed protections from the Yellowstone grizzly. The judge wrote in his decision that it would be “simplistic at best and disingenuous at worst” to not take into account the five other populations of grizzlies outside of Yellowstone. With the bears so close to closing the gap, losing protections would be an enormous setback for the subspecies. If the Fish and Wildlife Service was going to succeed in delisting the iconic bears, it would need to rejoin these island populations, creating genetic linkages that would ensure long-term survival. The trophy hunt was canceled, and protections were restored.

The ruling was a victory for the environmental groups and tribes who had fought hard to keep the animal protected indefinitely. For others living in close proximity to America’s growing grizzly population, it was anything but.

“Our people have been separated from the grizzly since we were forced onto reservations, but we have not forgotten.”

BLACK BART is the only bear Trina Jo Bradley doesn’t mind having around. The enormous jet-black grizzly, pushing 900 pounds, has lived on her ranch on Birch Creek for close to six years. He’s well-behaved, Bradley said, and keeps his brethren out: “Normally, we get bears coming through here pretty thick in March, heading out from the mountains down to the prairie. Since he’s been here, we’ve seen way fewer bears.”

Ranching is in Bradley’s blood. She was raised on a cattle operation some 16 miles south, near Dupuyer Creek in Montana. Her father was a hired rancher, which meant that Bradley and her brothers were put to work at a young age. They rode horses and herded cows. Any free time was spent mucking around outside — but always within shouting distance of the house, and with a guard dog. There were bears near Dupuyer, she said, even back then, in the 1980s and 1990s. Glacier National Park wasn’t too far away, and occasionally a grizzly from the Northern Continental Divide population would wander out and kill one of their cows.

Bradley went south to Casper, Wyoming, for college, where she studied agribusiness. At 22, a car accident forced her to return home to Montana, where, while recuperating, she met her husband. Instead of going back to school like she’d planned, she moved onto his family ranch, where she’s raised three daughters along with Angus cattle and quarter horses. When her father-in-law bought the Birch Creek land back in 1956, there were very few grizzlies in the area, she said. The first livestock loss happened in the 1990s when a bear killed a calf. Authorities promptly trapped and removed it. “That was the last bear they saw until I moved here. I’m pretty sure the bears followed me from Dupuyer,” she said.

As Montana’s bears grow in numbers and expand their range, they are spending more time on private land, leading to more encounters with humans and domestic animals. In 2019, for example, the state made more payments —$261,000 — to ranchers for livestock killed by predators than in any previous year, with nearly twice as many animals suspected to have been killed by grizzlies than wolves. In 2021, when ranchers reported 78 kills by wolves and 119 by grizzlies, payouts topped $340,000.

As Montana’s bears grow in numbers and expand their range, they are spending more time on private land, leading to more encounters with humans and domestic animals.

Bradley’s sage-green farmhouse is surrounded by some 3,500 acres of hayfield and private pasture, where she and her husband run about 250 cows. The house’s living-room window looks out over rolling hayfields, toward the snowcapped perimeter of the Rocky Mountains. From this vantage point, Bradley often watches the bears go by. “Grizzly bears are super cool, and I love seeing them,” she said. “But I don’t love seeing them in my yard or in my cows.”

Though grizzlies are around nearly every month of the year, her ranch hasn’t lost many of its domesticated animals to bears. Perhaps she has Black Bart to thank, or perhaps, she said, “our cows are just mean.” A neighbor less than a mile away, she said, loses between 15 and 20 calves to bears annually.

A few years ago, Bradley was appointed to Montana’s Grizzly Bear Advisory Council, a state-run initiative with the aim of “listening to Montanans” and “following their interests while also conserving bears.” She was passionate about protecting agriculture, and wanted to ensure that farmers and ranchers got the assistance they needed to cope with the grizzlies in their midst. “Pretty much everybody here is just tired. We’re tired of grizzly bears. We’re tired of conflicts. We’re tired of not letting our kids play outside. We’re tired of having to sacrifice our paychecks for the public’s wildlife.” This was one of the most common arguments I heard from livestock producers: Liberal urbanites want predators back on the landscape, but they aren’t suffering the consequences of a grizzly in the backyard. “It’s not like camping or backpacking,” Bradley said. “We don’t have a choice. We have to go outside. We have to take care of our cows. And there’s probably going to be a bear there.”

As long as grizzlies remain under the wing of the Endangered Species Act, state wildlife managers are unable to relocate or euthanize bears that kill livestock without first consulting the federal government. Ranchers believe this limits their ability to get rid of the bears causing problems. (Environmental groups and scientists have long questioned whether grizzlies are responsible for as many livestock deaths as states allege.) State and federal officials have discussed removing protections from the Northern Continental Divide bears, but perhaps chastened by the Yellowstone debacle, the Fish and Wildlife Service recommended in 2021 that all grizzlies in the Lower 48 remain listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

“Grizzly bears are super cool, and I love seeing them. But I don’t love seeing them in my yard or in my cows.”

Bradley disagreed with this assessment. “Grizzly bears no longer need to be protected. They’re not unicorns,” she said.

“How many bears do you think is enough, in an ideal world?” I asked.

“I think when the grizzly bears were put on the Endangered Species Act — there were only like (300 to) 400 bears in the entire state then — that was enough.”

Many ranchers want tougher punishments for encroaching bears. They want them removed from the population right away, not given multiple chances to redeem themselves after attacking livestock. They want more funding for conflict prevention measures. (In 2021 and 2022, Fish and Wildlife provided a total of $40,000 for grizzly-deterrent fencing, with the state chipping in $5,000.) Bradley had set up an electric fence around the chickens and goats in the yard, but it wasn’t feasible to put an electric fence around the entire ranch. For now, she’d have to rely on Black Bart to scare off the others.

“He’s the best guard bear there is.”

CHRIS SERVHEEN first laid eyes on a grizzly in the Scapegoat Wilderness, near Helena, Montana. He was in his early 20s, backpacking with college friends, when they entered a meadow and caught sight of a bear tearing up a huge stump, looking for insects. “We stayed there for a while, just watching him from the trees,” he said. “Grizzlies have this ability to burn into your memory so that you remember everything that was happening when you saw them. It’s really amazing how much you can remember, even years later. … That’s the magic of grizzly bears.”

Servheen is arguably the foremost grizzly expert in the United States, having served as the Fish and Wildlife Service national grizzly bear recovery coordinator for 35 years until his retirement in 2016. He was the guy in charge of making sure bears didn’t disappear from the Lower 48, and evidently, he did a decent job of it.

Servheen grew up on the East Coast, but, inspired by the National Geographic wildlife specials that captivated him as a child, he moved to Montana to study wildlife biology. He began by researching eagles under the mentorship of famed biologist and conservationist John Craighead. Servheen pivoted to grizzly bears for his Ph.D., three years after the subspecies landed on the endangered species list. After finishing his doctorate in 1981, he accepted the newly created position of grizzly bear recovery coordinator, but he wasn’t optimistic about the bear’s prospects: There were only about 30 breeding females left in the Yellowstone population. “It’s important to recognize we were really close to losing grizzly bears at that point,” he said.

For more than three decades, Servheen was a constant presence at bear meetings. Whether in Yellowstone, the North Cascades or the Cabinet-Yaak, his nearly bald head stood out among the Stetsons. In 2015, still working at the agency, he maintained that the Yellowstone population, and possibly even the Northern Continental Divide population, should be delisted. The grizzly group had met its ecological recovery goals, and, provided the population was managed carefully after delisting, the bears were guaranteed to be around for a long time.

“The objective of the Endangered Species Act is to get a species to the point where protection is no longer required,” Servheen told me at the time. “The purpose is to fix the problem.” In the case of the Yellowstone grizzly, he believed it had been.

During Servheen’s final years as the grizzly recovery coordinator, he began to worry that the federal government was bending to the will of the states rather than serving the grizzly’s best interests. As the agency prepared for the second delisting, Servheen had written some guidance on how best to manage grizzly deaths once the population lost protections, essentially putting safeguards in place that would stem any future population decline. If too many bears died, for example, these measures would ensure that the population regained protections. But his document came back with such safeguards removed. This, he felt, eroded the credibility of the recovery program and made delisting “biologically incredible and legally indefensible.” Knowing it would be up to him to defend such a plan in the face of a lawsuit — which was all but guaranteed — “I quit.”

“Grizzlies have this ability to burn into your memory so that you remember everything that was happening when you saw them. It’s really amazing how much you can remember, even years later. … That’s the magic of grizzly bears.”

It wasn’t the triumphant ending to his career that Servheen had imagined. “The grizzly bear recovery program is one of the most successful stories in the Endangered Species Act. They’re a challenging species to recover, and we did it,” he told me, “but all the political bullshit that happened right at the end kind of spoiled it.” Now, rather than spending his retirement fishing, Servheen had made it his mission to bring attention to the risks confronting grizzlies. I asked him if he thought grizzlies should still lose federal protections.

The answer was a decisive no. “For years, I was an advocate for delisting,” he said. He believed that the agency had gotten Yellowstone’s bears to the point where protections were no longer needed. And he hoped states would take on this responsibility with maturity and grace. But lately, “the actions of Montana’s Legislature have proven that the states are no longer able to be trusted when it comes to managing large carnivores.” Servheen pointed to a disconcerting trend in the West that he dubbed “anti-predator hysteria.” The Montana Legislature, for example, had approved a spring hound hunting season for the state’s black bears — a practice that had been banned in Montana for a century. Servheen perceived this as the state sliding backwards into a Manifest Destiny mindset. “It’s really horrifying to me to see this. If they weren’t still (federally) protected, one can only imagine what Montana would do to grizzlies.”

I asked Servheen how many grizzlies he thought the United States could feasibly handle. Some conservation advocates believed we could happily live with as many as 6,000, and lobbied for the bears to be returned to California, the Grand Canyon and the Southern Rockies. Then there were people like Trina Jo Bradley, who wanted far fewer bears than there were now. Most people weren’t willing to give a numerical answer, focusing instead on the genetic health and connectivity of the populations. However, Servheen — the scientist — was ready with an answer: 3,000 to 3,400 grizzlies, at least 1,000 more than estimated to now be living in the Lower 48.

