BevLive: water, water

Anyone who is reading this and lives in the west can skip tonight's blog. I find how people make a living from the land very interesting.The whole irrigation thing is very foreign to me as I come from a place that gets 30-40 inches of precipitation a year. Terri spent some time today and explained their gravity irrigation to me. I found it really interesting so I'm going to share it with all you lucky folks.

Foreground irrigation gate and ditch. In the lower field you can see several irrigation ditches and along the top of the next ruse.

In the 14,000 foot mountains near here the snow melt runoff is caught in a reservoir. This water then flows down to this lower elevation in a series of ditches and pipes. When it gets to Paul and Terri it's diverted into ditches that are spread all over their ranch. The big ditches are about two feet deep and a foot wide. These big ditches seem to sometimes feed into smaller ones that can be as little as a few inches deep. The water flows into the ditch where it is backed up by closing off the ditch using one of Paul's clever gates (see photo) or otherwise blocking the ditch. The ditch then overflows and the water flows down the slope irrigating the land until it hits another ditch. When enough water has over flowed to water the ground enough the obstruction in the ditch is removed the water flows into another section of ditch and the whole blocking and overflowing is repeated.Very ingenious and labor intensive. Rain is a good thing. When I am next sitting at a dog trial in the rain I promise to remember that it's a good thing.

This is the old railroad bed for the narrow gauge rail that ran through Black Canyon along side you can see an irrigation ditch and gate.

The ditches were a little scary the first two days with dogs tripping over them on their outruns. They have learned to pay attention and now seem to jump over them with ease.

We worked dogs this morning in the lower field and then when Paul and his helper, Tom, had finished using the 4 wheelers on the morning irrigation rounds we took the dogs on the bikes up the old railroad grade to a nice long field and did a few big outruns. In Mirk's case too big, as he managed to overrun the sheep Terri was holding for him and bring the whole flock from where we had them hidden behind the hill. It was really windy by then and I had a very hard time calling him back.

View above Ouray

By the time we had half a dozen outruns done the wind had become pretty unpleasant so we quit and went to Ouray up in the mountains for lunch. After we ate Terri drove me up toward Telluride and we saw some great Colorado scenery. I'm afraid my little iPhone camera can't do it any sort of justice, sorry.

Ouray from the road above. All the photos are a bit hazy. The wind today has been blowing Utah's soil into Colorado and it's so thick sometimes it looks like fog.

Just another day of retirement. Can't recommend it highly enough to you folks who haven't tried it yet.