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Silent Nighthorse

By Ken Wright

"When I was in Congress, dam building was kind of a religion in the West. I've always had regrets. "

- Stewart Udall

One night I was walking the lonely county road that used to run through Ridges Basin. It was a near-full-moon night, cold and quiet, when I saw what appeared at first to be an apparition: a square light from a dimly-lit trailer, and behind it some kind of big, bright mass swirling slowly in the meadow.

As I got closer, the scene came together: An old sheepherder's wagon stood along the dirt road, and behind it a flock of sheep (600 head, I would soon learn) grazed in the moonlight. While I stood there in awe, in appreciation, relishing the unexpected spectacle, out of the trailer came the sheepherder himself.

As the young Navajo shepherd shined his big flashlight over his charges, I learned he was driving the flock to Ignacio for lambing, having walked from La Plata, New Mexico, a few days earlier. He would cross the Ridges Basin tomorrow, pushing the sheep down through Basin Creek's narrow outlet canyon, to the Animas River, and on into Ignacio a few days later.

His story amazed me - that that people still had jobs that required walking a hundred miles of lovely country - but then came the hammer: He informed me that after 100 years, I was witnessing this outfit's the last sheep drive through Ridges Basin. Why? Because the next year the site of the dam that will create Ridges Basin reservoir, the construction of which had already begun, would be impassable.

We were quiet for a while, pondering the import of all that. The he broke the silence: "Why do they have to ruin good country?" he asked me, not really seeking answer. Because we both knew why.

The Animas-La Plata water project.

Ridges Basin was good country: A wide, wild, forested-hill-rimmed valley full of wetlands and harboring a perennial stream - a rarity in this high-desert country. Just a few short miles from downtown Durango, it was a sanctuary for both wildlife and wild people: a big healthy and historic chunk of living land close to town.

Where I talked to that sheepherder is only an incredible five-minute drive from my Durango home's front door. And it has been the front door of people for as long as 13,000 years, as attested to by the thousands of archaeological sites found in and around the basin. It also was up until just a couple of years ago home to an estimated 300 mule deer and 100 elk, while as many as 1,400 of the hard-pressed animals migrated through in the fall or wintered there. In May and June, the basin served as vital elk calving grounds in a region where meadows and valleys all around have metastasized into subdivision and trophy homes.

Ridges Basin was an amazing place. And it ought to have been wild forever. It ought to have been protected. And actually, it was. And it was supposed to stay that way.

The Bodo family, whose homes and ranch buildings still stood in the basin before Animas-La Plata's flooding, worked this land since 1914. The Bodo family gave up ranching in the 1970s, but not their love of the land that fed their family for generations. In 1974, they sold their land to the Nature Conservancy, with a clause in the deed: that Ridges Basin stay wild for wildlife forever. And when the Nature Conservancy turned over the basin to the Colorado Division of Wildlife, creating the Bodo State Wildlife Area (read: public property owned by all Coloradoans) that clause remained intact.

Forever.

Forever, that is, until the Bureau of Reclamation decided it needed the basin for the Animas-La Plata Project. In 1991, when the CDOW had to deny access to BuRec to do some testing for ALP, the Bureau condemned 4,000 acres of the Bodo Wildlife Area - to hell with the "public" in public land, or the "wildlife" in Wildlife Area, or the "forever" clause the CDOW was entrusted with.

And Ridges Basin's death sentence was issued. Today, that place where I encountered that bygone way of living is being slowly submerged under the growing stagnant reservoir pooling up behind Ridges Basin Dam.

But ...

There is still a chance to reclaim and retain some of those "forever wild" qualities to Ridges Basin. There is still a way we can resurrect the spirit and preserve some of the values and intentions of that Bodo gift.

The master planning process for the future of recreation in and around the Ridges Basin reservoir - which now bears the marketing name "Lake Nighthorse" - is still in its infancy, and much has yet to be determined. When filled, the reservoir will hold 120,000 acre-feet of former Animas River water, with a surface area of nearly 1,500 acres. Presently the reservoir is about a quarter full.

In the fantasies of the industrial recreationists, Lake Nighthorse and its environs will be home to a regular Four Corners Disneyland that includes a four-lane concrete boat ramp (!), camping areas, and trail systems for hikers, bikers and equestrians. Just drawing up the plan for this playground is estimated to cost from $150,000 to $200,000. In 2000, the Colorado Department of State Parks estimated recreational amenities could cost upwards of $25 million - not counting operations and maintenance.

Well, we all know how things are these days. So in recent years, the Bureau of Reclamation, Colorado State Parks , La Plata County , and the City of Durango all have bowed out of the Disney-building business around Lake Nighthorse . Not to be deterred, though, in March the Animas-La Plata Water Conservancy District took over the development of recreation at Lake Nighthorse . The District is reported to have $50,000 available.

The view from here, then, is that either full build-out doesn't seem likely, or, if the district can find investors to help them, then it's unlikely to be done in ways that are long-lasting, aesthetically pleasing, or that will maintain the quiet, remote, peaceful nature that Ridges Basin - even a flooded Ridges Basin - has known for millennia.

So here's an idea: Given all that was sacrificed in the loss of Ridges Basin, given the devious way the Project was pushed on the region, given the dreadful waste of the A-LP project (on top of the loss of open space and critical wildlife habitat, add some half-billion dollars in construction costs, 160 million kilowatt-hours of electricity required each year - consumption equal to that of a city 60,000 people - to pump Animas River water 500 feet uphill, and evaporation losses of up to 2,235 acre-feet per year), given that our stressed wildlife need more habitat more than we need more places to race our powerboats (feel free to visit every other major reservoir in the region), then I would like to offer a modest proposal:

Let's make sure Ridges Basin stays what it has been since the last ice age, and what the Bodo family intended it to be nearly forty years ago: For wildlife, and for human-powered enjoyment.

A Silent Nighthorse. An undeveloped Bodo.

We can save both money and what has always made Ridges Basin a treasure through two stipulations on any Lake Nighthorse recreation plan: Minimal building and non-motorized uses.

And we still have our chance to make those things happen.

The ALPWCD has won a grant from the National Park Service River and Trails program, and, with the help of a private consulting firm, is working on setting up a process for public meetings and input on the design of recreation on and around Lake Nighthorse . Look for announcements in coming months on ways to get involved and speak your mind.

What's done is done. There won't be any shepherds guiding their herds through Ridges Basin for another few hundred years. But there still can be wildlife, and a place near an ever-growing Four Corners urban center where families can get away for quiet and open space ... in canoes, on foot, on horseback.

There can still be a Ridges Basin that is wild. Forever. If we make it so.