The Yellowstone ecosystem and Northern Continental Divide, he explained, could support 2,000. The Bitterroot could hold 300 to 400. The Selkirks and Cabinet-Yaak could take another 150 bears. And the North Cascades could support up to 400 bears — though there were none present at the moment. But Servheen warned that, amid anti-predator sentiment, we could begin to see an overall population decline, not an increase. “Grizzly bears are special animals,” Servheen said. “They have low resilience. They live in special, remote places. And if we’re going to maintain grizzly bears, we have to behave and treat them in a special way.”

In February 2023, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced it would again review whether to remove federal protections from the grizzly bears in both Greater Yellowstone and the Northern Continental Divide ecosystems. Whether or not grizzlies continue to grow their numbers in the Lower 48 — and, eventually, close the gaps that exist between populations — depends now on our behavior and our politics.

Excerpted from EIGHT BEARS: Mythic Past and Imperiled Future, available July 11 from W.W. Norton.

Author Gloria Dickie, a former High Country News intern, is a climate and environment correspondent for Reuters. We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

Copyright © 2023 by Gloria Dickie. Used by permission of Gloria Dickie, care of The Strothman Agency LLC. All rights reserved.

The opposite side of the reservoir is dark and so quiet that water lapping on the shore and bats clicking overhead can be heard over the distant hum of boat engines. This is the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe’s reservation in California. The water that rose behind Parker Dam to create Lake Havasu washed away homes and flooded about 7,000 acres of fertile Chemehuevi land, including where tribal members grazed cattle.

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This story is the third story in a series about the Colorado River. See the rest, as well as other great reporting from High Country News by signing up for our newsletter.

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The communities across the reservoir reflect the vast divide in economic opportunities between Indian Country and the rest of the West, which has been perpetuated, in large part, by who received water and who did not.

In 1908, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the federal government owed tribes enough water to develop a permanent home on their reservations, and that their water rights would hold senior priority, meaning they trumped those of others. In the Colorado River Basin, most tribes, even during a drought, should get water before Phoenix, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and elsewhere.

More than a century later, only a few basin tribes have benefited from this system. Of those that have, some live near federally funded canals and pipelines that can deliver water to their land; others received money to build their own water systems; and some negotiated for the right to market their water to other users. The Gila River Indian Community, for instance, recently struck a deal with the federal government to forgo using some of its water in exchange for up to $150 million over the next three years, depending how much water it conserves, and $83 million for a new pipeline.

But most of the basin’s 30 federally recognized tribes have faced seemingly endless barriers to accessing and benefiting from all of the water to which they’re entitled. The Chemehuevi Reservation fronts about 30 miles of the Colorado River, yet 97% of the tribe’s water remains in the river and ends up being used by Southern California cities. The tribe never receives a dollar for it.

The water that has already been guaranteed to basin tribes but remains unused totals at least 1 million acre-feet per year — nearly one-tenth of the Colorado River’s flow in recent years and nearly four times the Las Vegas metro area’s allocation. If sold outright, this water would be valued at more than $5 billion, according to a ProPublica and High Country News analysis. For the Chemehuevi, a tribe with about 1,250 members, that means the amount of water it has on paper but doesn’t use would have a one-time value of at least $55 million.

Steven Escobar, the Chemehuevi’s tribal administrator, grew up testing his mettle against the Colorado River’s currents, swimming across its cold waters upstream of the reservoir. He still thinks of the river in terms of struggle. But now, it’s a struggle for the tribe to get the same help from the federal government to access water as others have, or, if not, to get compensation for what’s legally theirs.

“All that development and governmental support that they provide every state, that should be the same thing they provide to tribes,” Escobar said. “We’ve had to fight for everything out here.”

As demand on the Colorado River far exceeds its supply, tribes worry that they’ll never receive the water they’re owed.

The Chemehuevi are left in a bind: The tribe doesn’t have the pumps or other infrastructure necessary to deliver its full allotment of river water to its reservation. While the federal government gave the tribe a grant to build a small reservoir, neither it nor the state of California has allocated money to build a larger delivery system.

“All that development and governmental support that they provide every state, that should be the same thing they provide to tribes.” 

Even as a backup option, the tribe is unable to lease its water to other users, such as rapidly growing cities, or earn money by leaving it in the river to preserve the waterway. Antiquated laws and court rulings typically allow tribes to be paid to conserve only water they previously used. Any changes to how a tribe could market its water would take an act of Congress.

“This is a long-standing problem,” said Mark Squillace, a professor at the University of Colorado’s law school. “From the perspective of the people using that water, why would they pay when they’re already getting it for free?”

 

 

The Law of the River at work

A half-century ago, the Bureau of Reclamation began construction on a massive canal called the Central Arizona Project to send the waters that flooded the Chemehuevi’s land 336 miles across the desert to Phoenix and Tucson. The pumps that power the system, which help deliver the state’s share of the Colorado River, are the largest single consumer of electricity in the state.

Meanwhile, the Chemehuevi rely on a single diesel pump to draw water six stories up to the plateau where they live above Lake Havasu.

For at least 50 years, the river’s decision-makers have recognized this disparity in water access. In 1973, a body called the National Water Commission submitted a report to Congress: “In the water-short West, billions of dollars have been invested, much of it by the Federal Government, in water resource projects benefiting non-Indians but using water in which the Indians have a priority of right if they choose to develop water projects of their own in the future.”

For tribes, the first challenge is securing their water rights. After the Supreme Court’s 1908 decision confirming tribes’ right to water, two paths emerged to quantify and settle the amount and details of those rights. Tribes could, with the backing of the Department of the Interior, negotiate with the state where their reservation is located. Or they could go to court. Fourteen basin tribes are still in the midst of this process, but either path they choose presents trade-offs.

Tribes that negotiate typically need to trade some of the water they believe they’re owed in exchange for money to build water-delivery infrastructure. They can also trade their water priority — leaving them more susceptible when allocations are cut, a reality that’s already threatening to curtail their water amid the West’s ongoing drought.

For tribes that choose to go through the courts to get their water, there’s no opportunity to negotiate for funding for canals, pipes and pumps, meaning there’s no way to move the water they’re awarded onto a reservation.

“It’s not enough to have the right to the water,” Squillace said. “You also have to have the infrastructure.”

“It’s not enough to have the right to the water. You also have to have the infrastructure.”

Highlighting the difficulties in converting rights to water on paper into actual water on a reservation, tribes around the West that secured a negotiated settlement only increased their agricultural land use by about 9% and saw no increase in residential or industrial development, according to estimates from a recent study published in the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists.

And if a tribe can’t move water, it often can’t monetize it.

Laws passed between 1790 and 1834, known as the Indian Non-Intercourse Acts, have the effect of prohibiting tribes from leasing water beyond the borders of their reservations without congressional approval. Settlements also typically bar them from permanently selling their water and often prohibit them from leasing it.

“This is what’s left”

Politicians packed a conference room at the Arizona Capitol in April, where they unveiled an agreement to pay the Gila River Indian Community millions of dollars to leave its water in Lake Mead. Officials took turns at the lectern extolling tribes for their role in preserving the Colorado River.

“We don’t have any more important partners in this effort than in Indian Country,” Deputy Secretary of the Interior Tommy Beaudreau said.

When the Gila River Indian Community negotiated its water rights, the Central Arizona Project had begun carrying Colorado River water near its reservation south of Phoenix, and the tribe had some political clout after spending millions of dollars on lobbying. Those advantages allowed the tribe to negotiate tens of millions of dollars for infrastructure to deliver its water and the right to lease tens of thousands of acre-feet to nearby cities and a mining company. Its settlement has now made the tribe a well-compensated partner in conservation efforts.

“These are truly historic investments in directly tackling the challenge presented to our state and our region by the historic drought,” Gila River Indian Community Gov. Stephen Roe Lewis said during the April news conference announcing the deal to trade more water for money. The tribe declined requests for additional comment, as it is negotiating further water deals.

The Chemehuevi, by contrast, can’t access or lease most of their water. Their rights were quantified and settled via the courts in the 1960s, at a time when the tribe didn’t have federal recognition. So it didn’t receive infrastructure funding.

Escobar, the Chemehuevi’s tribal administrator, would prefer to use his tribe’s water, not lease it. He wants to expand pumping capacity and construct a cascading series of reservoirs. Once the Chemehuevi access the water, they could use it for more houses to bring enrolled members back to their land, new businesses to provide jobs and increased farming to grow the reservation’s economy.

Escobar talked about his dreams and the difficulty in developing Indian Country as he drove past the frames of unused greenhouses, evidence of a failed venture. Near a field where the tribe’s single tractor was working the soil, Escobar described the Chemehuevi’s agricultural plans. Behind him, Lake Havasu covered soil that could have been productive fields or pastureland. In front of him stretched sandy desert where the federal government said the tribe should harvest crops.

“We want to be a benefit to the system, but right now, they’re making it hard.” 

“This is what’s left,” he said of the tribe’s potential farmland that wasn’t submerged by the reservoir. “It’s sad.”

After the once-nomadic Chemehuevi fought for recognition of their tribe and their reservation, they partnered with the University of Southern California to develop a plan to farm 1,900 acres using the 11,340 acre-feet of water per year, about 3.7 billion gallons, that the government allotted them — at least on paper. But, in a good year, the Chemehuevi farm only 80 acres, growing melons for food, devil’s claw for basket weaving and cottonwoods for a riparian restoration project.

If it can’t transport more water to expand the farm, Escobar said, the tribe could accept leaving water in the river in exchange for compensation. “We want to be a benefit to the system,” he said, “but right now, they’re making it hard.” Many non-Indigenous people and a few tribes around the basin earn money limiting their water use, whether by fallowing farm fields or ripping out lawns.

Why shouldn’t all tribes be paid? Escobar asked.   

Anna V. Smith is an associate editor of High Country News. She writes and edits stories on tribal sovereignty and environmental
justice for the Indigenous Affairs desk from Colorado. @annavtoriasmith

Mark Olalde is an environment reporter with ProPublica, where he investigates issues concerning oil, mining, water and other topics around the Southwest.

