The fascinating story of Left Hand Valley water management

In the closing line of the poem First Things First, W.H. Auden writes, "Thousands have lived without love, but not one without water."

Water is the topic of author and retired water resource manager Bob Crifasi's lecture for the Niwot Historical Society's latest Now & Then lecture series set to be released on Nov. 18. Crifasi's lecture, "From Desert To Oasis, A Land Made From Water," will be available for the public to watch on the Niwot Historical Society's YouTube channel.

Crifasi worked for 25 years in water resource management, first at Denver Water Board and later for the City of Boulder Open Space & Mountain Parks Department, first doing environmental planning and then helping manage the various ditch systems and ditch rights of the city on open space property.

During his quarter-century of working both in the field and on various ditch advisory boards, Crifasi developed a keen interest in both the history and the ecology of the area.

"I started to dig into the various ditch companies and how they were formed and started to see many really interesting things that go back to territorial days and the Gold Rush," he said. "So I really got interested in the history of these ditch companies."

Crifasi also has a background in geology and environmental science which sparked an interest in the natural history of the area as well.

"I started to look at how the various water systems changed our local environment. There was a real story to be told regarding water and the development of the Front Range and how all of this developed and changed the environment and how the environment influenced what we did as people in the valleys. All of that became a long-term interest to me," Crifasi said.

His hour-long lecture for the Niwot Historical Society will delve into some of the precedents set by historic water management practices in the Boulder and Left Hand Valley, some of which are still in use today, take a look at both human history and natural history as it relates to water management in the area, and discuss some of the darker sides to the history of water resource practices along the Front Range.

In the 1800s, the Left Hand Valley was a key spot for the development of water law in the United States, helping set the precedent for the Prior Appropriation doctrine-a legal system that controls water allocation in the western United States to our present day.

"In 1881 there was a Colorado Supreme Court decision called Coffin vs. Left Hand Ditch Company that actually codified, in many ways, all the principles of what we now call Prior Appropriation doctrine," Crifasi said. "That happened right here in the Left Hand Valley. Some of the events that happened there had rippled out across the entire United States to influence all future water development."

One example Crifasi gave was that of Elwood Mead. Mead was employed in the 1880s to measure ditch flows on St. Vrain Creek and Boulder Creek before taking a job as a state engineer in Wyoming, bringing the ideas of prior appropriation from the Coffin case to Wyoming. Later, Elwood became the commissioner for the Bureau of Reclamation. A present-day audience likely knows him for the large body of water named for him in Nevada-Lake Mead. Crifasi pointed out that many of these historical developments can be attributed to what happened first in Colorado.

A lot that happened in this area had huge ramifications for economic and water development in the western United States," he said.

Which, in turn, has led to many of the decisions about water management that we see in practice today. "What I find when I talk about water, the rational decision-making that people made 100-150 years ago often influences how we make decisions today," said Crifasi.

Crifasi also will cover the development of what he calls "hybrid-freshwater ecosystems" or areas where people and nature have intermingled to create unique ecosystems, as well as how the various man-made water systems have impacted the landscape and, vice versa, how the landscape influenced where people built the water systems.

"When the first settlers came to Boulder Valley there were no natural lakes in the Boulder and Left Hand Valleys at all. There were a couple little blow-outs or some very small meander loops along the rivers. But once they started to settle and dig ditches, a number of things started to happen. They realized they needed water in the fall and winter, so they started digging reservoirs. They started digging lakes and now we have thousands of lakes, if you look at the land from an airplane, you'll see all this water. None of that was there naturally before settlers arrived," said Crifasi.

After 1860, once European-American settlers started arriving, the ecosystem began to change as they dug reservoirs and ditches. These new man-made freshwater systems became home to new ecosystems as nature moved in to capitalize on the life-giving water.

"We've reordered where there are natural wetlands and many of the ditches now have riparian vegetation along them that creates habitat for plants and animals that weren't there before the Gold Rush," said Crifasi.

At present, Crifasi estimates that the Left Hand Ditch alone now irrigates about 20,000 to 30,000 acres of land. "I like to refer to what we have as an oasis in many ways. If we didn't use this water from the mountains for the farms and ranches, we would have prickly pears everywhere and not a lot of green valleys here," he said.

One thing that Crifasi was not necessarily expecting as he dug into the history of the ditch systems in the area was the ties to some of the darker moments of Colorado history, specifically the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre.

"A number of the people who formed the ditches were physically at the massacre and benefited. They were essentially squatting on Native American land in 1864 and by running the Native Americans out, they were able to get the titles to farms," said Crifasi.

Crifasi said that these hard truths and how they affected him personally were part of what inspired him to write his book, "A Land Made from Water", published in 2015 by the University Press of Colorado. After discovering that Jonas Anderson, one of the founders of the Anderson ditch in Boulder Valley, was involved with the Sand Creek Massacre, Crifasi felt compelled to dig a little deeper.

"Here I was on the Anderson Ditch board whose founder was involved with one of the worst massacres in American history-so what does that mean? I started to look into the other ditches and, lo and behold, I found that many of the other people who founded the ditches were either directly or indirectly involved with this massacre. It was a real shock to me. So I started to dig into that and look into that history and realize that [at that time] the idea of appropriating water and land was also basically ethnic cleansing and removing people who lived here before Euro-Americans arrived," Crifasi said.

"So I tried to grapple with that as someone who is a beneficiary, in a sense, in an indirect way, which was a little troubling. One of my motivations to write the book was to dig into that history, and see if I could take some meaning from that and make more people aware of this other aspect of our history on the Front Range," he said.

In his book and lecture, Crifasi also seeks to contextualize the local history in a broader global context, situating what was happening locally at that time in a larger national framework. And, of course, to give a record of these stories for future generations.

"I was accumulating all these stories, and I realized if I don't write it, no one else may. If I don't write something down there'll be an opportunity lost for people to see what's happened here. That was part of it," he said.

Crifasi, though retired, is still actively involved in the community, serving as the Board President of Studio Arts Boulder, a nonprofit art educational organization, working on various photography projects, and writing a second book which he hopes to publish in the future. And even as he continues working on these projects, Crifasi said he is always happy to speak to the public about history.

"To the extent that we understand the past we can better deal with problems in the present," said Crifasi.