Umar Farooq is an Ancil Payne Fellow with ProPublica, where he reports on national issues. @UmarFarooq_

We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

The bison’s massive front- and hindquarters rested on a blue tarp to protect them from dirt and other contaminants. Gut piles left by other hunters, frosted with March snow, dotted the hillsides around Falcon. As she field-dressed the animal, tourists headed to the park passed by less than half a mile away. “We’re using our space that we have always used,” Falcon said. “We’re just using it again now with an audience.”

Falcon’s harvest is a revitalization of Indigenous knowledge and culture. But the hunt is also a public lightning rod — part of an ongoing controversy over managing an iconic species that tribal nations, the federal government and the state of Montana all have deep and different interests in.

“We’re using our space that we have always used. We’re just using it again now with an audience.”

AT LEAST 27 TRIBES have historic ties to the Yellowstone region. In the late 19th century, the United States government forced them out as part of a nationwide effort to exterminate and assimilate Indigenous people. Treaties between tribes and the federal government in the mid-1800s established reservations across the region, but maintained hunting rights in places deemed “unoccupied.”

At the same time, bison, which once numbered between 30 and 60 million in North America, were deliberately slaughtered en masse, part of the campaign to clear the land of Indigenous people: “Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone,” U.S. Army Col. Richard Dodge reportedly said in 1867. By the early 1900s, fewer than two dozen wild bison remained, deep in Yellowstone National Park.

Thanks to federal conservation efforts, bison rebounded in Yellowstone — and tribes began to reclaim their rights to harvest them. In the mid-2000s, the Nez Perce Tribe wrote to Montana’s governor, claiming their right to hunt bison on Forest Service land adjacent to the park. The state acknowledged the tribe’s sovereignty. “Today, after years without meaningful access to bison, the Nimiipuu are reconnecting with bison in the Greater Yellowstone Area, re-asserting our sacred relationship with the bison, and exercising our treaty-reserved right to hunt bison that was secured by our ancestors and promised by the United States,” the tribe said in an emailed statement. Over time, more tribes followed; last winter, eight tribal nations hunted bison outside Yellowstone, some from as far away as Washington and Oregon.

Tribal hunters entered a contentious landscape. For decades, the state of Montana, federal agencies and conservation groups have gone back and forth through lawsuits, legislation and protests over how many Yellowstone bison there should be, and where. Bison and elk in the region harbor the country’s last reservoir of a disease called brucellosis, which can cause cattle to abort and become infertile. While there have been no confirmed cases of wild bison spreading brucellosis to domestic cattle, the state still spends more than a million dollars every year to prevent its spread. If Montana loses its brucellosis-free status, it could forfeit another $10 million or more per year. Tribes, wildlife managers and park officials developed three methods to keep the park’s bison numbers down: hunting outside Yellowstone, transfer to tribes, and capture by park officials for slaughter.

“Today, after years without meaningful access to bison, the Nimiipuu are reconnecting with bison in the Greater Yellowstone Area.” 

By 2022, Yellowstone bison numbered about 6,000 — the highest since recovery began. During particularly harsh winters, when ice and deep snow block forage, the animals migrate north, searching for food. Last year, winter came on strong and early, and buffalo appeared in locations that they likely hadn’t grazed in a century.

That meant they had to pass through Beattie Gulch and other federal land, where hunters waited. Conservation groups have long criticized the park’s bison cull, but this year’s high harvest amplified that tension. Videos circulated online showed gut piles lining the road, blood streaming down the brown dirt as the offal thawed. Billboards popped up across the state, reading: “There is no hunt. It’s slaughter!” One local organization, the Gallatin Wildlife Association, wrote to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, urging the federal government to “renegotiate how (tribal) treaty rights should be enforced in a modern society.”

Bonnie Lynn, who lives across the road from Beattie Gulch, is a longtime hunt opponent. Monitoring the harvest from cameras placed around her property, she said she’s seen injured animals fleeing into the park, dozens of hunters in a firing line — even people unintentionally shooting toward each other and the road. She’s also concerned about ecosystem health: Lead poisoning from bullets can devastate raptors and other scavenging birds. “To watch this on a daily basis is emotionally draining,” she said.

Lynn, like many others, blames this year’s high harvest on federal and state mismanagement. In May, Jaedin Medicine Elk, a Northern Cheyenne tribal member and co-founder of the group Roam Free Nation, wrote an open letter to tribes that harvest Yellowstone bison. (The Northern Cheyenne Tribe hasn’t participated in the modern hunt.) “I don’t think the buffalo could go through another winter like this one,” he wrote. He said state and federal governments respect tribal treaty rights only when it directly benefits their agenda — in this case, serving Montana’s livestock industry. Bison need more room to roam, he wrote. When that happens, a respectful hunt can begin.

 

 

AT THEIR HOME in East Glacier on the Blackfeet Reservation, more than five hours north of Beattie Gulch, Christen Falcon and her partner, Wyett Wippert, threaded nylon rope through the edges of a bison hide and pulled it taut, like tightening shoelaces. This was the couple’s first experience tanning a hide on their own. Chatting about the harvest with friends and neighbors, they tossed scraps of fat and meat to their dogs, Binks and Noi. “Gonna have all the neighbor dogs over here,” Wippert joked. “They’re comin’!”

Falcon said there’s a running joke about Yellowstone bison hunters in her community: They aren’t real hunters, people say. The hunt is roadside, and the animals are accustomed to tourists wielding cameras, not guns. Still, she said, it’s better than the alternative the animals face: Many of them likely would be slaughtered by the park anyway.

Falcon works for a nonprofit that focuses on Indigenous-led research. The bulk of her and Wippert’s harvest will go to a study she’s leading that will analyze what happens when tribal members consume a completely traditional diet. Animal parts with special meaning, like the tongue, will go to knowledge-holders. Ultimately, she sees the Yellowstone harvest as a blessing; it helps everyone who hunts and receives meat connect to land, culture and identity. “That’s what sovereignty is — taking care of yourself,” she said. “And that’s what we’re trying to do here.”

 “That’s what sovereignty is — taking care of yourself.”

Tribal hunters HCN interviewed said their meat goes to family, community members, even schools. An average bison yields, conservatively, 500 pounds of steak and burger, meaning the winter’s harvest of Yellowstone bison equates to over a half-million pounds of lean meat going straight to tribal communities. In places like the Blackfeet Reservation — where census data shows a poverty rate of 31.1%, roughly triple Montana’s average — that can have a real impact on food security and nutrition. Christina Flammond, a tribal member and the reservation’s sole meat processor, waives her 85-cents-per-pound processing fee for hunters who donate half their meat to local food pantries. “I never dreamed of processing this many bison,” Flammond said one April afternoon at her facility, where a handful of bison quarters hung, aging.

BISON IGNORE STATE, federal and tribal land boundaries, so managing them requires getting parties with sometimes diametrically opposed interests to agree. That’s not easy. As last winter began, the state, federal government and tribes hit an impasse. Montana wanted fewer bison while tribal nations argued that more of the ungulates should graze the hills and valleys of the region. In the end, the park suggested there’s no science-based reason to reduce the population and proposed that at most a quarter of it — 1,500 animals — be removed through hunting, slaughter and transfer to tribes.

Tribes, as sovereign nations, set their own hunting dates and regulations. Reporting hunt numbers is voluntary, and no cumulative goals exist. As bison flooded through Beattie Gulch, the total removed from the Yellowstone population — hundreds of animals were transferred to tribes or slaughtered — exceeded the park’s proposed limit. “I don’t want to see multiple years of substantial population reduction like we just had,” said Yellowstone Superintendent Cam Sholly.

“Everybody’s freaking out that there’s Indians eating from buffalo. That’s not a bad thing; that’s actually a good thing.”

James Holt, a Nez Perce tribal member and executive director of the advocacy group Buffalo Field Campaign, said last winter’s hunt shows how Montana’s efforts to minimize the population have “led to every tribe for itself.” Lamenting the lack of a shared vision, he said, “It’s a tragedy of the commons that we’re seeing on the ground right now.” Still, there’s an opportunity for collaboration that centers both buffalo and tribes. He wants to see tribes work together to oversee a sustainable harvest, much the way Columbia River tribes cooperate on fish management.

“Everybody’s freaking out that there’s Indians eating from buffalo,” said Kekek Jason Stark, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa and professor of law at the University of Montana. “That’s not a bad thing; that’s actually a good thing.”

In “Re-Indigenizing Yellowstone,” published in the Wyoming Law Review last year, Stark and his co-authors offered what he called a “road map” to empower tribal voices in America’s first national park. Their vision encompasses more than bison: They suggested that Congress could return the park to tribal management, much as it did with the National Bison Range on the Flathead Reservation. Short of that, the park should empower tribes as partners with true decision-making authority. Since so many tribes with diverse interests have connections to the Yellowstone area, they suggested creating an intertribal commission. Once that work begins in Yellowstone, Stark said, “it’s going to catch like wildfire” on other federal lands.

Right now, only two of the eight tribes with bison-hunting rights are officially part of the conglomeration of agencies and tribal entities that manage the area’s bison, via an effort known as the Interagency Bison Management Plan, or IBMP. Four treaty tribes are also serving as partners while Yellowstone works on a new environmental impact statement to replace its nearly 25-year-old bison management plan. Last year, the park published the alternatives it’s considering, with population numbers ranging from 3,500 animals to as high as 8,000 or more. The state of Montana pushed back immediately, saying all the alternatives were too high and urging the park to withdraw those population targets.

In a June IBMP meeting — the first since last winter’s hunt — bison managers discussed how to move forward. Yellowstone Superintendent Sholly said there needs to be better landscape-level collaboration among all groups that hunt: “It can’t be a free-for-all.” Others, including the chairman of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, agreed. But Ervin Carlson, a Blackfeet member and president of the Intertribal Buffalo Council, said all the talk of the hunt distracts from another way of managing the population: Ramping up the park’s program to transfer living, breathing bison to tribal groups across the country.

The federal government is already in the throes of a massive effort to restore the iconic animal nationwide. A $25 million Interior Department initiative aims to partner with tribes and establish “wide-ranging herds on large landscapes,” to revitalize both ecosystems and cultures. The saga in Yellowstone shows just how difficult it can be to put those ideas into practice. In fact, Montana’s Legislature passed a resolution in April opposing federal bison reintroduction on a wildlife refuge more than 200 miles north of Yellowstone, one of several recent state-led attempts to create barriers to introducing wild bison in the state.

The future of bison management requires governmental policy decisions. But it also depends on the smaller-scale, on-the-ground actions of tribal members like Christen Falcon. “We’re Indigenizing this space,” Falcon said, warming up in a car in March, overlooking the wintry hills of Yellowstone. The dead animals, the publicly visible gore — she understands how unusual it all looks. “We’re showing this Western world that not everything is as it seems.”      

Nick Mott is an award-winning journalist and podcast producer who focuses mostly on climate, public land and the environment. He’s based in Livingston, Montana.

Taylar Dawn Stagner is a writer and audio journalist who’s an editorial intern for the Indigenous Affairs desk at HCN. She’s Arapaho and Shoshone and writes about racism, rurality, and gender. 

We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

You might see Elizabeth Johnson’s semi-tractor trailer traveling the U.S. interstate highways, especially between Colorado and Nebraska.

And if you do see it, there’s no way you can miss Johnson’s message.  The entire trailer carries the simple direct message: “Invisible No More.”

It’s a message meant to bring attention to the plight of missing and murdered Indigenous women whose cases are unsolved.

Johnson — a member of the Ho-Chunk Tribal Nation of Nebraska — has been spreading the message since 2017.

“My message as a woman is, if any woman sees this semi-truck and needs help, me and my dog Delilah will help you to safety,” Johnson said. “Knock on my semi-truck door.”

There are an estimated 506 cases of missing or murdered indigenous women across the country. And that’s likely an undercount due to bad data, according to the Urban Indian Health Institute. Of that number, 128 of the women are considered missing, while 280 were known murdered. Another 98 are cases of unknown status, according to the Urban Indian Health Institute.

The group surveyed 71 police stations and one state agency and found 5,712 missing and murdered Indigenous cases were reported in 2016. But of those, only 116 were logged in a Justice Department database.

According to the National Institute of Justice, as of May 2023, 84.3% more than 1.5 million American Indian and Alaskan Native women experience violence in their lifetime. Victimization of American Indian and Native woman is 1.2 times higher than white women.

Johnson and her family moved to Winnebago in Nebraska when she was five, and she was raised as a tribal member of the Nebraska Ho-Chunk tribe and given the name Rainbow Woman.

She left home when she was in her preteens and has kept moving.

“I don’t know if God would bless me to go further in my trucking industry or this is the end of my travels, but when I see family, I want to make an apple pie,” Johnson said.

Nebraska is always her home, she said, but so is Colorado because her son and grandchildren live in Brighton. She spends half her time with them.

Johnson started her mission because she was a victim of abuse herself. It was a two-way abusive situation, she said:  He was abusive to her, but she fought back.

“He would put me on his lap with a knife at my throat,” Johnson said. “It was a toxic relationship. I left, and I was done. As soon that door closed, God, or wherever you want to believe, started to open other doors for me.”

She had worked as a construction driver in the summer and fall. She was laid off in the winter but guaranteed to return in the summer. Even so,  she said she needed a more consistent job, and she needed reliable transportation to do that. She found a pick-up truck she liked and approached a bank looking for a loan.

“They never wanted to give me a loan, but I told them if you don’t give me a loan, I’m going to go somewhere else,” she said. “This is income that comes to your bank and comes back out. They gave me the loan, and I purchased a brand-new Silverado. When I purchased the truck, that was when I left the man. I thought I was going to die leaving him and was heartbroken, but I left.”

Johnson said she drove the Silverado for a while, and although it was nice to drive a cute truck, she was still broke.

“I went back to the bank and asked for a loan to trade off the Silverado for a used semi to make money,” she said. “I told the banker it was a win-win. I could make money at the same cost Silverado. The woman sat across from me and said, ‘I’m going do it for you’. Usually, they didn’t give business loans.”

That opened a door for Johnson, and she started her trucking company, Ho-Chunk Trucking, in 2017. After a couple of years, she was able to upgrade and buy a new semi-truck. Then, after a couple’s years of hauling other companies’ trailers, she took out another loan and purchased her own trailer in 2020.

“I wanted my own trailer because women in the industry are treated badly. It’s a whole other story,” Johnson said.

Johnson said that once she had a trailer, she started thinking about it as a platform for other Native American women.

“I went through hell and back. What is the message I wanted to say to the world?” she said.

Johnson decided to do a custom wrap on her trailer with a message about Indigenous women. She also included pictures of her family dressed in regalia and a friend dancing pow-pow and included information about 500 gone missing or murdered women.

One photo, showing a woman with a red hand over her mouth, is her niece Jalisa Horn who was left for dead from abuse and had to crawl to get help. Horn agreed to add her photo to draw attention to the message.

Gov. Jared Polis signed Senate Bill 22-150,  a law requiring official reports of missing indigenous people within eight hours. Missing children must be reported to law enforcement within two, under the law.

The act also requires the Colorado Bureau of Investigation to work on investigating missing or murdered indigenous persons and also work with federal, state, and local law enforcement to effectively investigate the cases.

In addition, an alert system and an agency called Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives are responsible for reporting and improving the investigation of missing and murdered Indigenous women and addressing injustice in the criminal justice system.

This story was previously published by Colorado Community Media and is being republished from AP StoryShare.

The post Brighton trucker offers a message and sanctuary for Indigenous women appeared first on Buffalo’s Fire.

Until recently, however, the cause of the fire remained a mystery. In early June, the Boulder County Sheriff’s office released the results of its investigation into the fire’s origin, identifying two sparks: a seemingly dormant ember blown from an outdoor firepit in Marshall, and a downed Xcel Energy power line a few hundred feet south. The findings resolved one major question about the Marshall Fire, though other challenges, from building codes to home insurance disputes, still smolder for the residents.

High Country News spoke with Ashley Stolzmann, the former mayor of Louisville and a current Boulder County commissioner, to understand the significance of the investigation, how to prepare for the next wildfire, and the details behind a lawsuit seeking damages from Xcel Energy for its role in starting the inferno.  

Stolzmann has amassed an unusual amount of experience when it comes to responding to climate disasters. Her first month as a Louisville city council member coincided with the 2013 Front Range flood, the largest rain event on record in Colorado, which destroyed 262 homes in Boulder County. That earned her an appointment to the Mile High Flood District by Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, D, in 2020. A year later, the Marshall Fire forced then-Mayor Stolzmann and her husband to evacuate alongside 40,000 other area residents as she juggled the city’s disaster response. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

High Country News: You were mayor of Louisville during the blaze in 2021 and still live there today. As the fire bore down on the city, residents were sending you texts for information you didn’t have. At the same time, you had to lead the city’s emergency response while making your own decisions about what to save from your home as you evacuated. Could you walk me through what happened that day?

Ashley Stolzmann: I live in Louisville, very close to where the fire was extinguished. In my family, we sort of divided up the tasks that day. I have a great partner and he took care of evacuating our house and worrying about our personal life. That allowed me to go over to emergency operations and just focus on the city stuff. So, my partner really helped me to split my personal life apart from what I was working on for the community. And It was really hard, because neighbors would text me or call me and ask, “Is our neighborhood still here? Is our house OK?” And I didn’t know. It was important that I followed all the evacuation orders that we set because I couldn’t break the rules myself. I actually found out from a neighbor that did break the evacuation rules that our house was still standing. 

HCN: What has the Marshall Fire come to mean for Louisville and Boulder County? 

AS: For the most part, it really has brought people together and shown them the goodness in others: how people really want to help, and continue to want to help. Early in the recovery, some of the community had gas and power and shared their homes with those that didn’t. People were offering showers and heated beds and food. The food sharing has gone on for the whole year and a half, where folks cook dinners for one another and feed each other. Just a lot of caring for one another and resilience. But the fire has also set others back and forced some hard choices. I’ve heard from residents who had to use their children’s college savings account to rebuild their house. There are people that had to decide they’re not rebuilding, just because of their financial situation and their retirement plans. And there are some who didn’t want to rebuild just from the pain of the whole thing. Overall, people have really shown how supportive and resilient they are, what a strong community this is.

HCN: Based on what we know from climate science, this likely won’t be the last Front Range fire catapulted by extreme winds and drought conditions. What have the county and state done to prepare for the next one? 

AS: We’re really ramping up the amount of mitigation we’re doing in the forest and in the grasslands. The community was generous and passed the new tax for fire mitigation that has allowed us to unlock more federal grants because, for any FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) grants, you must have local money to match it. We have done more controlled burns this year, we’ve mitigated more acres of forest land, and we’re grazing areas heavily with livestock to cut down on fuel. But we’re trying to do that with more regenerative practices that keep the water and moisture in the soil. Then came this rainy spring, and we know that means even more fire fuel to manage later down the line. We’ve also made changes to our evacuation system and made changes to the way we dispatch firefighters so that we can try to put out fires faster. 

The biggest piece of it that I’m excited about is we’re working on a public communications plan. It’s a Smokey the Bear-style campaign with the theme of, ‘How can you prepare for forest fires and grassland fires?’ Because there’s another fire coming. It teaches residents about the importance of fire screens on roof vents to keep embers from getting sucked in and of having a fire-resistant perimeter surrounding the home. The campaign also talks about having photos of your house taken, so your insurance company has documentation of what you had in your house; it also underscores the importance of having insurance that’s up to date and a plan for evacuation. 

“I’ve heard from residents who had to use their children’s college savings account to rebuild their house” 

HCN: Insurance companies have fought to prevent payouts to those who lost their homes, adding to the trauma of the fire. What steps are being taken to make sure future wildfire victims are fairly compensated after a loss?

AS: We got two bills passed at the state level this year that I’m proud of. One is about the insurance payout and what people get in a declared disaster and complete loss to make it so that people don’t have to go through the retraumatization of itemizing everything they lost. Judy Amabile, our state representative, brought a bill to correct that part of the insurance process. It allows the Division of Insurance to look at the payout levels on an ongoing basis. The way insurance works is they have software that assesses what the company thinks it will cost to rebuild. 

And then the other bill we passed is called the FAIR Act. The state can now step in with public insurance if a consumer is told by the companies, “No, we will not insure your home.” So, there’s a way for every person in the state to get insurance, because we were starting to see people being denied coverage.

HCN: There’s an ongoing lawsuit against the utility giant Xcel Energy seeking damages since it was one of the company’s downed powerlines that initiated the Marshall Fire. The county investigation confirmed that the dangling wire was one of the fire’s two ignition points but found no grounds for criminal charges against the company. What do you think about the lawsuit and the decision not to pursue charges against Xcel? 

AS: The sheriff’s office did the investigation and then the district attorney looked to see if there could be charges brought. So much detailed effort was put in to really consider if there was a case for a criminal charge, and the district attorney found there was not. But that doesn’t mean that people cannot pursue civil lawsuits for accountability.

HCN: The fire torched over a thousand homes in Boulder County. How far has the recovery come in the year and a half since? 

AS: For our community members, it’s not going nearly fast enough. We want everybody back home. But from a disaster standpoint, when you look at other disasters like ours, we are really doing great as a community getting homes rebuilt. All of the debris is removed, and more than half of the people who lost their homes are well into the process of rebuilding, which is incredible. And then the best news I can deliver is that the rebuilding of a large condo unit that burned down, broke ground last weekend. That was one that was keeping me up at night. 

Samuel Shaw is an editorial intern for High Country News based in the Colorado Front Range. Email him at samuel.shaw@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy. Follow Samuel on Instagram @youngandforgettable. 

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This story is the first in a series about the Colorado River. See the rest, as well as other great reporting from High Country News by signing up for our newsletter.

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The Navajo Nation has for years been locked in contentious negotiations with the state of Arizona over water. With the tribe’s claims not yet settled, the water sources it can access are limited.

The hospital tried tapping an aquifer, but the water was too salty to use. If it could reach an agreement with the state, the tribe would have other options, perhaps even the nearby Little Colorado River. But instead, the Dilkon Medical Center’s grand opening has been postponed, and its doors remain closed.

For the people of the Navajo Nation, the fight for water rights has real implications. Pipelines, wells and water tanks for communities, farms and businesses are delayed or never built.

ProPublica and High Country News reviewed every water-rights settlement in the Colorado River Basin and interviewed presidents, water managers, attorneys and other officials from 20 of the 30 federally recognized basin tribes. This analysis found that Arizona, in negotiating those water settlements, is unique for the lengths it goes to in order to extract concessions that could delay tribes’ access to more reliable sources of water and limit their economic development. The federal government has rebuked Arizona’s approach, and the architects of the state’s process acknowledge it takes too long.

The Navajo Nation has negotiated with all three states where it has land — Arizona, New Mexico and Utah — and completed water settlements with two of them. “We’re partners in those states, New Mexico and Utah,” said Jason John, the director of the Navajo Nation Department of Water Resources. “But when it comes to Arizona, it seems like we have different agendas.”

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1908 that tribes with reservations have a right to water, and most should have priority in times of shortage. But to quantify the amount and actually get that water, they must either go to court or negotiate with the state where their lands are located, the federal government and competing water users. If a tribe successfully completes the process, it stands to unlock large quantities of water and millions of dollars for pipelines, canals and other infrastructure to move that water.

“We’re partners in those states, New Mexico and Utah. But when it comes to Arizona, it seems like we have different agendas.”

But in the drought-stricken Colorado River Basin — which includes seven states, two countries and 30 federally recognized tribes between Wyoming and Mexico — whatever river water a tribe wins through this process comes from the state’s allocation. As a result, states use these negotiations to defend their share of a scarce resource. “The state perceives any strengthening of tribal sovereignty within the state boundaries as a threat to their own jurisdiction and governing authority,” said Torivio Fodder, manager of the University of Arizona’s Indigenous Governance Program and a citizen of Taos Pueblo.

While the process can be contentious anywhere, the large number of tribes in Arizona amplifies tensions: There are 22 federally recognized tribes in the state, and 10 of them have some yet-unsettled claims to water.

Federally recognized tribal reservations and trust land in Arizona

The state — through its water department, courts and elected officials — has repeatedly used the negotiation process to try to force tribes to accept concessions unrelated to water, including a recent attempt to make the state’s approval or renewal of casino licenses contingent on water deals. In these negotiations, which often happen in secret, tribes also must agree to a state policy that precludes them from easily expanding their reservations. And hanging over the talks, should they fail, is an even worse option: navigating the state’s court system, where tribes have been mired in some of the longest-running cases in the country.

Arizona creates “additional hurdles” to settling tribes’ water claims that don’t exist in other states, said Anne Castle, the former assistant secretary for water and science at the U.S. Department of the Interior. “The tribes haven’t been able to get to settlement in some cases because Arizona would impose conditions that they find completely unacceptable,” she said. 

Neither Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican who left office in January after two terms, nor his successor, Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs, responded to requests for comment on the state’s approach to water-rights negotiations. The Arizona Department of Water Resources, which represents the state in tribal water issues, declined to answer a detailed list of questions.

Shirley Wesaw, a citizen of the Navajo Nation, lives near the not-yet-open Dilkon Medical Center. She eagerly watched as it was built, anticipating a time, after it was completed in June 2022, when her elderly parents would no longer have to spend hours in the car to see their doctors off the reservation. But Wesaw is familiar with the difficulty accessing water in the area. Shared wells are becoming less reliable, she said. It’s most difficult during the summer, when some of her relatives have to wake up as early as 2 a.m. to ensure there’s still water to draw from a community well.

“When it’s low, there’s a long line there,” Wesaw said, “and sometimes it runs out before you get your turn to fill up your barrels.”

Pipe dream

One impact of Arizona’s negotiating strategy was particularly evident at the outset of the pandemic.

In May 2020, as the Navajo Nation faced the highest COVID-19 infection rate in the country, the tribe’s leaders suspected that their limited clean water supply was contributing to the virus’ spread on the reservation. They sent a plea for help to Ducey, the governor at the time.

More than a decade earlier, as the tribe was negotiating its water rights with New Mexico, Arizona officials inserted into federal legislation language blocking the tribe from bringing its New Mexico water into Arizona until it also reaches a settlement with Arizona. John, with the tribe’s water department, said the state “politically maneuvered” to force the tribe to accept its demands.

 A multibillion-dollar pipeline that the federal government is building will connect the Navajo Nation’s capital of Window Rock, Arizona, to water from the San Juan River in New Mexico. But without a settlement in Arizona, the pipe can’t legally carry the water. The restriction left the tribe waiting for new sources of water, which, during the pandemic, made it hard for people to wash their hands in communities where homes lack indoor plumbing.

“For the State of Arizona to limit the access of its citizens to drinking water is unconscionable, especially in the face of the coronavirus pandemic,” then-Navajo President Jonathan Nez and Vice President Myron Lizer wrote to the governor. Nez and Lizer included with their letter a proposed amendment that would change a single sentence in the law. They asked Ducey to help persuade Congress to pass that amendment, allowing enough water for tens of thousands of Diné residents to flow onto the reservation.

Arizona rejected the request, according to multiple former Navajo Nation officials.

The Department of Water Resources did not provide ProPublica and High Country News with public records related to the state’s denial of the Navajo Nation’s request for help getting its water to Window Rock. Hobbs’ office said it could not find the communications relating to the incident.

Land and water

Nearly half of the tribes in Arizona are deadlocked with the state over water rights.

The Pascua Yaqui Tribe has 22,000 enrolled members, but limited land and housing allow only a third to live on its 3.5-square-mile reservation on the outskirts of Tucson. A subdivision still under construction has just started to welcome some Pascua Yaqui families on to the reservation. But the new development isn’t nearly large enough to house the more than 1,000 members on a waiting list. More than 18,000 additional acres of land would be needed to accommodate the tribe’s future population, according to a 2021 study that the tribe commissioned.

But Arizona has used water negotiations with tribes to curtail the expansion of reservations in a way no other state has. 

It’s state policy that, as a condition of reaching a water settlement, tribes agree to not pursue the main method of expanding their reservations. That process, called taking land into trust, is administered by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and results in the United States taking ownership of the land for the benefit of tribes. Alternatively, tribes can get approval from Congress to take land into trust, but that process can be more fraught, requiring expensive lobbying and travel to Washington, D.C.

The policy will force the Pascua Yaqui “to choose between houses for our families and water certainty for our Tribe and our neighbors,” then-Chairman Robert Valencia wrote to the Department of Water Resources in 2020. “While we understand that our Tribe must make real compromises as part of settlement, this sort of toll for settlement that is unrelated to water is unreasonable and harmful.”

For tribes across Arizona and the region, building homes and expanding economic opportunities to allow their members to move to reservations is a top priority.

The Pueblo of Zuni was the first tribe to agree to Arizona’s land requirement when it settled its water rights with the state in 2003. The Zuni had hoped to take into trust more land they own near their most sacred sites in eastern Arizona, but that will now require an act of Congress. Since the Zuni settlement, all four tribes that have settled water rights claims with Arizona have been required to agree to the same limit on expansion, according to ProPublica and High Country News’ review of every completed settlement in the state.

In a 2020 letter, the Navajo Nation’s then-attorney general called the state’s opposition to expansion “an invasion of the Nation’s sovereign authority over its lands and so abhorrent as to render the settlement untenable.”

The Interior Department, which negotiates alongside tribes, has agreed, objecting on multiple occasions in statements to Congress to Arizona’s use of water negotiations to limit the expansion of reservations. In 2022, as the Hualapai Indian Tribe settled its rights, the department called the state’s policy “contrary to this Administration’s strong support for returning ancestral lands to Tribes.”

Tribes in Arizona often wait decades to secure water rights

Seven federally recognized tribes in Arizona have filed but not settled any of their claims to water rights. The settlement process can take decades and wind through courts and Congress.

Tom Buschatzke, director of the state’s Department of Water Resources, explained the reasoning behind Arizona’s stance to state lawmakers, noting it’s based on Arizona’s interpretation of a century-old federal law that Congress is the only legal avenue for tribes to take land into trust. “The idea of having that tribe go back to Congress is so that there’s transparency in a hearing in front of Congress so the folks in Arizona who might have concerns can get up and express those concerns and then Congress can act accordingly,” he told the Legislature, adding that the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ process, meanwhile, puts the decision in “the hands of a bureaucrat in Washington, D.C.”

The Department of Water Resources has even gone outside water-rights negotiations to challenge reservation expansion without an act of Congress. When the Yavapai-Apache Nation filed a trust land application with the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 2001, the department fought it, according to documents obtained via a public records request. The department went on to argue in an appeal that the trust land transfer would infringe on other parties’ water rights. A federal appellate board eventually ruled in favor of the tribe, but the state’s opposition contributed to a five-year delay in completing the land transition.

Pascua Yaqui Chairman Peter Yucupicio has watched non-Indigenous communities grow as he works to secure land and water for his tribe. “They put the tribes through the wringer,” he said.

Arizona’s demands

No one has defined the terms of water negotiations between Arizona and tribes more than former U.S. Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz.

Before entering politics, he was a longtime attorney for the Salt River Project, a water and electric utility serving parts of metro Phoenix. During that time, he lobbied for and consulted on state rules that force tribes to litigate water disputes in state court if they’re unable to reach a settlement. After landing in the Senate, Kyl and his office oversaw meetings where parties hashed out disputes, and he saw his role as that of a mediator. He helped negotiate or pass legislation for the water rights of at least seven tribes.

“I wasn’t taking a side,” Kyl told ProPublica and High Country News, “but I was interested in seeing if they could all reach agreements.”

Tribes, though, often didn’t see him as a neutral party, pointing especially to his handling of negotiations for the Navajo Nation and the Hopi Tribe. He was shepherding a proposed settlement for the tribes through Congress in 2010 when he withdrew support, saying the price of the infrastructure called for in the proposal was too high to get the needed votes. A 2012 version of the tribes’ settlement also died after he added an extension to allow a controversial coal mine to continue operating.

Even when Kyl wasn’t directly involved, tribes were pushed to accept concessions, including limits on how they used their water. Settlements across the basin, including in Arizona, typically contain limits on how much water tribes can market, leaving unused water flowing downstream to the next person in line to use for free.

Even when Kyl wasn’t directly involved, tribes were pushed to accept concessions, including limits on how they used their water.

And several tribes in Arizona were asked to give up the ability to raise legal objections if other users’ groundwater pumping depleted water underneath their reservation.

Tribes have also often had to trade the priority of their water — the order in which supply is cut in times of shortage, such as the current megadrought — to access water. The Bureau of Reclamation recently proposed drastic cuts to Colorado River usage, and, in one scenario based on priority, a quarter of the proposed cuts to allocations would come from tribes in Arizona.

“Some of the Native American folks had a hard time with the concept that they had to give up rights in order to get rights,” Kyl said, adding that tribes risked getting nothing if they kept holding out. “If you’re going to resolve a dispute, sometimes you have to compromise.”

Given the long list of terms Arizona typically pursues, some tribes have been hesitant to settle — which can leave them with an uncertain water supply — so the state has tried to push them.

In 2020, Arizona legislators targeted the casino industry — the economic lifeblood of many tribes. Seven Republicans, including the speaker of the House and Senate president, introduced a bill to bar tribes from obtaining or renewing gaming licenses if they had unresolved water-rights litigation with the state. The bill failed, but Rusty Bowers, the House speaker at the time, said the legislation was intended to put the state on a level playing field with tribes. “Where is our leverage on anything?” Bowers said. If tribes weren’t using the water, then others would do so amid a drought in the growing state, he said.

The state’s economic and population growth has presented tribes with other challenges: They must now negotiate not only with the state and federal governments but also with the businesses, cities and utilities that have, in the interim, made competing claims to water.

It has taken an average of about 18 years for Arizona tribes to reach even a partial water-rights settlement, according to a ProPublica and High Country News analysis of data collected by Leslie Sanchez, a postdoctoral fellow at the U.S. Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station, who researches the economics of tribal water settlements. The Arizona tribes that filed a claim but are still in the process of settling it have been waiting an average of 34 years.

Chairman Calvin Johnson of the Tonto Apache Tribe — which has a small reservation next to the Arizona mountain town of Payson — remembers, as a child, watching his uncle, then the chairman, begin the fight in 1985 to get a water-rights settlement.

Still without a settlement, the tribe hopes to one day plant orchards for a farming business, build more housing to support its growing population and reduce its reliance on Payson for water, Johnson said. But, faced with Arizona’s demands, the tribe has not yet accepted a deal.

“The feeling that a lot of the older tribal members have is that it’s not ever going to happen, that we probably won’t see it in our lifetime,” Johnson said.

Turning to the courts

Tribes that hope to avoid Arizona’s aggressive tactics can instead go to court — an even riskier gamble that drags on and takes the decision-making out of the hands of the negotiating parties.

The Kaibab Band of Paiute Indians is the only federally recognized tribe in Arizona yet to file a claim for its water. It has a reservation near the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, but with only 400 members and minimal resources, it would face a daunting path forward. To settle its rights, the tribe would have to engage in court proceedings to divvy up Kanab Creek, the only waterway that crosses its reservation; bring anyone with a potential competing claim to the creek’s water; find money to complete scientific studies estimating historical flows; and then, because the waterway spans multiple states, possibly face interstate litigation before the U.S. Supreme Court.

“It’s about creating and sustaining that permanent homeland,” said Alice Walker, an attorney for the band, but the path between the tribe and that water “boils down to all of those complex, expensive steps.”

Arguing before the Supreme Court on behalf of Arizona and other parties in 1983, Kyl successfully defended a challenge to a law called the McCarran Amendment that allowed state courts to take over jurisdiction of tribal water-rights claims.

“It’s about creating and sustaining that permanent homeland.”

“Tribes are subject to the vagaries of different state politics, different state processes,” explained Dylan Hedden-Nicely, director of the Native American Law Program at the University of Idaho and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. “As a result, two tribes with identical language in their treaties might end up having, ultimately, very different water rights on their reservations.”

Some states, such as Colorado, set up special water courts or commissions to more efficiently settle water rights. Arizona did not. Instead, its court system has created gridlock. Hydrological studies needed from the Department of Water Resources take years to complete, and state laws add confusion over how to distinguish between surface and groundwater.

Two cases in Arizona state court that involve various tribes — one to divide the Gila River and another for the Little Colorado River — have dragged on for decades. The parties, which include every person, tribe or company that has a claim to water from the rivers, number in the tens of thousands. Just one judge, who also handles other litigation, oversees both cases.

Even Kyl now acknowledges the system’s flaws. “Everybody is in favor of speeding up the process,” he said.

After years of negotiations that failed to produce a settlement, the Navajo Nation went to court in 2003 to force a deal. Eventually, the case reached the Supreme Court, which heard it this March. Tribes and legal experts are concerned the court could use the case to target its 1908 precedent that guaranteed tribes’ right to water, a ruling that would risk the future of any tribes with unsettled water claims.

The Navajo Nation, according to newly inaugurated President Buu Nygren, has huge untapped economic potential. “We’re getting to that point in time where we can actually start fulfilling a lot of those dreams and hopes,” he said. “What it’s going to require is water.”

Just across the Arizona-New Mexico border, not far from Nygren’s office in Window Rock, construction crews have been installing the 17 miles of pipeline that could one day deliver large volumes of the tribe’s water to its communities and unlock that potential. Because of Arizona’s changes to the federal law, that day won’t come until the state and the Navajo Nation reach a water settlement.

For now, the pipeline will remain empty.

Anna V. Smith is an associate editor of High Country News. She writes and edits stories on tribal sovereignty and environmental
justice for the Indigenous Affairs desk from Colorado. @annavtoriasmith

Mark Olalde is an environment reporter with ProPublica, where he investigates issues concerning oil, mining, water and other topics around the Southwest.

Umar Farooq is an Ancil Payne Fellow with ProPublica, where he reports on national issues. @UmarFarooq_

We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

Cathy Topper stood at the door to her house looking over the field of solar panels visible from just about anywhere on her property. 

“I finally have gotten to the point where I don’t cry all the time,” she said, as we sat at her kitchen table. 

The shades were drawn throughout the house so she wouldn’t have to see the solar array while going about her day.

Solar farms have been popping up all around Montezuma County, Colorado, over the past few years. Montezuma County, sitting at 6,000-7,000 feet in elevation, gets 300+ days of sun a year. With the high elevations keeping temperatures cooler, and a significant amount of sun, the region is an ideal place for solar development.

Topper has lived in her house on agricultural land outside Cortez, Colorado, in the Four Corners region for 31 years. She hopes to pass down the house and land to her son. She said it was a peaceful place to live, with views of the fields to the north and Sleeping Ute Mountain to the southwest. 

That changed in June 2022 when the solar farm, a project of Empire Electric Association (EEA), began construction. Since then, Topper said the sound of jackhammers has filled the air every day, seven days a week. 

A Long List of Concerns

The location of solar development can be a major point of contention for residents, especially those who have to look at solar projects every day. For Topper, the issue is about the way the installation has disrupted the peace of her rural life. But people have other concerns about solar installations, including solar arrays installed on irrigated agricultural land, which render it useless for agricultural production. 

In 2004, Colorado was the first state to enact a renewable energy standard (RES), requiring 30% renewable energy for investor-owned utilities, and 10% or 20% for municipalities and electric cooperatives. Rural electric coops, including Montezuma County’s Empire Electric Association, and Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, where Empire Electric buys most of their electricity, have been ramping up their transition toward renewable energy in the past few years.

Mike Conne, who lives adjacent to another Empire Electric solar array at Totten Lake, was worried about wildlife in the area and how the solar project would affect the animals. During the permitting process for the Totten Lake solar project, Conne attempted to convince the county that the solar project should go elsewhere, on the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land, away from residential and agricultural land. However, the land used for the Totten Lake solar project was already owned by Empire Electric. “It made economic sense to use that property to generate additional revenue for our members through a lease with the array developer,” said Empire Electric in an email.

One of Conne’s biggest concerns was the bald eagle nest next to the Empire Electric-owned property. Colorado Parks and Wildlife recommends placing any development at least a quarter mile from any eagle’s nest. OneEnergy Renewables, the developer for the Totten Lake project, followed these recommendations and curved the solar project to provide a quarter-mile radius around the nest. OneEnergy also completed construction before nesting season. Now, Conne worries about a housing development going in across the street from the solar array, within the quarter-mile radius of the eagle’s nest.

The Totten Lake solar project was completed and brought online in December 2022. Now, Conne has seen deer get hit by cars because they walk on the road instead of crossing the newly-fenced-off land with the solar array.

Perry Will, a Colorado State Senator for District 5 and former wildlife officer, said that any time you take land out of production by fencing it off, you’re reducing wildlife habitat, especially for ungulates like deer and elk who need fields and sagebrush for critical winter range. “It’s impacting the habitat,” Will said. “It’s really no different than paving it over as a parking lot or putting up a building. It’s still habitat loss.”

Conne was also frustrated with the amount of land degradation that took place while the solar construction was underway. “I expected that they were just gonna put the panels over the vegetation. They completely destroyed the whole area,” he said as he showed photos of a machine grading the 12-acre property next to Conne’s house. 

In response to questions about landowner concerns, Empire Electric said in an email that “During the permitting phases for both the Totten Lake and Montezuma solar generators there were landowners adjacent to the projects who came forward with concerns about the facilities being built near their homes. EEA [Empire Electric] worked with the solar developer and the county planning and zoning board to ensure the projects complied with statutory requirements and also addressed individual member concerns. In the end, all parties were able to come to terms and the projects were approved. In our opinion, the process allowed members with concerns to have their concerns addressed in a fair manner.”

Topper said that when the solar project was announced, she and her neighbors fought it, but they lost the battle. Nathan Stottler, associate director of project development for OneEnergy Renewables, says that he should have reached out to neighbors earlier in the project development for this specific project. During the permitting process, however, there is built-in time for public comment. When neighbors like Topper came to the public comment meetings with frustrations, OneEnergy did make some allowances like moving the project 50 feet from the property line, building an 8-foot-tall privacy fence (which you can still see over from most spots on Topper’s property), and promising to plant 6-foot tall trees for privacy once the project is finished. 

“We’re held to a higher standard than oil and gas because oil and gas is an established use,” said Stottler, “And to the extent we can, we try to welcome that, we want to be better, we want to do better. I work in solar for a reason, because I want to fight climate change.”

A Legal and Logistical Maze

Empire Electric’s contract with Tri-State dictates that the co-op is only allowed to generate up to 5% of its own electricity and must buy the rest from Tri-State. If Empire Electric was able to generate more of its own electricity with solar, electricity prices could go down. But because of the current contract, community members like Topper do not receive any financial benefits from having a solar project in their backyard. 

Stottler, who grew up in rural Minnesota, understands how the view of a solar farm is not what residents desire. However, he said that if people see themselves as a part of the regional community and county, there are more direct benefits to having solar installed locally, including keeping money in the community and stabilizing electricity prices.

“OneEnergy is going to be pumping more tax money into Montezuma County, and that’s a big thing that wouldn’t have happened if you were buying your power from out of state or out of county,” said Stottler. Because Empire Electric, a locally owned cooperative, owns these solar farms, anyone who purchases electricity from Empire Electric keeps their dollars in the community instead of sending it out of the county to a coal or natural gas plant elsewhere.

Other Southwestern rural electric coops such as Kit Carson in Taos, New Mexico, and Delta Montrose in Southwest Colorado have bought out of their contract with Tri-State and are now pursuing 100% solar energy during the day, which can stabilize and lower electricity costs for residents. 

One of the reasons solar developers choose a specific parcel of land is access to roads, power lines, and substations. If the power is being sold to a transmission company, there need to be transmission lines nearby. The Totten Lake and Montezuma Solar projects are only for distribution through Empire Electric Association, which means they need to be located near Empire Electric-owned distribution lines. EEA is not allowed to back feed power onto the transmission grid because of their contract with Tri-State, which means they are only allowed to generate the minimum daytime load (typically determined by the amount of power used from a substation in the middle of the day) and they cannot use Tri-State owned transmission lines to distribute the power produced by the solar arrays.

Stottler said the siting of solar development has three phases. 

“It has to be in Empire’s territory, [and] it has to be on their distribution lines,” said Stottler. The project also needs to be adjacent to a substation. 

For smaller solar projects like the Montezuma (5 megawatts) and Totten Lake (2.5 megawatts), there is not much wiggle room for moving farther away from distribution lines and substations. Building new infrastructure isn’t feasible because the profit margins are much smaller than they would be for a larger, transmission-size solar project. 

“Some of the prime agricultural land is also the prime land for solar energy production because it’s flat and it gets a lot of sun,” said Tyler Garrett, Rocky Mountain Farmers Union’s director of government relations. “The worry is that that [land] will be taken and we’ll be gradually decreasing the amount of land that’s available for agriculture.” 

Bob Bragg, Topper’s neighbor and an agricultural journalist, said that it’s important for developers to consider the people who live near solar arrays. “We’re so hellbent on putting in solar installations that we want it close to the substations, when in reality maybe we need to spend a little bit more money to get those to where they’re not impacting someone’s home who lived there for a very long time,” Bragg told the Daily Yonder.

Garrett worries a lot about farmland being taken out of production with the development of more and more solar farms across the West. He sees agrovoltaics — the marriage of solar and agriculture — to be the best path forward. 

One way agrovoltaics can work is to raise solar panels high enough for farming or ranching to take place beneath the solar installation. Colorado-based farm Jack’s Solar Garden is working with the Colorado Agrovoltaic Learning Center to educate farmers and ranchers about what this could look like.   

Byron Kominek, director of the Colorado Agrovoltaic Learning Center, agreed. “We have well over 10,000 acres of solar panels in Colorado as far as I understand, and we’re going to have millions of acres of solar panels across our country in the coming years,” said Kominek, “It would be unfortunate if all that land just goes to dirt or weeds or gravel or any degraded state.”

The potential of agrovoltaics is still being explored in Colorado and around the country. In Colorado, a bill was signed on May 19th, 2023, that will provide half a million dollars in grant money for agrovoltaics and conduct a study on the opportunities and challenges with agrovoltaics in Colorado. 

Conne said he loves solar but would prefer to see development away from homes and with less land degradation. He said he would support more agrovoltaic development with cattle or sheep to maintain the agricultural nature of rural areas. He sees BLM land as a good opportunity for future solar development as well as landfills. “I love solar, I really do,” said Conne, “but there’s a lot of things that need to be changed in the future.”

The post Solar Farms in Colorado: Fossil Fuel-Free Energy Comes With Controversies appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

Here in the Western U.S., smoke season has become a summer ritual. It’s never enjoyable and never routine, but far too common to brush off: Days too choked with smoke to go outdoors, weeks of scratchy throats and headaches, constant low-level anxiety about fire and health impacts.

But so far the heavy smoke has mostly clung to the Western half of the country.

So it’s strange to see it take hold in New York City: That familiar smoky orange haze hanging over skyscrapers, enveloping the Statue of Liberty, smogging up the streets. Sorry to say this, Northeasterners, but welcome to our reality. Our sympathies. It’s stressful and suffocating and disorienting. We get it.

But for better or for worse, though, we’ve developed some coping strategies that some might find useful. So from your friends out West, here are some tips on surviving smoke season:

The first time Oakland was fully socked in with smoke a few years ago — the sun didn’t come out for a day or two, which was really eerie and frightening — I was shocked that some people just tried to keep on with their workdays. It helped me a lot to pull back and take time for what was really going on: grief. THIS IS NOT NORMAL, and trying to go on with my regular day made it feel even worse. I ended up strapping on an N-95 mask and going for a really short walk to take in how totally scary and weird it was in my neighborhood. That was a physical health risk, to be sure, but it helped my mental health to fully process what was going on. And I ran into other neighbors who were walking their dogs or doing the same thing I was. Connecting over the scariness of it all helped, too.

—Sarah Trent, editorial intern

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“All is changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.”

If you know someone with COPD, asthma or similar diseases — in my case, a vulnerable family member — try to find ways to help them so they don’t have to leave their house. Fetch groceries, pet food, mail, etc., if you can, and make sure that they have necessary prescriptions, especially inhalers, and that their cooling system is working as well as possible — which is not easy for poor folks living in challenging conditions, I know. Like Sarah, I sometimes masked up (thank you, Dr. Fauci!) to go for walks outside, because walking is necessary to me, and besides, if I stayed inside too long, the climate grief and depression overwhelmed me — but I certainly avoided any outdoor activities that might require heavy breathing. You never really get used to it — or even accept that it’s actually happening to a place you love so dearly. It was strange, but at times the light was eerily magical; sometimes I thought of Yeats: “All is changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.”

 —Diane Sylvain, copy editor

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A home air filter is about the same size as a box fan. You can duct-tape one to the back/intake side of the fan and turn the fan on. It’s an inexpensive way to filter particles out of the air indoors.

— Toastie Oaster, staff writer

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The light is different, the air can feel strange, time passes differently. You’re not going crazy; it is really disorienting. I found it helpful to remind myself this was just going to be weird and find ways to ground myself. For example, cold showers help with the vaguely sooty, sweaty feeling. Also: That headache? Yes, it probably IS because of smoke.

Also: Use your COVID toolkit. Maybe you got yourself an air purifier or rigged up a makeshift one. Put that back in action! Did you get a humidifier to help with COVID symptoms? That may help ease your throat scratchiness. If you have to go outside, your N95 mask will help protect you, although it isn’t going to block everything.

 —Kate Schimel, news and investigations editor

“Fire season” is a household phrase here, as depressing as that is. But I noticed that like the grinding doldrums of the pandemic, we slowly found ways to process the nightmare through humor and memes — all small acts of defiance against something larger than ourselves and largely out of our control. So share that selfie with the hellish sunset! Become Vin Diesel in The Chronicles of Riddick! For once, we all get to be in on the same pitch-black joke. And If you’re a nerd like me, you might also find that mapping the inferno provides a small measure of calm: it’s nice to know thy enemy, so to speak. Here’s a NASA tool where you can put a face to that flaming monster with satellite imagery. 

—Samuel Shaw, editorial intern

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If you have young kids, find out where the indoor tumbling classes are to keep them occupied. And I think it helps to invest in a good map app that can show you smoke paths, like OpenSummit.

 —Michael Schrantz, marketing communications manager

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I boil rosemary. Somebody told me it purifies the air by binding to smoke particles. I have no idea if this is actually true, but the added humidity and pleasant smell make me feel better when my asthma acts up during smoke events.

There’s value in rituals of healing, something as simple as sipping tea or massaging oil onto a strained muscle. Even if it turns out whatever the tea was made of, or whatever was infused in the oil, doesn’t have any extra health benefit, the act of noticing an ill and paying attention to it does. These things allow me to pause, admit there is a problem, and feel for a moment that I have some agency over a solution.

 —Luna Anna Archey, associate visuals editor

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When it looks, feels and smells like the world is ending, don’t expect you’ll be at peak physical and mental performance.

Wildfire smoke will wreck more than your lungs. Ash can also damage vehicles and other items outdoors if you try to wash it off with water: The particulate wood ash reacts to form a weak lye solution that can damage your paint. Keep vehicles indoors, or cover them if you can. If not, try to brush the ash off rather than rinsing it. In a pinch, putting a wet bandanna over your nose and mouth can help with the worst effects of smoke.

Also, it’s normal for orange skies and the eerie, blood-red sun to affect your mood and mental health. Symptoms of smoke exposure, like shortness of breath and a vague, general feeling of unwellness, mirror and can exacerbate anxiety symptoms. When it looks, feels and smells like the world is ending, don’t expect you’ll be at peak physical and mental performance.

 —Rachel Alexander, managing editor at Salem Reporter

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Being surrounded by wildfire smoke soup often makes me feel powerless and hopeless. It’s hard to feel safe when systemic forces and global problems — climate change, forest management — seep across borders and make your lungs, throat, eyes and head hurt. But I’d encourage people experiencing wildfire smoke for the first time to protect themselves, and then push for change that lasts after the smoke dissipates and protects the most vulnerable. Disasters can be pivotal moments, and action is an antidote to despair. Demand that wildfire fighters, who are on the frontlines of these blazes, receive adequate compensation and health care. Demand that farmworkers, who harvest food when the rest of us hole up inside, receive adequate protections from smoke (and heat!). Demand that people living without shelter have access to clean indoor air. Don’t just buy an air filter and go back to normal.

—Kylie Mohr, editorial fellow

Being an avid walker and hiker is difficult during wildfire smoke events. Some days it’s simply not feasible or advisable to exercise out of doors (purple and red days!). But other days, especially for those who don’t have health issues that make them particularly vulnerable to marginal air quality, it can be done. I watch the air quality index (AQI) throughout the day and choose my walking/hiking time based on air-quality reports. I also watch different air-monitoring stations throughout my area, and choose my walking/hiking locations based on AQI, which can be variable even locally. Sometimes I will take a walk wearing a N95 mask. I don’t do more strenuous walking or hiking masked, though. On days when it’s better to stay inside, I use a stationary bicycle to get my cardio fix. During the Thomas Fire of 2017-2018 (which burned for over a month), air quality was so bad for such a prolonged time that I and many others in our area who had the ability to do so simply packed up and left home.

—Jennifer Sahn, editor in chief

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I grew up in New York’s Adirondack Mountains. The summer after college, I went to Montana for eight weeks of field ecology classes (maybe I was done with college, but college wasn’t quite done with me). On the last day of the program, I woke to the hazy hot air and lurid neon-red sun that now, after more than 15 years of living in the West, I’m very familiar with. That day felt like the Apocalypse or the End Times — something biblical, something entirely beyond my previous understanding of what the world could even be. What I’ve learned since then is that the smoky days will always be hard and scary, but they do pass. One day it will rain, one day I’ll be able to see the distant hills from my back deck, one day the morning sun will be as yellow as the roses blooming in my neighbor’s yard.

—Emily Benson, senior editor-north

We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

Last year, Fairmead received a grant to help plan for farmland retirement in order to recharge groundwater under California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, or SGMA. But the community’s vision for the future is bigger than that: The locals also want to see improved air quality, a community center and reliable domestic wells.

The West is not just facing an energy transition, it is also at the beginning of a major transition in land and water use. In California’s Central Valley, groundwater regulations will require retiring between 500,000 and 1 million acres by 2040. (Retirement, or “fallowing,” refers to taking lands out of agricultural production.) The planning and decision-making now underway across more than 260 regional Groundwater Sustainability Agencies will determine how SGMA plays out across different groundwater basins: whether landowners will be compensated for retired lands, what the lands will become and who will manage them, and how counties will replace the revenues they currently collect from agricultural lands and use to help provide services to residents in need.

“The side effects of agriculture have a huge impact on the environment and on everyone.”

But while groundwater sustainability is SGMA’s focus, it’s not the only thing on Central Valley residents’ minds: They also need jobs, as well as clean air and water. Many Central Valley towns have diverse demographics; Fairmead, for example, is over 70% Latino — mostly immigrant and predominately Spanish-speaking — but there are also Black, Asian, Indigenous, mixed-race and white individuals. The median household income is less than half of the state’s average, and the residents are disproportionately exposed to environmental hazards.

“The side effects of agriculture have a huge impact on the environment and on everyone,” said Ángel Fernández-Bou, a climate scientist at the nonprofit science advocacy organization Union of Concerned Scientists, which is researching the Central Valley’s land-use transition. He and others spoke to High County News about how SGMA can help create a healthier and more sustainable post-agriculture Central Valley:

Improved air and water quality: Locals are in dire need of better air quality. “When they spray, they spray all kinds of pesticides,” said Nelson, who is also president of the organization Fairmead Community and Friends. “The Central Valley has a lot of problems with people with asthma and COPD because they grow so much stuff out here. The environment is bad to breathe, plus it’s super-hot.”

Around 200 million pounds of pesticides are used in California each year, and the geographical pattern of their application is one of environmental inequality: According to the Pesticide Action Network, majority-Latino counties see 906% more pesticide use than counties with fewer than 24% Latino residents. Fernández-Bou calculated that creating “buffer zones” by retiring the farmland in a one-mile radius around the Central Valley’s “disadvantaged communities” — a term used by the state of California for municipalities with median household incomes lower than 80% of the state’s — would decrease pesticide use by 12 million pounds, and also combat the health effects of pesticide drift.

Agricultural inputs also affect the water quality. When the nitrate from fertilizers leaches into aquifers, it can cause chronic health effects and conditions, such as blue baby syndrome. A long-term study by the Environmental Working Group found that 69 Central Valley water systems serving at least 1.5 million residents — the majority of them Latino — exceeded federal standards for nitrate. The impact is likely even higher, given the numerous domestic wells. Creating buffer zones would reduce nitrate leaching into aquifers by over 200 million pounds, per year, Fernández-Bou calculated.

The impact of land fallowing on dust is less clear. The Public Policy Institute of California has raised concerns about increased dust blowing off fallowed lands and affecting farmworkers and nearby communities. But Fernández-Bou took a more optimistic view, saying that dust is most often a problem when farmers till fallowed fields; left alone, he said, cover crops or weeds will grow roots that hold the soil in place.

Workforce transition: For many Central Valley residents, the biggest question concerns jobs, wondering how they’ll make a living once farmland is retired. Transitioning away from agriculture is “a hard pill to swallow,” said Eddie Ocampo, director of the organization Self-Help Enterprises. “Everyone is for economic diversity, but there’s going to be a gap, and those who are the most vulnerable are going to be the most affected.”

Under Fernández-Bou’s buffer-zone model, an estimated 25,682 agricultural jobs would be lost. Communities are only beginning to think about what will replace them. One option is renewable energy: California’s SB100 requires the state to be 100% renewable by 2045 — a timeline similar to SGMA’s land fallowing — and the Central Valley is being eyed for significant solar production. “We’re going to see long-term sustained demand for solar construction and maintenance jobs,” said Andrew Ayres of the Public Policy Institute of California. Community colleges in the Central Valley are working to develop training programs for these jobs. Another initiative plans to re-train farmworkers to install water recycling systems.

“Everyone is for economic diversity, but there’s going to be a gap, and those who are the most vulnerable are going to be the most affected.”

Access to drinking water: Like Fairmead, many of the Central Valley’s low-income rural communities lack urban water infrastructure and must rely on shallow domestic and municipals wells to meet their drinking water needs. Because SGMA prioritizes access to drinking water, many people believe it could improve the health of those wells. “Generally speaking, SGMA implementation is going to be good for rural groundwater wells,” said Ayres. Recharging groundwater, he said, “can buoy those community wells.”

Dialogue: The planning process itself, said Ocampo, has been beneficial for the Central Valley. Developing successful land-repurposing plans, he said, requires the participation of diverse interests — agribusiness, environmental justice organizations, land trusts and under-represented communities. “A lot of stakeholders realize that the more diversity of opinion there is, the more multi-beneficial and inclusive the outcome will be,” said Ocampo.

Planning for groundwater sustainability gives historically agricultural communities the chance to envision myriad new economies and land uses that will shape the future of the Central Valley. Habitat restoration, parks, regenerative agriculture, community centers and cooling centers are all on the table.

“I would say the possibilities are endless,” said Fernández-Bou. “But please don’t bring bad stuff to the valley.”

Caroline Tracey is the climate justice fellow at High Country News. Email her at caroline.tracey@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

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